But Bessent announced that Trump will be "doubling down" on supporting the largest foreign aid gushers on earth. "Far from stepping back, 'America First' seeks to expand U.S. leadership in international institutions like the I.M.F. and World Bank," Bessent declared. 

Bessent complained that the IMF "devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues." Unfortunately, Bessent said nothing about how the IMF and World Bank bankrolled many of the worst crony Covid crackdown policies.

But what should the US government expect when Congress and endless presidents give the World Bank and IMF billions of US tax dollars to play with? The US government is on the hook for $52 billion to the World Bank. The US has a financial commitment of $183 billion to the IMF. 

The IMF was created in 1944 to shore up currencies and help nations with temporary balance-of-payment problems. In the decades since the IMF's founding, global capital markets and fluctuating currency exchange rates have made the IMF a relic. But too many people have gotten rich from IMF largesse to permit the curtain to be closed on this institution.

The IMF enabled scores of governments that chose to pointlessly shut down their own economies after the outbreak of Covid-19. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva declared in April 2021, "While the recovery [from Covid] is underway, too many countries are falling behind and economic inequality is worsening. Strong policy action is needed to give everyone a fair shot—a shot in the arm to end the pandemic everywhere, and a shot at a better future for vulnerable people and countries."

The IMF's "fair shot" consisted of its international bureaucrats providing scores of billions of dollars in "emergency financing" to 80 governments, most of whom exploited Covid to stretch their own power. The IMF provided emergency relief via the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust (CCRT) to 29 governments to supposedly help them "combat the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic." The IMF's deluge of handouts to government helped fuel the worldwide inflation surge in recent years. 

The World Bank President Ajay Banga "has sought to emphasize the bank's focus on job creation…and to prioritize private sector involvement in projects around the world," the New York Times reported. But the World Bank's notion of the private sector has often been either a fraud or a political smokescreen. In the late 1980s, the World Bank touted its loans to Communist nations as private sector-oriented loans – one bait-and-switch too many, as I detailed in a 1988 Wall Street Journal article. And permitting the Bank to exonerate its handouts by counting illusory jobs created is a recipe for make-work scams. 

The Covid pandemic provided the World Bank with the chance to play savior. In the first months of the pandemic, the Bank proudly announced that its "emergency operations to fight COVID-19 (coronavirus) have reached 100 developing countries – home to 70% of the world's population." From April 2020 to March 2021, the World Bank "committed over $200 billion, an unprecedented level of financial support, to public and private sector clients to fight the impacts of the pandemic.  Our support is tailored to the health, economic, and social shocks that countries are facing." The fact that the World Bank was effectively financing governments to pointlessly shock their own nations was omitted from celebratory press releases.