USAID Forever
USAID didn’t deserve to die. Here’s why.
A year ago, I experienced a new kind of career crisis. I wasn’t fired or demoted. I didn’t have to worry about where my next paycheck was coming from. But I suffered a professional loss – of identity, of a sense of value and contribution. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was destroyed, erasing the institution where I had gone to work every day for over two and a half decades. As I wrote at the time, “It took the Trump/Musk team a month to dismantle the agency, disrupting the lives of thousands of people around the world. It is a searing truth that the strongest and richest men in the world have waged war on those most threatened by poverty, famine and conflict.”
Many friends and colleagues lost their jobs. Their lives changed literally overnight, forced to return to the United States from overseas, uprooting their families, leaving behind lifesaving work that saved millions of lives over the last two decades. I have talked to dozens of USAID staff and development professionals across the field, from newly-minted graduate school students just entering a nearly defunct field to those nearing retirement with tuition bills to pay and the prospect of hitting the job market in their late 50s. The job market looks a lot different when you pull over $35 billion out of the sector.
As for myself, I too was left reeling, despite having exited the agency in 2017. I am still not prepared intellectually or emotionally to tell the entire story. Fortunately, many others have honored the Agency’s history through their testimonies, advocacy, and analyses over the past year. For now, I’ve gathered in one place what I consider the best documentation that I came across during this tumultuous year. While I have undoubtedly missed many accounts that add to the record of USAID’s achievements. I’m sure there are also tales of vengeance, arrogance, incompetence, and ignorance I have failed to include on the part of those who oversaw and enabled the destruction of the Agency. I would certainly welcome your additions in the comments.
If you have a half-hour, start by watching John Oliver’s humorous and brutal takedown of the USAID’s executioners, those most responsible for its undoing. Oliver always delivers great satire, but here he also does a great job describing USAID’s work and what we as a nation have lost in terms of international stature, the influence of “soft power” and the result of 60 years of international development cooperation.
A standout piece by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker described in detail the consequences of USAID’s demise in terms of lives lost. Gawande, the head of USAID’s Global Health Bureau during the Biden Administration wrote:
”There are valid criticisms of U.S.A.I.D. It sometimes fostered dependency. It could be inefficient. Too much of its funding went to international institutions, rather than to local ones… Yet no other agency of the U.S. government has saved more lives per dollar. It helped move billions of people out of poverty. And it showed how to deliver results for all of humanity, including Americans, through cooperation, rather than coercion.”
The piece includes a short film entitled “Rowina’s Choice,” which centers the human cost of Trump’s policies on a choice no mother should have to make.
Daily news is of course the first draft of history— it is extremely important that the historic record of this calamitous decision be clear: how USAID’s quickly USAID was extinguished with little public debate, congressional oversight, or subsequent accountability. To understand the scale and pace of the destruction, The New York Times’ timeline is a guide for future researchers and historians.
A year ago, I also offered my own testimonial, concluding:
“This is not a fight about foreign aid. It’s about whether our democracy can withstand unchecked power grabs and unaccountable governance led by the most powerful man and the richest man in the world. It smacks of fascism. It has already made us less safe, less free and less able to meet the challenges we face.”
And if you have just 90 seconds, I’d like you to watch this video. It brings a tear to my eye and puts fight back in my heart.
USAID Forever.
Do you have stories about USAID? I’d love to hear them in the comments.
I was hired by SENADA which was a USAID Indonesian project to assist handicraft manufacturers in Java. I helped them create sustainability profiles to better compete with less eco-friendly Chinese competitors. It was only a 60-day consultancy for me but it was truly a once in a lifetime experience that I cherish still today. The work we did was important then and would be still. To scapegoat this agency is beyond cruel. It upsets me to no end. Thank you for writing this.
Like you, I had already retired from USAID before last year's boom fell. But it affected my husband, and so many around us in the DMV, directly. For me, I draw some comfort from the efforts of several groups of young people that have cropped up to promote the future of foreign aid and the role of US soft power. The world will turn and we'll find our best selves again.