A New $60 Billion Agency Is The Clearest Sign The U.S. Is Worried About China’s Africa Influence

In the last few years of President Barack Obama’s administration, there were increasingly loud calls for the government to get rid of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the development agency which encourages investment by U.S. companies in Africa. The problem, as the critics saw it, was the four-decades-old agency had become “institutionally ill-suited to its mission and harms poor people around the world,” said a 2015 paper from CEI, a libertarian Washington D.C. think tank, which also claimed OPIC projects end up “enriching the politically connected.” With President Donald Trump’s “America first” mantra it was completely unsurprising when the administration’s first budget in 2017 proposed essentially killing off OPIC.