Lawfare Daily: An Insider’s Account of the Trump Administration’s Dismantling of USAID

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Plus, you'll help us continue to offer all of our content for free to everyone, thanks for listening, and for caring about things that matter. I was nervous, but optimistic and waiting for some sort of supplemental guidance that would describe what was actually meant by this because they couldn't possibly mean what it said because that would result in potentially millions of people losing their lives

and us pulling the rug out from promises we have made around the world to keep people safe. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Anna Hickey, Associate Editor of Communications at Lawfare with Nicholas Enrich, former acting assistant administrator of Global Health at USAID, and author of Into the Wood Chipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded USAID.

In my mind, when the dust settles on the Trump presidency, this is going to end up being its legacy. This is one of the most consequential policy decisions that the Trump administration will have ended up making, and they didn't even know what it was that they were closing out.

Today, we're talking about his experience within the agency, as Elon Musk's newly-created department of government efficiency dismantled it, and the global impacts of the end of the United States Agency for International Development. Before we dive into what happened with the agency last spring between January and March of 2025, can you describe your background, how did you end up at USAID, and what did you do there

prior to January 20th, 2025? Sure. I was in the Global Health Bureau, and unlike most people in the Global Health Bureau who were doctors, epidemiologists, public health specialists, and the like, I was actually a lawyer,

and my job was to basically create a framework, a procurement framework for USAID to

move money in ways that would allow us to implement the technical objectives of those doctors and epidemiologists. So my job as we came into the Trump administration was the director of policy planings and programs for the Global Health Bureau, and that basically just meant that we needed to make sure that we had enough, we had the right levels of funding to achieve those objectives,

and that we were using those funds as effectively as possible to achieve those objectives. And we think about objectives like, what was USAID doing for, you know, I'm sure many people in America saw at least some of our listeners didn't really know about the agency prior to last year when it really hit the news, what were USAID's objectives, and what was the

“scale of, you know, especially the Global Health Bureau of that service, and like impact?”

Yeah, our big overarching objectives were to increase global life expectancy and to expand access to quality health care around the globe.

We had a budget in Global Health of approximately $8 billion a year, and we worked through

a variety of disease in health areas like HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, family planning, nutrition, and a couple of others, and the basic model was to work in partnership with host governments to strengthen local health systems, to be able to address health problems for the long term. Obviously, there's the reason of the US government should do this, because it is morally

good, it is saving people's lives, but why was it important, at least in your eyes, that the US government was doing this work in other countries to decrease maternal mortality, increase life expectancy, especially like children, what's the pitch to the US people? Yeah, I mean, the shortest term pitch is that it keeps Americans safer from the potential spread of infection diseases, right?

And we're five years out from a global pandemic of COVID, and so I don't think anyone

COVID, we've invested hundreds of millions of dollars through USA to help countries strengthen

“a global early warning system to be able to detect and respond to outbreaks of infectious”

diseases before they potentially could become a threat to the US. So that's in the shortest term sense. Another one is that, however, like in a more broad sense, USAID, it was really the embodiment of American generosity and soft power in a lot of ways. We strengthened partnerships and built stability and security around the world in ways that

were founded on goodwill and partnership and made the world a more stable place for the benefit of all Americans. Now kind of turning to what happened last spring. So starting in January 2025, I mean, you start the book of, you end up on vacation at the beginning of the transition, can you describe what January 20th, so January 22nd, 23rd,

looked like what information was coming into the agency and how you all were thinking about

the second rapid administration coming in and changing the objectives or directions of the

agency? Sure. I mean, I should start even before the inauguration reading kind of anything I could possibly find about what the administration might be planning for USAID, including Project 2025. A lot of speculation is to who we're going to be the potential political appointees

that might come in. And what it seemed like was we were concerned about that some of our programs might be in jeopardy, especially those related to family planning, those related to climate and resilience, and those related to partnering with the World Health Organization.

“But it never really crossed my mind, honestly, that the entirety of our broader programs”

would be threatened. And again, the objective of expanding health access around the world and increasing global life expectancy and keeping American safe from infectious diseases seemed to have brought by partisan support over decades. On January 20th, however, there were a series of executive orders that the president issued

that first day, including one that issued a blanket freeze on foreign assistance.

And to me, I was reading that, like you said, I was actually on vacation. I did not know how quickly this was all going to move. And I thought I might have some time as the transition would go into place, but boy was I wrong. But as reading that, the executive order that was freezing foreign assistance, I thought

it must be a mistake overly broad, because if taken at its letter, my assumption was that

“that would mean that it would shutter health clinics that we had, that USAID was running”

all over the world, that would interrupt clinical trials, that we had patients that needed to take treatment the next day, it would disrupt the distribution of everything we were planning to do to prepare for the rainy season for malaria around the world. And just the effects would be so catastrophic that I just couldn't believe that that's really what they meant.

And so I was nervous, but optimistic and waiting for some sort of supplemental guidance that would describe what was actually meant by this, because they couldn't possibly mean what it said, because that would result in potentially millions of people losing their lives, and that's pulling the rug out from promises we had made around the world to keep people safe.

Just to kind of drill down on two parts of the question, first you mentioned family

planning, and others a lot of people, especially online that think about family planning from USAID in terms of abortion or other reproductive health access things, is that what you mean by family planning? No, I mean, we did not do abortions. We were actually legally prohibited by statute to not promote or provide any sort of abortion

services. What we mean by family planning is counseling, providing contraception, providing the basic frameworks to allow women and girls to have children in the timing that they they wanted to and to help prevent teenage pregnancies to help women continue in their education so that they could help contribute economically and as a program that actually saves a lot of lives

by giving women more education and choice over when they have families, but that to be very, very specific and clear, we did not fund abortions under any circumstances despite that being like a incidious rumor, but again, we had strict safeguards in place to prevent that none of our funds were ever used for abortion. I know, especially this year, I feel like I've seen a lot of people, both who support the

administration and oppose the administration, have responded to critics of saying, nothing is surprising, everything that the administration has done has been laid out either in President Trump's, you know, 20, 24 campaign by his advisors in Project 2020, 25, and just to like really hammer the, you know, point home, it's the destruction of USAID was not mentioned during

even after he won before January 20, that's correct, I mean, nothing that I had seen,

“I mean, well, I will say that there were certain fringe podcasters and right wing social media”

commentators who were certainly calling for the abolition of USAID and calling it a front up to the seat for the CIA and unfortunately, it was those voices that somehow caught the year of Elon Musk because he was coming in with his department of government efficiency and while this was not a political priority for anything that I saw in terms of for the Trump administration as political appointees, where doge is concerned, unfortunately, that's exactly what they

gotten to their heads is what they wanted to do. Thinking about Doge and what Doge did, as I read the book, I kind of became more of three buckets of people who worked at USAID in between January and, you know, March or July 2025, and so I kind of want to pull at the intentions and roles of each of those buckets.

So the first was, you know, people like you, people who had served at USAID prior to January

2025, the Civil Servants Foreign Service Officers, the second bucket was Doge personnel

“who came in at the behest of Elon Musk and another third were political appointees who”

came in who had somewhat previously worked at USAID and, you know, people like Piet Maraco who ended up leading much of the agency. So do you think about kind of the people who worked at USAID in those three buckets, or is there anybody I'm missing, who had significant roles to play in that time period? No, I think those are the three main buckets, as you say, the political appointees that

were coming in from the Trump administration, the Doge team that was coming in under Elon Musk and the career officials or the Civil Servants Foreign Service contractors, all those groups that were already there, I think that's a fair assessment. And so thinking about the Doge people first, you mentioned, much of the actions by the Doge personnel kind of were, at some points appear to be random, you mentioned in the book,

sometimes it even appeared to be unintentional, in your view in your time there, how much of what the actions of specifically the Doge personnel were done, you know, two target specific programs, how much was done just to end all foreign aid, how did you think about their intent and then also what they did?

“Yeah, I think it's really important here to be very clear that the Doge personnel that”

came in had absolutely no idea what USAID did and they really didn't care to find out.

They never participated in any sort of meetings where they could find out what it was

the agency did when they started tinkering and I refer to them as in the book as basically children in a toy spaceship messing around and pressing buttons and not really knowing or carrying what any of those things did and some of the destruction that they initiated, all of the destruction that they initiated was like not based on and totally in disregard for what the impacts of that would be on global health and international development in

general. And the other thing is that from the Doge perspective, they really didn't, whereas the political appointees were kind of focused on closing out the agency in like a smooth way that Marco Rubio even issued a waiver to allow life-saving humanitarian assistance activities to continue, but Doge should really didn't care about that.

They were working quickly and it was pretty smart for them to do that because it allowed them to break everything down before there was any way to save any parts of the program. So it often ended up with kind of yelling and screaming between the political appointees and Doge as the political appointees who were to some degree, some of them were trying to figure out what the impacts would be of the damage when they realized, "Oh, wow, we

do need to turn some of this work back on," or people are really going to die. And they realized that the damage that had been done to the systems by Doge through breaking our payment system or canceling our contracts or slashing the staff were so broken that there was no way to even fix them at that point they would be on repair. So, did you have any personal interactions with any of the Doge personnel during your time

at USAID? I did. I wish I did earlier because I would have loved to try to get the chance to explain them what the damage they were causing, but by the time I started interacting with Doge who was them getting very angry at me for what they called slowing down their process

of canceling terminating our contracts. And the reason that that we had that bit of a conflict was, as I mentioned, Rubio had issued this waiver to allow, even though the foreign aid was paused to allow for life-saving activities to continue. And so, this entire time, from January through the beginning of March when I got kicked

out, that was my goal was to restart the life-saving activities and I was stopped at every

And one of the things that was preventing us from, actually, maybe the most permanent thing that was preventing us from turning those activities back on was that Doge was terminating the contracts that we needed to do those activities.

“So I would continue to try to say, "Wait before you terminate that contract, you should”

know that it's needed to implement the waiver that Rubio put in place, that Musk is standing at the White House and saying, "We're still doing these activities that Rubio and people Morocco are telling Congress that, "Yeah, we have this waiver in place, all the life-saving things are continuing. We can't do those if you terminate our contracts."

And Doge basically just said, "Absolutely not."

Stop slowing down our process, all these contracts have already been vetted by the Secretary of State, which is just frankly not true. And so that had ended up being my first interaction with Doge. What was your position in between January and March when you left at USAID? Because you mentioned that you started doing more of the Lawyery work within Global Health,

but you obviously don't end up in that position at the end?

“Sure, about one week into the Trump administration, Doge put the 60-most senior career officials”

at USAID onto administrative leave, and that included my boss who was acting as the Assistant Administrator for Global Health and all of her deputies. And then the next day, I found out through a notice that went to the entire agency without any warning or heads up that I was actually the one that was now going to be put in charge of Global Health because they had gotten rid of all of the career leadership.

So from that point on, about one week into the Trump administration, I was the acting assistant Administrator for Global Health. As I mentioned, as you mentioned, I was on vacation at the time that I found this out and had to hurry back to Washington and just kind of jumped right into a world of chaos again.

Number one priority, trying to get Doge and the political point to understand what it was that they were destroying so that hopefully we could save some of the key programs on the way in a kind of desperate attempt to avoid a catastrophic loss of life. So we've mentioned the Trump political appointees.

“I think that term we probably should define it at this point.”

So when we talk about political appointees, what are we referring to and how are the political

appointees who came into the second Trump administration may be distinct from the types of appointees

that came in during prior transitions? Yeah. So unlike the career staff or the civil service and the foreign service, and those that are kind of the consistent federal employees that stick around and non-partially are non-partisan way, implement the work of USAID every four years, there is a new political

leadership that's determined by and appointed by the president and that's common that happens every four years and usually that's experts in the field where like for a in global health are our previous political appointee that to leave global health was a guy named Toggle one day who is renowned surgeon and global health strategist. And so that's normally what you get in terms of political appointees.

In this case, the people that were brought in as the Trump political appointees were actually people that had little to know information about what the agency did or really understanding of how government worked. That was the primary collection of political appointees.

There were a few a handful who had been political appointees previously under the first

Trump administration that came back. So that included P. Morocco and the guy who ultimately became my boss, Mark Lloyd. And the people who were turning, they fall into the category of vindictive. These were people who came back into the government with an axe to grind because they felt that they had been wronged during the first Trump administration.

Morocco, for example, had been removed from USAID after only four months in the first Trump administration for severe mismanagement that he blamed on the career staff. My boss, Mark Lloyd, also had been there and also blamed the career staff for his ouster as well saying that they had the staff had like leaked things to the press and had harassed him.

And he even went as far as saying that the career staff during the first Trump administration had killed his dog. So I mean, these are the kinds of people that we were trying to convince that needed to save our programs. They were people who were really happy to be there trying to get rid of the civil servants, really absolutely, it was a pleasure to them to disregard and get rid

of the expertise of the agency in what felt like revenge. I mean, again, my boss was pretty convinced that me and my colleagues were pet mergers. So that was a part of the book that I wanted to make sure I asked about because it like stopped me in my tracks, where the quote that you have him saying is, they referring to

house to threaten me and then they killed my dog. Did you ask him what he meant by that? I just, I can't imagine having somebody who was my boss accusing me of my colleagues of that.

So I've been asked that before and the answer is no, I was nervous to follow up.

“I didn't believe it, honestly, it sounded unhinged and again, needs to be taken in the”

context of, the reason he brought it up was because I kind of asked him, like, when you came in for this position, were you looking forward to doing the position that you were brought in for, which was to be an assistant administrator for a part of the agency, or were you excited to be tearing down this agency? And he was just happily telling me that he was excited to be tearing down the agency that

he had a list of staff that he wanted to take revenge on. And so honestly, when you told me that the staff had killed his dog, I asked no follow questions. I just said something like, oh, that sounds terrible and tried to kind of like remove

myself from the conversation because, you know, I was afraid of where that was going.

Thinking about, you know, Mark Lloyd ending up as acting assistant administrator for global health. One of the other, I guess people you mentioned in the book is to My Spurger, who was acting assistant administrator for the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance. You, obviously, as a civil servant, also ended up in that very briefly.

Do you have a sense of how or why you as a civil servant ended up as an acting administrator for acting assistant administrator for a period of time when much of the other acting

“assistant administrators were political appointees?”

So I think the reason is because they hadn't yet brought in a political appointee to be the assistant administrator for global health, whereas they had for the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, which was Tim My Spurger, and for the Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, which was what Mark Lloyd was brought in for. But yeah, the bureaus that did not have political appointees at that period one week into

the administration when all the senior leadership was removed. In those cases, all of those bureaus were then led by civil servant. So for example, the all the regional bureaus, so like the bureau for Africa, for Asia, for Latin American Caribbean, for example, all were kind of the same situation as me, career officials who were elevated to that position because their bosses had been removed.

Did you ever get an explanation as to why putting political appointees in wasn't a priority for the administration that early on when all of those senior folks were put on admin leave? Did you ever get an explanation of why certain bureaus got political appointees and the others, or such as unknown?

Well, I mean, it certainly within two weeks of the Trump administration coming in when Elon must tweeted that he just spent the weekend feeding USA into the woodchipper. At that point, they weren't really interested in bringing in a team of political leadership to run an agency, right? They were at that point getting rid of it.

As far as I can tell, the only political appointees that came in were the ones that came in with Pete Morocco, he is kind of like group of people who had been there with an

extrogrine from the first administration, and I did not hear this directly, but it wouldn't

have been surprised if they had had a conversation about how much fun they were going to have when they came in because that's sort of how it seemed. I guess that's not true. There are a couple of other political appointees that I don't know what their relationship was to Pete Morocco, who did come in and kind of seemed like they were trying to do something.

And by that, I mean, they were trying to draw down, draw down, there were to close out and shutter the agency in a way that causes little damage and as few headlines as possible. Those are people like the chief of staff, Joe Borker, the director of policy, Megan Hanson, these were people who didn't seem necessarily at least to me to have a specific animosity towards the agency, but we're just kind of like, this is what's happening.

We're taking this agency apart, these were people who did seem to think that there was some priority related to following Rubio's waiver for life-saving humanitarian assistance where those other appointees that I talked about that came with Morocco and certainly the Dodge staff had no interest in fulfilling that part of their duties.

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deck incident. So that meant we're pulling staff from other teams. We're sending response teams immediately to the effected region.

“We're coordinating with with with our partner agencies like the CDC for testing with the world health health organization with the host government in this case in Uganda.”

And we're mobilizing a massive response effort. So that means bringing in personal protective equipment into the area to make sure that health care workers are able to quickly respond without putting themselves at risk. It means conducting screening and contact tracing to try to identify the extent of the outbreak and to be able to contain to contain a where it is.

And a variety of other like measures. And in this case, we were forwarded at every attempt that we made to set up our response.

At the time we were barred from communicating with our partners in the country with the WHO, but even with our own sister agencies. We weren't even allowed to communicate directly with the CDC and when. And when the national security council came and asked for updates. Why are they hearing that Elon Musk is saying that Ebola activities have restarted where the government of Uganda saying that they haven't. Pete Morocco, which is basically lied to to the National Security Council and be like, I don't know, we've we've approved everything when he had refused to approve the activities that we had asked for.

And some of those in these were like not just to help contain the outbreak in Uganda, but to keep Americans safe.

For example, they refused to allow us to provide screening at international airports in Uganda to make sure that passengers didn't have symptoms of Ebola before getting on international flights. So those people could be going on or to the United States. And that's a way to get Ebola into America. And we weren't even allowed to do that. Similarly, we had pre-positioned personal protective equipment at a WHO owned warehouse right outside of the Ugandan border in Kenya. And not allowed to move those that PPE into the country directly by people in Morocco because he was upset that would have involved engaging with the World Health Organization, which he refused to do at all costs.

At one point, he actually told me that I should go and get the PPE out of the warehouse without engaging with the WHO who owned the warehouse. It was, I mean, it was this crazy scenario where he was basically suggesting that I break into the warehouse myself or my team and like go get this PPE, bring in across the border without telling anyone. And he actually gave me 12 hours to do that or he threatened to fire me. I never, I was not able to get it done. He did not fire me at that point, luckily, but you know, we were never able to get the PPE into the country and it's just sitting still as far as I know in that warehouse not being used for, you know, what was a critical national security threat.

“Do you a sense of what the outbreak of Ebola on the ground and you got a look like given the lack of, you know, US aid assistance?”

It actually ended up not being the worst outbreak that we had seen. I mean, there was only a handful of people who ended up dying from the outbreak. And the number of cases were actually contained. It was pretty miraculous given that it was an outbreak that actually involved people within the capital city, often that exacerbates the problem. I think it's kind of a testament to the work that we had done since the since since COVID, especially to help provide technical expertise and and training to make to like build up the London system to be able to identify those things even sometimes without our help, but, you know,

at the time that that's not a good enough reason to that the fact that we got lucky and this didn't turn into an out of control Ebola outbreak as we've seen in in other cases in other countries over the last few years. But it just felt like we were kind of conducting global health policy by crossing our fingers and hoping, which obviously is a terrible way to to conduct global health policy. And it's now been, you know, just about a year since the official drawdown of USAID has occurred.

“Do you ever sense of what the on the ground impacts have been?”

I mean, obviously, the end of USAID has been deeply impactful for those who used to work at the agency or used to work at a contractor V8 agency. But what has it been like that people used to receive aid from the agency?

And those, you know, it was I think in Sudan where families were going to food distribution sites that USAID had run that ended up being closed and shuttered when they spent all day walking there.

“It was pregnant women who were unable that had emergencies during childbirth that were unable to access emergency ambulance services and get to clinic.”

Some of the clinics were closed that when they got there and they ended up perishing. So the anecdotal examples started that there were truly heart wrenching came in right away.

But we've seen over the last year or so is that through conservative estimates, at least 750,000 people have already died and about 500,000 of those are being children.

And unfortunately, it looks like the worst is very much yet to come with we've stopped our global immunization campaign. We are totally stopping our like prevention activities for major disease portfolios and we're starting to see some clinics. Babies are being born with HIV at high rates again when just a year later at those same clinics, those numbers were near zero. And so the researchers are estimating that potentially up to 14 million people could die over the next five years alone, which is like, you know, in my mind when the dust settles on the Trump presidency.

So then see this is going to end up being it's like a see this is one of the most consequential policy decisions that the Trump administration will have ended up making and they didn't even know what it was that they were closing out.

“Are you aware of any grants or contracts that might have been transferred to other departments like the Department of State from USA already?”

So what I know is that the the the few remaining contracts that did not get canceled by does did shift over to being run by the Department of State. And unfortunately what we're seeing is that the contracts that do remain were not because they're like the perfect alignment of, you know, from from a global health perspective to actually address our global needs. These were just the contracts that had the most room to park a bunch of money in and so what we're seeing is it didn't really matter what what those contracts were for before.

So for example, we have tuberculosis contracts that are now they're just dumping in, you know, malaria and polio and and family planning money into into these contracts for work that was supposed to happen in countries where those contracts never even operated in the first place. So it's it's a way for them to to claim that they're they're moving the money, but these contractors are not in a position to use those funds to actually do the work that they're meant to do at least not in the short term until they're able to, you know, change the scope of their work.

Bring up or the experts that would would do those things establish offices or or outpost in the countries where those funds are for. So what we're seeing is kind of just a dumping of the remaining global health funds into anywhere that that funding can go. But certainly in the probably the least strategic manner that you could imagine. Can you give at all like a monetary or numerical figure of what the drawdown of USAID has meant either both for personnel, you know, how many people between civil servants and, you know, institutional support contractors that you mentioned in the book.

For USAID at the beginning, we're to, you know, how many work doing humanitarian aid now and then how much grant money was going out from USAID prior to January 2025 and you know, what's left today. Yeah, I mean, the impact of of people that were a part of USAID or or the contractors that that implemented the work in countries was enormous. The the staffing footprint for USAID was depending on how you measure in contractors and our locally higher staff, for example, between 10 and 16,000 people. And then another couple hundred thousand people when you if you also consider the the the contractors who were working on implementing that work.

We're moving about eight billion dollars a year of global health funds across the world and and across these different health categories.

Approximately and so it's it's just an enormous industry of people and American businesses and local organizations and local staff and that that have all kind of. Like without even looking at the the the recipient side that have been affected by these cuts. So is it there's nobody left at USAID is the footprint of the agency zero now.

“No, I believe my understanding is that there's still this like tiny skeleton crew that's responsible for closing out the remaining contracts.”

The latest that that that that that I actually saw was that the political appointees now it's it's now actually currently being run under.

And they're saying that they're expecting about nineteen billion dollars in administrative close out costs for the agency, which is just an astronomical waste of money that could have been used to.

You know, save millions of lives.

“Obviously, you know, that's a lot of people who have lost their jobs and this would not be the law for a podcast, we didn't mention litigation surrounding actions from the Trump administration.”

So can you talk about, you know, either from grant recipients or from those who have lost their jobs, what kind of litigation or legal challenges have occurred since the drawdown or closure of the agency.

Yeah, so there's there's a variety of different kinds of litigation because people were fired in so many different ways.

But for a lot of the foreign service and civil servants staff, the way that they got rid of the staff was totally illegal, you know, this was not a layoff, it was a politically motivated mass firing.

“And so there's there's an appeal that was filed to the merit system protection board, which is the independent federal body created to protect civil servants from exactly this kind of personnel action.”

And those cases are sort of making their way through the courts to be able to show that if you do a reduction in force, like there are legal ways to do a reduction in force, this was absolutely not what that was. And there's again, there's similar lawsuits related to those who didn't have federal protection, you know, me people were fired three times and then reinstated and then unfired and it was just just like an absolute legal mess. And so those those cases continue to make their way through the courts and, you know, there's also arguments that that this was done by the the doge group who didn't actually have legal authority to be making those decisions at all and there's a separation of powers argument because they basically abolished an agency that's authorized by Congress.

So there's a whole litany of different legal claims that that are facing the agency for this dismantling that that's not even taking into account all the contractors who, you know, had their their contracts illegally terminated as well. At the end of the book, you detail your and your colleagues writing memos to document what happened to the agency and what the effects might be why did you all find it important to write these memos and then also, you know, disseminate them to USAID and then also to the public.

Yeah, at that, you know, after several weeks of doing everything I could to restart our lifesaving programs pursuant to Ruby as waiver, at some point I realized that it actually the waiver itself was a force that we were not going to be given the opportunity to actually do that. But yet at the same time, I was hearing publicly Marco Rubio, Pete Morocco, Elon Musk, show publicly that everything was fine there was this waiver in place and it dawned on me that the career staff were actually going to get blamed for why the lifesaving programs didn't actually happen because they, you know, they had this waiver and the reality was we had tried and been stopped at every single turn by exactly those people.

And so it was really important to me to preserve the record of what actually happened for the former staff of USAID to be able to point to the actual facts of how we were prevented from doing that and the warnings that we had issued to the administration of what would happen if they really went through with all these cuts.

At some point, I knew that this was like that I was going to have to send that information out and I knew that that that was probably going to be the end of my career.

I felt like at that point, I could no longer stay silent and that to continue to allow the agency to tear his programs apart that way without saying anything felt like complicity from my perspective. And so it's important to me to get the word out there to warn the war but also to establish that record and hopefully to one day bring some amount of accountability because a lot of those, these people who we were talking about these political appointees, these doge staff, they are now in very high ranking government positions in other agencies and have never been held accountable for their actions.

“What specifically, like what specific information did you include in the memos?”

Right, so there's three memos. So the first was basically documenting everything we had tried to do to restart lifesaving programs and how we had been stopped at every step of the way and the specifics of how that happened and kind of like a chronological role. The second was documenting the destruction of our staffing footprint, the daily putting people on and off administrative leave and firing and ending our probational employees and ultimately getting rid of all the leadership that to show the impact of that on our ability to implement our programs.

As you're thinking about and like the months to years to come of what a post USAID world looks like both for the United States and for countries globally. What are you trying to keep your eye on to understand the impact of the end of the agency? Yeah, I mean what I think needs to happen right away is that the state department needs to release the data which is something that they haven't done is required by Congress and it's still being collected for a lot of these diseases and we need to be able to see what the actual impact because right now we're doing it based on modeling based on estimates based on anecdotes.

It's difficult because they have shut down a lot of the monitoring and evaluation and surveillance programs that we have that make it more difficult to assess that data but it's required by Congress and I hope that Congress will put their foot down and demand that we see what what the impacts of this are. We expect that in whatever the form of the next administration is that we'll need to reestablish USAID and it doesn't need to be exactly the same but remember that USA was not torn down because because that was took a way to better align for an assistance with the president's agenda it wasn't because there was so much waste fraud and abuse it was torn down just like for the sole purpose of satisfying the ego of the world's richest man and that's not a good reason.

This is an organization that function and of course it can be improved it's going to need to be brought back in the future.

If the agency is brought back in the future obviously there's a dearth of institutional knowledge now in the federal government about global health or humanitarian assistance. Do you have a sense of other you or your former colleagues would go back to such an agency and whether the United States has lost trust with its contractors globally. Do you have a sense of how you know whether or not people will trust working with the agency going forward.

“I think that the expertise will be the easiest thing to replace I mean we're all still here you know I've seen surveys showing that you know over 60 or 70% of former USAID staff are currently either unemployed or significantly under employed.”

You know they made us cut up our badges but you know aside from that we're still here like I would love to go back to work for an agency for international development would do so in a heartbeat. I think it will be much more challenging to rebuild properly than it was unfortunately for Elon Musk and his team to tear it down which is sad we have broken that trust and it will be difficult. The other countries to rely on support from the United States when it like we made it very very clear how easy it is to break those promises and pull the rug out.

But at the same time I think that we'll whatever the next version of it looks like it'll have to it'll have to deal with those issues and we'll have to make strong strong and firm commitments that that were able to stand behind in order to start rebuilding that trust. And is there kind of anything you want to say as we drop down the conversation about your experience working at USAID either prior to January 2025 or between January 2025 to March 2025 that you think you know listeners are the American public in general might not know about the agency and what happened to it.

Yeah well I would just say like this is it's a cautionary tale and you like it's too late for USAID at least in its previous version but if you if you see what's happening at other agencies or you're seeing policy decisions that make absolutely no sense. That like related to the Iran war or ice or in the FBI or all in all of these other agencies like I hope that people recognize that this isn't just like necessarily policy decisions a lot like we can't underestimate the sheer level of incompetence and what happens when agencies are hollowed out of their expertise and replaced by.

Uninformed and unqualified sick of ants who really don't understand the work of the agencies or how those governments work and it so it's often no surprise that things when things go wrong they end up getting worse.

That decisions get flipped flopped and and seem confused it's not always part of the plan this is why there's a value in having.

Expert and nonpartisan civil servants to administer the policies of something as complicated as the US government.

“Well I think we'll leave it there on that note and I think you so much for joining me today on the offer podcast and for listeners into the woodchipper of whistleblowers account of how the US administration shredded USAID.”

I'm reading for understanding what the first three to six months of the Trump administration looked like by an insider's view. Thank you so much.

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