Hello, listeners.

Welcome to another episode of the Jacob Shapiro Podcast.

Joining me on the podcast is friend and a veteran of the USAID industry, Emma Pennessy.

She's a former colleague of mine.

She's also a friend.

This podcast might be controversial to some of you listening, although I hope that at this point, if you're listening to this podcast, you know that I'm going to attack all sides of an issue and I'm not really going to care what the sort of political overtones are.

I'm just trying to get to ground Traffic truth here.

Emma was authentically raw and honest about her career in the USAID space, what the demise of USAID means to her, what she thinks it means for US influence in the world and US Strategic interests.

I think some people may listen to this podcast and you may vehemently disagree with her, and that's cool, you're allowed to vehemently disagree.

But I think this is an important perspective to have, and it's a perspective that I think has been covered up by a lot of the things that are happening around some of these moves that are all legalistic or more ideologically driven or things like that.

I want to thank Emma for coming on.

I want to thank you listeners for holding the space to listen to things that maybe you disagree with but still learn things from.

As I say at the beginning of every presentation I give in person, if you agree with everything that you hear from me, I'm not doing my job correctly.

My job is to bring you perspectives that you disagree with.

But I also personally found Emma very compelling.

Even the questions and criticisms that I had about foreign aid, I thought she gave some really meaningful responses and ones that actually made me reconsider some of my critiques of foreign aid in the past.

So thank you, Emma, for coming on.

Thank y'all for listening.

Take care of the people that you love.

Cheers and see you out there.

Emma, besides being a veteran in the US aid space, you're also a friend.

And we haven't seen each other in a while, so it's nice to see you.

I wish it was under better circumstances.

I know, it's great to see you too.

Hopefully a fewer crises next time we talk.

Listeners, I usually when I'm in conversation with somebody, I have the better wallpaper.

And I still think I have the better wallpaper here.

But your wallpaper is pretty good.

It's pretty, pretty good.

So I appreciate you bringing that.

Yeah, I try to stay aesthetic as much as possible.

Even amidst the crumbling democracy, you probably can't see Emma.

But if you really zoom in on this wallpaper, it's called Safari Soiree and it's literally just different safari animals dressed up in formal attire, having cocktails.

It looks like it's like classic 12 from, from.

Anyway, I'm like ridiculously proud of it.

Okay, so we're going to back into a conversation about USAID or USAID and all of the controversy around it.

You're a veteran of this space too.

I try to be objective.

So I'm going to ask you questions.

I'm going to push you in some directions and in other directions.

I just kind of want to get the raw, authentic response from you.

But I think one of the things listeners could maybe use from the get go is just some basic facts, because facts are hard to come by in today's media environment.

I to encourage listeners.

A long time ago, it was actually our 44th episode ever when this podcast had a different name.

We had Lewis Luck on the podcast.

He's a former U.S.

ambassador.

He was a director in Haiti and Afghanistan and a couple other places.

That was a really good primer on what USAID is and the things that it does.

My own sort of preamble here before I ask you to talk about USAID.

Emma, you know, the concept of U.S.

aid really goes back to after World War II and the Marshall Plan.

Before World War II, the United States is more isolationist than anything else.

It's mostly paying attention to itself.

It's not in a position to dole out massive amounts of international aid.

You get the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe after World War II, which was not out of American generosity.

It was a defined part of resisting the Soviets and the new and emerging Cold War.

In 1949, Harry Truman, you know, he wins the presidency.

In his inaugural address, he talks about four themes that should guide American foreign policy in the post World War II period.

Those are support for the UN Economic Recovery for Europe, assistance to free nations to resist the Soviet Union.

That's where NATO comes in.

And then the fourth foreign policy Initiative Point four, was to embark on a bold program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.

It takes about 12 years, 13 years for all of these different aid things that pop up after Truman makes that a US Foreign policy priority for John F.

Kennedy to create USAID via executive order.

And you know, usaid, there's been a lot of controversy out there.

You should think of it both as an organization that is trying to make things Better for humankind to do things, better for the world.

Also to resist the Soviet Union.

The concept of the quote unquote, Third World was there was, you know, the free and liberal world and there was the Soviet world, and then there was the Third World.

And the thought was, if you give the Third World, which was by and large poor and underdeveloped and malnourished and all these other things, if you give them access to U.S.

technology and U.S.

ideas and also and U.S.

aid, they will not only become richer and more prosperous, they will also become more freedom loving and they will resist the Soviets and we will all happily, you know, win the Cold War and hold hands and sing Kumbaya, which kind of worked.

The Soviets collapsed.

USAID outlived the Soviets.

And unfortunately, it looks like the death knell will come with Elon and the Department of Government Efficiency.

So there's my little preamble.

Throw back at you.

So what is USAID to you?

What did I miss in my very brief historical recap there?

What are the important things to know about why and how it was created?

Yeah, I think it's also good to keep in mind this was an agency established by JFK in 1961.

I think a lot of folks will have heard about JFK's establishment of the Peace Corps and the way he talked about being in service to your country.

I think USAID was founded under kind of similar, in similar times and for similar purposes to project American values, but also to project kind of American goodwill.

And I can talk about this a little bit more, but some sense of altruism in the world.

So it is an independent agency.

It works very closely with and under the authority of the U.S.

department of State.

And it is the main implementer or the main funder of U.S.

foreign assistance programs all around the world.

Just to note that I think we've seen a lot of misinformation and disinformation going around about the amount of money that the U.S.

puts into foreign assistance.

USAID's budget last year was about $40 billion.

That's less than 1% of the entire U.S.

budget.

Some Americans believe we contribute up to 25% of our national budget into foreign assistance.

And that's just grossly out of proportion.

What, what USA does is a massive return on investment for really a pretty small amount of money.

So through that budget and through the work that it does, USAID provides humanitarian assistance which can be responding to disasters.

Think about the earthquake in Haiti a couple of decades ago.

At this point, it can also fund and does fund long term development assistance in areas like education, governance.

You think back to the Cold War, in particular Democratic governance, agricultural production.

I know it's an area you care about a lot and many more across low income countries.

What was at its founding called the third World, but we might refer to now as the global south or middle or low income countries.

And USAID has a mission in every country it supports more or less.

That mission sits alongside the embassy and really works very closely with the US Diplomatic corps to implement foreign aid programs.

You know, again, I said already that that budget is about $40 million or, sorry, $40 billion.

And that is appropriated by Congress every year in line with our country's foreign policy objectives.

So I'll, I'll pause there.

Yeah, we're recording on February 12th.

We're not going to sit on this episode particularly long, so you'll probably get this in the next couple of days.

But just an hour and a half ago, House Republicans released their fiscal agenda.

I don't know if you saw this.

They're talking about adding 3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.

So USAID's budget for last year and those numbers that you cited would have been roughly 1.3% of the 3 trillion that the House Republicans want to add to the US deficit.

That's just straightforward.

And let me just say that I think also that this agency is not one of the most popular among Americans.

I think the idea of us sending taxpayer dollars overseas is not a popular one.

Again, people have a, a misconception about how much money that actually is.

When you put it in those terms though, I just want to come again to the fact that this is a huge return on investment that taxpayers get for, for about, you know, 0.7% of our, of our national budget each year.

USAID is able to do life changing work that protects American interests.

And yeah, I think that's critical to be thinking about as we have this conversation.

Yeah, it's also, you know, I already mentioned Truman.

I just want to quote from his 1949 inauguration speech for a second where he talked about point four.

So quote, we have to embark, or sorry, we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery.

Their food is inadequate.

They are victims of disease.

Their economic life is primitive and stagnant.

Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas.

For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve suffering of these people.

The United States is preeminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques.

The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited, but our imponderable resources and technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible.

End quote.

First of all, you think anybody in the White House knows what the word imponderable means?

Probably not.

Maybe some of the listeners don't know.

But the thing that I want to point out here, and you know, people will make this a political comment, but it's not a political comment.

If you listen to the way that US Politicians talk about the role of US policy, not just in the world, but at home and how it's morphed since Post World War II, it's really remarkable because you've got people like Truman, JFK, into Johnson saying things like, we're going to kill poverty, we are going to eliminate hunger.

We are, you know, we have all of these techniques.

We can, for the first time in human history, like relieve the suffering of people.

And it slowly gets, starts, it starts to whittle away as you go by each inauguration speech.

It goes to, oh, and we're going to fight the drug war and oh, we're going to deregulate and oh, we're going to fight the terrorists.

And now it's like, what?

Drill, baby, drill.

I don't know.

So there has been this decline in how the United States defines its interest.

The flip side of that, Emma, and the devil's advocate is of course, course, that, you know, USAID was founded in the shadow of the Cold War.

The United States won the Cold War.

Was there still a re.

A strategic reason for the United States to continue giving out aid this way?

So if I was to push you on that, how would you describe how that strategic interest either did or didn't have to morph post the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Another organization that is less controversial but has a similar identity problem is NATO.

NATO was an anti Soviet alliance, then the Soviet Union collapsed.

NATO stuck around, but there have been problems with NATO ever since because people struggled with, well, how much should we actually spend if the enemy is gone, do we let other people in?

Does it make any sense?

So I'll let you take that in whatever direction you want.

Yeah, I think I, I believe that the United States is not an inherently altruistic country.

I don't think that that is really one of our core values.

And so it's so interesting listening to that Truman quote, because I think just about all of my colleagues that work in the foreign aid space, I'm sure many of the civil servants who work at usaid, they believe that altruism is necessary.

They believe that as the richest country in the world in history, we have an obligation morally to give back and to improve the lives of people living in more difficult conditions.

But that altruism is not really the foundation of, of our foreign policy strategy and certainly not our foreign aid strategy, in my opinion.

I think, you know, JFK in, in founding usa, talked about the fact that we wanted to stop disease and other catastrophic events before they reached our shores.

And I think that's really critical to think about.

And we can talk a little bit about what that's also going to mean going forward as this agency is dismantled.

But I think in the post Cold War era, we've seen usaid, and of course that's alongside US foreign policy really evolving and what its main areas of focus are, I think in our lifetimes, the defining event was 9, 11 and the global war on terror.

And so you saw a lot of foreign assistance programs shifting to frankly, clean up in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, to reduce the, just as an example to, to promote the growth of, you know, staple crops that replaced growing poppies for heroin that would, that would fuel the drug trade and destabilize America and our partners.

And in Iraq, USAID programs have come in, in the wake of that war and then, you know, decades later, following the occupation by isis to shore up civil society, to improve intergroup relations in a way that will reduce the further, further and future potential of conflict and to deliver essential services like water and electricity to people who have been under the occupation destruction by ISIS of Mosul, for example.

In the last decade, you know, we've heard so much about the return to great power competition.

I think to some degree you say perhaps the Cold War never really did end.

It just graduated to a different phase.

And your audience will know what that great power competition means.

But the US is competing mainly with China and Russia for global influence and economic dominance.

And USA plays a huge role in this game.

I talked earlier about how these investments in foreign aid are strategic.

We're not going to overwhelm Russian or Chinese investment.

Just in the period of 2013 to 2022, China spent $679 billion on global infrastructure projects through its Belt and Road initiative, and the US spent 76 billion in comparison.

But we still have held the upper hand in terms of influence and allyship, particularly where I work, mainly in sub Saharan Africa.

So again, this is a way to very strategically counter the influence of some of these great powers or these, these other great powers amid this competition.

And then, of course, in the wake of the war in Ukraine, US Aid and foreign assistance shifted pretty dramatically.

Again, coming back to agriculture, Ukraine being the breadbasket not just of Europe, but many other parts of the world.

That war risked drastically increasing food prices.

And we did see a rise in food prices.

But because of strategic investments that USAID made in farmers and agricultural systems and policy in Ukraine, they were able to maintain production and maintain those exports in a way that did not completely collapse the global food economy.

So I think those are just a couple of examples of ways that in the post Cold War era, USAID has shifted to reflect the changing geopolitical landscape and foreign policy landscape we're facing.

Yeah.

And to your point, it's not altruism by design.

There are plenty of countries that have negative stories about USAID or how it was tied to US Strategic interest.

The one that I think about most often is India.

India, which had to import lots of calories after its independence from the British Empire and imported many of those calories from the United States until Lyndon B.

Johnson wanted India under Indira Gandhi to say nice things about the US War in Vietnam.

And Indira Gandhi declined to say nice things about the US War in Vietnam.

She criticized the United States for war in Vietnam.

And at that point, LBJ started yanking wheat exports and wheat aid to India right around the time that India was facing something close to a famine, or at least, you know, food shortages that were leading to a famine, which led to the Indian green revolution and India deciding that it never wanted to be dependent on US Aid in the future, too.

So it's not, it's not completely innocuous to some of these countries, too.

And it's.

It's weird to see.

You know, I think when you, when we talk about Truman and JFK and the highfalutin language, they were good at dressing up the strategic interests in a way that also, I think, showed, I don't know, an optimism in the trajectory of the human condition.

Like, they had that, but they also saw the naked strategic interest.

It's.

It's weird to see how, I don't know that.

That the US Government has lost sight of USAID as part of that strategic interest toolkit.

Even somebody like Marco Rubio or some of these Republicans who have had their hatchets out, like in the past have praised USAID for the work that they did.

And it's also, you know, it's, USAID doesn't just pursue projects on its own, like they administrate projects that are directed from top down.

So the White House could have said, okay, we don't want to do these other projects that Biden did.

We want to do all these other projects, then the system could have turned turned over.

How do you, do you have any explanation for that amnesia or why usaid, like, incurred the focus of the Eye of Sauron here?

Like, it just doesn't really make sense to me.

Yeah, I think that, I think in terms of the politics of this moment, you know, I mentioned USAID is not typically one of the most popular agencies or entities and certainly not very well understood within the US government.

And Project 2025 pretty clearly has set out to dismantle the bureaucracy to cut alleged government waste.

And it's, it's easy to start your playbook out with an agency that is not popular or well understood.

And the speed with which these folks were able to dismantle this agency, essentially strip the building of its letters, put its staff on administrative leave, recall thousands of Americans living overseas, I think without a whole lot of resistance from, from members of Congress, from the public, until maybe the last week or so shows that they have really been able to use USAID as a test run for this playbook of how to dismantle bureaucratic entities that, that can give them also a quick win to say to their base, look, we are, we are taking back American tax dollars that are being spent overseas and we're going to give it to you.

Well, they haven't exactly said that, but they're saying, we're not going to send your tax dollars overseas anymore.

That's the best I can do to understand this moment, but I think it's unbelievably short sighted.

I think Marco Rubio, in his statement following the executive order that paused all four nave for 90 days, said they will be reviewing each program to see if it makes America safer, stronger and more prosperous.

And fundamentally, every foreign aid program does just those three things in myriad ways.

And I think that it will not be long before we start to see the effects of this kicking back on this administration.

I think whether that's that we have, you know, fewer countering violent extremism programs in the next couple of years, we just don't have the pulse on some of those communities and it results in a terrorist attack or, you know, much closer to home at the minute, USAID bought in 2020.

This goes back to your comment on, on India, USAID bought $2.1 billion.

I'm sorry, the US government bought $2.1 billion in food aid from American farmers that was then distributed overseas.

I'm not sure who's going to replace that buying, if anyone is going to buy it.

And, you know, in a, in a modern America where farming and agriculture is already struggling in a lot of ways, I think that's going to come back and hit our economy and our farmers across America pretty hard.

It will.

It's a smaller number.

But to your point about people starting to realize what the implications of this are, there's a new bill working its way through the GOP about moving oversight of the 1.8 billion that, you know, USAID purchases from U.S.

farmers and moving it to the Agriculture Department.

So they're trying to hive off and save some of the parts of it that are good, at least for their constituencies, which I think we're going to get into.

A depressing moment on the podcast here because I was talking to another friend who spent a long time in usaid and I was asking him his opinions.

He wasn't willing to come on the show for understandable reasons.

But one of the things he said to me was, you know, if you abolish USAID on Tuesday, you will have to reinvent something like it on Wednesday because there are still all these things that have to be done and there's still money that is associated with it and US Interests that have to be carried on and, you know, U.S.

citizens abroad that are doing important work and these sorts of things.

Before we hit record, I said that to you, and you had a pretty depressing take.

So I'll tee you up that way now for the depressing take.

So I take it you don't think that they'll have to reinvent something like this, that really they can just gut it and that there's no going back?

Yeah, I mean, when your colleague says there are these things that have to be done and so forth, I think, I think that is almost a state of denial of what is happening right now.

That, yes, this money has been obligated by Congress, yes, these contracts and cooperative agreements are signed by the US Government with those delivering the foreign assistance, but this government does not really seem to care about that.

I think, you know, just before we came on here, I was listening to the initial oral arguments by a group of USAID implementing partners who have filed a restraining order against Trump and Marco Rubio and a number of other administration officials.

And one of the arguments is that this is not just an effort to review all foreign aid programming.

This is actually under the guise of stripping all foreign aid programming.

And I, I'm pretty bought into this idea at this point.

I think the people who are really in charge, it's not Marco Rubio and it's, it's not Donald Trump, although they're, they're operating with Trump's authority.

They are people who from the last Trump administration and through the development of Project 2025 have made it really clear that they do not see value in foreign aid and foreign assistance.

They would rather channel that money to faith based organizations that communicate out the great value of Christianity across the world or would like to reinvest that money in private sector developers or financial bros.

So I'm not particularly optimistic that or I don't really believe that this administration believes that they have to replace USAID with anything.

I think they're pretty comfortable letting American foreign aid die.

Did you see that incredible moment where Musk and, and Trump were in the White House together and the reporter was asking Musk in particular, you know, there's this disinformation about how the US spent $50 million sending condoms to Gaza.

And there was a reporter in the room that said actually that was 50 million of condoms that were supposed to go to Mozambique as part of an anti AIDS program.

And you know, Musk like responds to it by sort of laugh, like he laughs off the idea, oh, 50 million, that's a lot of condoms that you're sending over there.

I'm not sure that it's in the interests of our country to be sending $50 million worth of condoms to Mozambique, which is like, I sort of struggle that we're having this conversation in 2025.

Like the limitation of, and the elimination of disease is like one of USAID's great things.

Like think about polio vaccine eradication campaigns, which also, by the way, is not completely apolitical.

Like think about the assassination of Osama bin Laden and polio clinics in Pakistan and everything else there.

But you know, just, just the, the easiness with which they could laugh off something like that, which no, actually is really important and actually like helps from a global health perspective in meaningful ways.

Not just the country itself, but all these others.

But they can just laugh it off and say that's not that big of a deal.

Like it's a, it's a shocking amount of sort of blase, I don't know, apathy towards something that is actually, to your point, It's a big ROI, like the ROI on that $50 million worth of condoms.

Elon is really, really good.

And Jacob, it's not just that they're going to Mozambique, it's that they're going to the Gaza Province of Mozambique.

And of course the agents of misinformation and disinformation are so ill prepared to understand that this government that they've stepped into, that they are now operating basically in control of, I think we're going to continue to see stupid mistakes like this and there is no interest in correcting them, particularly when they get people's, people's backs up about this.

And you know, it's not just, it's not just condoms which are not, you know, it's not just for spurring on sexual activity or something.

That's to prevent the spread, the spread of HIV and aids, which was, was and continues to be an epidemic in Africa of unimaginable proportions.

There's also, the last I checked, about 20 million people around the globe who rely on USAID funded clinics to stay alive living with HIV and aids.

They, they require weekly or more frequent medication to continue to live.

And that medication is now sitting at various points in the supply chain unattended or unrefrigerated when it needs to be refrigerated or on clinics that people are not allowed to work in because of the stop work order that USAID implementers are under.

People will die from this and I would have to presume that that will start now, if it hasn't already.

And the richest man in the entire world is laughing about it, as you say.

Yeah, this also, you know, I think a lot about black swans in my line of work.

And I mean, black swans are such a weird thing because like the moment you actually think about something, it's no longer a black swan because like the definition of black swan is supposed to be that it's unthinkable.

But I've been thinking a lot lately about what the next pandemic is going to be.

Yeah, because like there's going to be another one.

Like the combination of climate change and you know, exposure to different environments and to different animals and things like that.

It's only a matter of time and I hope it's a long time from now.

But you know, the United States has withdrawn from the World Health Organization.

It is now gutting USAID.

And it's like it's got Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

A noted vaccine skeptic who seems on his way to confirmation.

You know, I just hope that Something doesn't happen here in the next couple of years because it does feel like the United States has gutted a lot of its infrastructure around preventing the rise of global diseases.

And we also did such a poor job when it came to Covid communicating around like what were lockdowns, how long they should have lasted, what the purpose of them was, what the trade offs were, building resilience into the system for everything from PPE to vaccines.

Like, we didn't have those conversations.

We all just yelled at each other about whether we were wearing masks and whether you were a fascist or not, based on your stance on whether you wore a mask or not.

And I guess USAID is actually just a small chapter in that story.

What are other specific ways besides sort of the global health equation, where USAID is fundamentally doing things that either further U.S.

interests or that make the lives better for the people who are interacting with those programs?

Well, let's start with global health, actually.

Jacob, do you remember Ebola?

I do, I remember it.

There's an outbreak in Uganda right now.

Exactly.

In, in the outbreak in West Africa that hit a number of years ago.

USAID was instrumental in deploying rapidly support teams that, that responded to.

This is a horrifying disease, by the way.

The, the way that people get sick and die is.

It is graphic and painful and terrifying.

And so Americans were understandably very afraid of this disease coming to our country.

And in part because of what USA did, it really, it did not reach this country in a way that created a pandemic.

But as you say, there is an active outbreak of Ebola in Uganda.

There have been active outbreaks recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place where, you know, conflict is also rife.

It's very difficult to kind of, kind of monitor disease and what's happening there.

And it's not just.

There's a lot of different ways in which our global health work engages with communities.

We, we can do education and technical assistance to, to local health clinics, but we also provide PPE directly.

We provide people, you know, people with the health skills to treat and respond to disease outbreaks.

Like you said, we coordinate with the World Health Organization.

That work has stopped.

That is, nothing is happening right now, despite the fact that there is proportion, reportedly a set of waivers in place to allow some of this work to continue functionally.

That's just not possible.

And so I fear that it's only a matter of time, just like you say, before the next global health emergency strikes and we're not able to respond to it or prepare for it in the way that we should be.

Another one that I've been thinking about a lot recently.

I spent a fair amount of time living in and working on Ethiopia.

There's plenty of people alive and working right now who remember the 1984 famine in Ethiopia.

For those who aren't alive and don't or were not alive then and do not remember it, between 400,000 and a million people died in that famine.

And the response to it was really inadequate.

I think we were not ready for a famine of that scale.

But a lot of changes were made in the.

In the intervening years to prevent something of that scale from ever happening again.

And because of that, there are many of us, myself included, who have never lived during a time when a famine or hunger of that scale has struck in the same way that that one did.

USAID established a program for monitoring food security.

They monitor agricultural markets and food production, household incomes, and their ability to source the staple foods they need.

And that program has really helped ensure that resources can be directed to places that are facing acute food insecurity before it becomes a famine.

I think another issue that has been very much on the minds of American voters and certainly been spoken a lot about by this administration is immigration.

And USAID has invested heavily all over the world, but perhaps most relevantly for us in Central America, in Venezuela, and other places in our hemisphere, to invest in communities, to invest in social cohesion, in economic growth, so that people feel safe and prosperous in their own communities, so that they do not pack up and walk across this hemisphere to enter our southern border.

I think we're going to see a surge in migration as these programs fall apart and the resources that have been in place to really keep people investing in and growing in their own home communities rather than immigrating to America as these.

As these programs fall apart.

Yeah.

Which sort of gets into.

I hope the listeners can hear like, politics is not the thing that you want to be on a podcast talking about.

You want to be talking about, like, the objective ways in which you can help people.

Yeah.

One of the reasons it's so weird that USAID finds itself at the center of all this is that, I mean, nothing is perfectly apolitical, but it's not that apolitical.

Andrew Natsios did an interview with pbs.

This is the administrator for USAID during the George W.

Bush administration.

He's now at Texas A and M University.

I'm just going to quote him.

So aid is the most pro business and pro market of all aid agencies in the world.

I can tell you that categorically I am a conservative Republican.

I am not a liberal, and I have served in repeated Republican administrations.

The notion that the agency is, quote, unquote, Marxist, that's utterly ridiculous.

I know that we have private sector offices in it.

We have a program that I started that was called the Global Development alliance that brings in American businesses who contribute 6 billion plus a year.

They never even bothered to ask the business community what they thought of this attack and on attempts to abolish it, all of which is to say, you've got a card carrying, you know, meat and potatoes Republican there sort of crying foul.

Why do you like, you know, then you've got Musk and Trump and some of these others saying, no, there's like all this WOKE ideology and there's all this corruption inside of USAID as well.

So I don't know, it just strikes me as really strange because, like, I am sure there are ways that the Biden administration directed USAID money that, you know, if you're on the other side of the aisle, were too, too woke or too into DEI or some of the things like that.

But if you were a previous administration, you would just change the priorities or you would change the programs or you would say, these are our new priorities and USAID would go out and sort of do these things in response.

Whereas, I don't know, for some reason they've decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

When, when you've been interacting in these spaces, have you seen overt political ideology like that?

Like, are there examples of political ideology where, like, oh, sure.

Like, there was this ideology.

We could have done X, Y and Z better.

Or are they really just barking up a tree they don't know anything about?

Yeah, I think, you know, Andrew Natsios is beloved in this community, and like you said, he was a George W.

Bush appointee.

He came together with a number of other recent USAID administrators from both Democratic and Republican administrations to really speak out against this, to warn about the geopolitical implications and to encourage this administration to reconsider because of the importance of the work that USAID does and the lives that will be lost as a result of these actions.

And I think that just, just demonstrates and it's a marker of how historically USAID has really had bipartisan support.

Every administration, whether Republican or Democrat, has nominated an agency head under the first Trump administration.

Mark Green was the administrator, and I think folks thought he did a lot of good for the agency and a lot of good for the world.

And More importantly than the administration, I think, is that every year Congress again develops a budget and appropriates funds to USAID.

The money that that makes up that $40 billion budget is set by USAID.

And there's been pretty consistent levels of funding, no matter who is in power, both in the administration and in Congress.

I also think that as an agency, and I spoke with a number of folks ahead of this conversation to make sure that I wasn't misunderstanding, but they have really affirmed that as an agency, USAID is very proud of its apolitical stance, that they, they are not there to promote one president or one party's ideology over another.

They are actually bound by laws, the Hatch act in particular, that prevent them from talking about American politics in their work amongst themselves or with external, you know, parties, foreign or domestic.

And they take that really seriously.

Many of these civil servants have worked for USAID for their entire careers.

They have seen, you know, all of these changes to the agency that I talked about earlier and evolutions from the Balkan war to the global war on terror to the war in Ukraine.

I mean, a lot of war going on there.

But they have responded to crisis across decades.

No matter who the President is in service of American foreign policy and security, their number one priority is to serve their country.

And right now they're being denied the right to do that.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you something because, you know, I don't think that the Musk Trump criticisms and the Rubio criticisms of USAID are fair.

I hope that we've marshaled enough objective data on that to leave the listeners with that point, although listeners can make up their own minds.

I will say, though, I was combing through research to try and find the other side of this, and I stumbled upon a World bank paper from 2007 that analyzed 108 recipient countries of foreign aid from 1960 to 1999.

And one of the things they found was that foreign aid overall had a negative impact on the institutions in those countries, that if foreign aid over GDP, like, was in the 75th percentile, that you actually saw indexes of democracy decrease and sometimes even GDP decrease.

They compared it to the Dutch disease countries that make a big discovery of oil or natural resources and ironically, their economy doesn't do well because the resource economy does well, but it drives up the currency and it gets rid of innovation and things just don't go particularly well.

So when you're thinking about the provision of foreign aid, because we talk about US aid being established in the early 1960s, it's been a long time.

It's not like poverty is gone.

It's not like hunger is gone.

It's not like all of these issues have disappeared.

And in fact, you know, going Back to around 2014, 2015 started getting worse.

Like global hunger started rising again in 2015.

Diseases started popping up again.

There has been more war and more migration and all these other sorts of things.

So do you think there is an Achilles heel to the aid argument?

Is there a problem with the way that aid has been dispensed?

Is there some way that aid could be reformed in a meaningful way to make it better for host countries?

Or would you look at that World bank paper and be like, okay, it's nice that these academics are sitting behind a desk in Brussels or wherever they were sitting.

But like, you know, I've been on the ground and I've seen how this transforms lives.

You can't really put a dollar amount or a regression equation on that.

How would you react to sort of the conclusions of that study?

Yeah, I would just start by noting the institution that that comes from is not super well known for really cultivating positive economic growth and in some ways operates a bit like the same sort of debt trap diplomacy that China is famous for.

I'm not saying the World bank doesn't do any good, but I think some introspection there probably worthwhile.

I think pretty much everyone that I've spoken to in this sector agrees that we are always eager to talk about reform.

I think implementing partners for USAID have a lot of recommendations and do a lot of advocacy for how we can make this, this, this work better and more effective.

In recent years, USAID has made significant shifts to try to drive funding not to US companies, but directly to local, local organizations and to really drive program design in concert with host country governments and local organizations who know their space the best.

So yes, of course I'm always, you know, pro reform and figuring out how to do this better.

But I also think that USAID is one of the most data driven entities in the US Government.

Every single program has a robust, what we call monitoring and evaluation platform that they have to abide by.

They have to report, report out tangible results that they achieve with US Taxpayer dollars.

And so there's a lot of information that can be used to do that reform.

Bringing every single program and every dollar to a screeching halt is not the way to go about that.

Yeah, if you were going to make changes to usaid, what would they be like?

What are some of the weaknesses of the agency overall in your opinion?

I mean, it's kind of ironic.

I saw that Oval Office interview that Elon Musk did talking about the bureaucracy.

And you know, sometimes we as implementing partners complain about the bureaucracy because it takes so long to develop and award programs and the compliance requirements are extraordinarily, extraordinarily tight.

We have very detailed annual audits and complex reporting.

But I'm not going to complain about that bureaucracy when it's what makes the foreign aid sector one of the most, one of the most transparent and accountable entities within the U.S.

government.

I think what we can continue to think about as a foreign aid sector, and this will be with or without USAID as the future unfolds, is I think, making upstream investments as much as possible.

And I've worked particularly over the last few years in a sector that we call resilience.

You know, broadly that tends to do with a lot of food security and addressing markets and agricultural production upstream.

But I think a lot of work can be done proactively that demonstrably saves money down the line by preventing crises, by preventing conflict.

And I think that sort of collaboration with local governments, with partner organizations on the ground who again, they know their countries, they know their communities, they know their problems and their opportunities better than anyone.

I think they're the ones who can really tell us how to direct that money in a way that will best set them up for future resilience and success.

So that would be my recommendation.

You've been in the USAID space.

Do you think there's a future for foreign aid workers?

Are, are you hopeful that there will be either a judicial stop to some of the assaults on USAID or that there will be other organizations that take over this work and that they'll be able to do it under the aegis of the Department of State or Department of Agriculture, or.

Do you feel like this is the end of an era?

It's hard to articulate how traumatic the last few weeks have been for, for my colleagues and I, I think my LinkedIn is just one open to work post after another.

We know that I think about 10,000 people have so far been furloughed or lost their jobs.

And forecasts estimate that up to 50,000American jobs could be lost.

That, that doesn't take into account people overseas who, who have worked faithfully and loyally with the US Government and US implementing partners.

I mean, the scale is terrifying.

But I think what is more frightening for many of us is that if there's a series of tech layoffs, if Microsoft lays off 1500 folks.

They can go to Google or Apple or tech startups and find similar work.

Our peer organizations are collapsing again.

In the legal hearing that I mentioned I was attending earlier, the lawyers for the plaintiffs said that many of these organizations fear that they will not survive the 90 day pause on US funding, that they will run into bankruptcy or simply have to shutter their doors because.

Because of this dismantling of USAID and the government's refusal to pay congressionally appropriated money.

So I think that level of trauma and the scale of this dismantling of the foreign aid apparatus means that people, I think some people will leave this sector forever.

And that is a tragic loss for the US as a whole, that these people with deep understanding of different countries, of critical sectors of work that have kept us safe, they will be so fed up by this process and so demoralize that they may not want to come back and work in the space ever again.

No matter what it looks like.

It seems like this is going to create a major vacuum in the world in general.

And I guess the question I would want to maybe close off with before I turn it over to you to ask if there's anything I've missed is are we going to get a China aid group or an EU aid.

Is there a country that's going to look at this opportunity and say, hey, the US is really giving this up.

Why don't we insert ourselves and try and fix something here?

Could it be a private company?

Like, again, we're talking about a budget of $40 billion.

So I mean, that's a lot to you and me, but there are plenty of bajillionaires in the United States for whom that's not.

And I think Elon bought Twitter for more than the annual budget of USAID last year.

It's like, do you have some hope that maybe the private sector could step in and that some of these people will put their monies where their mouths are?

I don't know, just talk to me about the.

Or is it just going to be, you know, the US will leave and then the things that always take advantage of power vacuums, like, you know, know militant groups and radical ideologies and smugglers and predators and cartels will take over in the absence of the presence of these things.

U.S.

foreign assistance makes up about 40% of the global aid budget.

That's a gap that private funding is never going to fill.

The EU has already seen pretty major cuts to, to its foreign assistance budgets.

And so, and we're seeing, you know, organizations within the UN infrastructure already start to shrink because they're anticipating funding cuts.

So I think that the damage will be quite widespread.

And it's just hard to imagine why partners would ever trust American entities.

Honestly, again, at this point, one of my colleagues shared with me a text message that I want to read to you, which I think is the bigger problem.

It's not just the financial gap, but the influence vacuum and the.

Yeah, the influence that we have, that we have projected over the globe, that is just going to.

It's already disappearing overnight.

Every bag of food, every conference that we organize that's USAID funded is labeled.

Required by law to be labeled from the American people.

And that.

That, again, has stopped that.

That aid is not going anywhere anymore.

So this colleague in West Africa said, for someone like me, who studies American literature and civilization and studied all aspects of America's history, including the civil rights movements, and was so in love with the American stance on the rule of law, I am completely lost.

That America elected someone with Trump's records was already beyond my understanding.

But that an independent agency established by Congress can be shut down without following the basic legal procedures is just leaving me speechless.

How did America get to that?

I think the way that we have withdrawn our assistance, the way that we have left our partners and our.

Our staff high and dry overseas, I don't think that we can recover from that just by replacing some of the funding with foreign.

Sorry, with private assistance or with, you know, private businesses.

I think this damage is, to some degree, irreparable.

What didn't I ask that I should have asked?

I won't ask you to try and find a silver lining because it doesn't sound like there is one.

But is there anything else that we should have talked about that we didn't cover that you think people should know about?

I think I want to talk about just one example of the impact I have seen directly from my work and the organization that I work with that gave me hope and inspiration and was the reason that I've done the work I've done for the last decade.

I wrote a proposal for USAID funding a little over a year ago to distribute cash transfers directly to communities that are affected by terrorist violence, essentially as a way to help them meet immediate needs and resist the financial incentives that terrorist organizations use to recruit them.

Cash transfers are one of the most effective, both in terms of kind of impact and cost forms of assistance.

And I was really excited when we were awarded this activity by usaid.

And about a year after the award, our team in country shared a video of the first woman in a remote village in this country receiving her cash transfer.

And.

And she sang and danced with her neighbors and told our program staff that this $100 cash transfer had changed her life.

And I think about just the direct connection between the research and the writing and the work that I do and that woman's life.

I think about the mandate that I feel to do as much good as I can and the time that I can on this earth.

And that project was that, that contract was canceled by USA this morning.

So I think, you know, that that's a very small story.

It's an impact on one person's life.

But I think each of my colleagues has dozens of those stories, and we believe in the work that we've done.

You know, I tried to set my bleeding liberal heart aside here for this conversation, but I think many of us are inspired by the mandate to do right by our fellow citizens of this globe and have really been driven by that for decades.

And I think many of us will be feeling a great sense of loss over the opportunity to impact other people's lives as a result of this.

Yeah, there's an old.

There's a section of the Talmud that has always been particularly close to my heart, which is that that he or she who saves a person saves the world.

And so if every one of Your colleagues has 10 stories like that, how many worlds did they save?

Because you never know, like, what.

What change one person is going to do.

If you empower one person, are they going to empower five more?

It really is a grassroots, like, bottom up, like try to change the world in that sort of perspective.

And it's something that the United States is, at least for the time being, is giving up on.

So thank you for putting aside your bleeding liberal heart.

And thank you for your bleeding liberal heart.

And I hope things get better.

Thanks, Jacob.

I appreciate you having this conversation.

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