"They Didn't Think It Would Be So Easy"

The Obliteration of USAID

After a recent event in Washington, I started to chat with a person I will call Sam. He had my complete attention when he said his years of work at USAID had ended abruptly when he was given minutes to clear out his office and was fired with a mandatory sixty-day period for that to take effect.

Sam’s career was spent working in hard places. (Trust me.) I said I wanted to write about him with assurances that his identity would be protected. In return, he gave me a complete, unvarnished account of how Elon Musk, DOGE, and designees from the Trump administration obliterated USAID only days after the inauguration on January 20.

Until 2024, USAID had an annual budget averaging $23 billion, with programs in education, food, health, environment, and democracy support, less than 1 percent of the federal budget. Estimates of lives saved every year was in the millions. There were about 10,000 employees around the world — most are gone. There is a remnant of about fifty people working on the closeout because as an independent government agency, only Congress can eliminate it altogether.

Aggregate numbers of job losses tend to be impersonal. But every one of these people has had their livelihood — their paychecks, their sense of security, and their dedicated mission — ended at the whim of a president and his cohort, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a professed admirer of USAID over the years.

Getting back to Sam. He became interested in sub-Saharan Africa as a student, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees as his focus. After arriving in Washington, he held a series of positions that deepened his interests and broadened his knowledge before arriving at USAID.

With experience and energy, Sam was given more responsibility. He considered himself a professional and not an advocate. If priorities in Washington changed, he would adjust his field work accordingly. Sam is an idealist with a commitment to progress. During the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, he persevered through war zones, famines, terrorism, and threats to his personal safety — always working toward goals that may have seemed out of reach yet were worthy and admirable.

As in every government agency, USAID’s bureaucracy was frustrating. But unlike their counterparts around the world at the State Department, the CIA, or the military, USAID’s work was harder to quantify in terms of lives saved, services rendered, or democratic structures advanced — or whether its funds were well spent or squandered.

Each administration had its achievements. George W. Bush’s success in establishing PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was as meaningful as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were violent and costly.

The Obama and Biden administrations were well staffed. But the stature of celebrities like Hillary Clinton at State and Samantha Power at USAID were distractions when their roles collided with politics and media fascinations.

Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term reflected his skepticism of USAID’s objectives and its loyalty to Trump’s agenda. Career staff at the agency were criticized for being “too close” to their issues or too much “in the weeds.” Upheavals elsewhere meant that relatively little attention could be paid to monitoring foreign assistance.

The Biden years were mostly smooth. The regions of Sam’s specialty continued to roil, and it was increasingly clear that America had moved its focus elsewhere. For instance, the once widely recognized famines and genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan largely receded as a cause célèbre.

And then came Trump’s second inauguration, with the issuance that day of Executive Order 14169: “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”

As Sam recalled: “The overall guidance from our superiors was, paraphrasing, to ‘keep your head down,’ ‘keep doing what you are doing,’ and ‘let’s make this as painless as possible.’ There was certainly internal denial and wishful thinking. The feeling was that this couldn’t happen and that Congress and/or the courts wouldn’t allow it. In retrospect, the outcome was clear.”

The full, harrowing story of those early weeks was in the New York Times in June and a Daily episode in October

Sam’s termination took effect July 1. He and most of his colleagues were now unemployed.

I asked Sam how he felt USAID could have been improved. He mentioned procurement reform; greater efforts at having local organizations involved in planning and activities; understanding the complexities of politics and conflict, wherever they were working; reaching out to an American public largely unaware or indifferent to USAID’s mission.

None of that is now possible. The demolition of USAID was accomplished with pretty much the same speed and ruthlessness as what was done to the East Wing of the White House to make way for Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom.