The Trump administration has frozen funding for foreign aid, putting workers out of jobs and threatening the future of USAID in doubt. Brett Murphy is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on ProPublica’s national desk, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the rapid dismantling of the humanitarian agency and what will happen to the people around the world who rely on its help. His article, written with Anna Maria Barry-Jester, is “‘People Will Die’: The Trump Administration Said It Lifted Its Ban on Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid. That’s Not True.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] The United States Agency for International Development, which most people refer to as USAID, has carried out health and nutrition and development projects all over the world since the early 1960s. Has it been worth the billions of tax dollars? Well, consider PEPFAR for the president’s emergency Program for Aids relief. It was established in 2003 by George W. Bush, and since that time, analysts estimate this one program has saved at least 26 million lives. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Now the future of PEPFAR and all the other programs administered by USAID is uncertain at best and possibly doomed. Elon Musk, head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on X that he “spent a recent weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.” That’s a quote. It looks as if the nearly 13,000 person workforce at this agency will be permanently fired. And if that happens, what can USAID still do? Brett Murphy is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter on ProPublica’s national desk, where he’s been reporting on the dismantling of USAID. And he joins us to share what he has learned. Brett, welcome to Think.
Brett Murphy [00:01:13] Thanks, Krys for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:15] Why was USAID established in the first place?
Brett Murphy [00:01:19] It’s established first by JFK. It was in ’61. His idea behind it was America had a vested interest in the developing world. We wanted to both help these countries establish themselves exist on their own. And if there way if there was economic freefall in those places, they could be open to influence from our adversaries at the time. And he thought it was worth the investment won on humanitarian grounds to save lives and two to expand, as they called it in D.C., “American soft power” to establish our interests so that these countries will be our allies and they’ll be able to interact with us not through not through war, as so many do, but through humanitarian efforts. Then it’s important to note, even though it was first established through an executive order back in 61, it was enshrined into law the same as any other agency. In 1998 by Congress, the Congress has established this as an independent agency for several decades now.
Krys Boyd [00:02:32] So has there always been a stark partizan divide in support for USAID?
Brett Murphy [00:02:38] No, it’s it’s you know, it’s had bipartisan support for four decades. There’s always been criticism of it largely in quarters on the right that our US tax dollars are not well spent and foreign aid that would be better spent stateside. That’s always been a criticism. There’s been a fringe criticism for four years, too, that, you know, USAID is a conduit for unscrupulous spending money that goes towards nonprofits that aren’t actually doing anything with. It’s the the more kind of dramatic or drastic allegations are things we’re seeing now on social media quite a bit, including by the president and by Elon Musk accusing the agency of money laundering in these in corruption fraud. These sorts of allegations of have, like I said, always been on the fringe until now. So what we’re seeing now is a partizan divide that I don’t think has been quite so stark over the years.
Krys Boyd [00:03:48] Has there been significant evidence made public of graft or fraud or waste as a persistent problem with many USAID project?
Brett Murphy [00:03:58] Not that I’ve seen, and I’ve been asking for it. And I’d be very interested in knowing about widespread graft and corruption. It’s important to note to a judge recently asked the government to provide evidence that they didn’t have any on hand to support allegations of fraud and corruption. I think what’s happened is that a lot of people can fleet to things. They can fleet’s programs and spending that they disagree with, that they don’t like for, you know, could be a host of reasons for for ideological or political reasons or they just think it’s a bad idea that program is not worth funding or they think maybe that nonprofit pays its pays its executives too much. And they and there’s conflation between that, which is like an allegation of misusing taxpayer dollars and a criticism that has been around for a while, complaining that with the crime of fraud and corruption, which is a large leap to make, and it’s one I’m I’m always interested in hearing about, I just haven’t seen evidence, evidence of it yet.
Krys Boyd [00:05:08] So you mentioned nonprofits. People know USAID is government funding. So can you explain for us how these projects are carried out or how they might be carried out in terms of federal employees doing work versus NGOs operating with USAID funds?
Brett Murphy [00:05:23] Sure. Yeah. So it’s a it’s kind of a big mixed bag. But basically, Congress appropriates money to foreign development and aid projects. Most of those projects are managed administered by USAID as well as a couple of bureaus in the State Department. And they decide which programs fit, fit the agenda of the president and which are fitting what Congress wanted to use the money for. But Congress appropriated that money for they then hired contractors, third parties and subcontractors, kind of this vast network of contractors and subcontractors, they call them implementers, to actually do the work. So that could be administering polio vaccines, to be getting first responders into war zones, medical supplies. It could be establishing work programs in the Pacific Rim. There’s all sorts of different things. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of different types of programs that we administer or taxpayers administer through this kind of network of nonprofits or some some corporations. And they do the work on behalf of the US government.
Krys Boyd [00:06:34] Are those projects evaluated for effectiveness and held to account for delivering what they promise?
Brett Murphy [00:06:40] They are often. Yeah. There’s one of the most common criticisms of USAID and government largely is too much bureaucracy. There’s a lot of bureaucratic bloat, people say, across governments, but certainly within USAID and a lot of that bureaucracy is there. Defenders of the agency say it because they need to oversee all these programs. They audit them frequently. They’re supposed to be monitoring whether or not the the supplies or the medicine or the food is going to where it’s supposed to be going, that the right people are doing the right work. All that this all amounts to a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of oversight. And they’re frequently audited both internally and externally. So funders of the agency would say that there is actually a lot of oversight over this, maybe too much over the years.
Krys Boyd [00:07:27] What is USAID’s budget?
Brett Murphy [00:07:29] It’s actually a little difficult to pin that down because it splits a little bit of money with State Department. So kind of a moving target. But they move around 40 billion in foreign aid development. So that’s money that Congress is giving to these programs through the State Department. And a lot of that goes a lot, but a portion of that goes to the State Department itself or I’m sorry, to USAID itself. So I go to the salaries and tax, but it makes up with the with the development dollars Congress appropriates, plus the budget of the agency itself. It’s less than 1% of the federal budget.
Krys Boyd [00:08:03] Okay. Less than 1% of the federal budget. We’ll note here, still a great deal of money. How does the amount the U.S. has historically spent on foreign aid compare with what other wealthy countries pay for or pay for around the world?
Brett Murphy [00:08:17] Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. So they we give the most we are the U.S. through USAID is the largest donor of foreign aid dollars anywhere in the world. At the same time, our per capita giving is less than a lot of the developed countries. So it kind of depends on which way you want to look at it. We actually give a lot, but compared to some other countries, we don’t give as much when you ask it for the rate, but it’s certainly a lot of money.
Krys Boyd [00:08:45] Brant What kind of strings come attached to USAID projects around the world? Like can, you know, funding to build wells or something be dangled in front of a country in exchange for some policy change there that aligns with U.S. goals?
Brett Murphy [00:09:02] Not that I know of. Not quite like that. I think the there’s different bureaus throughout the agency at the State Department that will look at a need and they’ll evaluate it on several different measures, whether or not it’s good for democracy, whether it’s good for U.S. national security in some way, or whether it’s good to maybe stave off the encroachments of adversaries like the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians. So there’s a lot of different kind of like realpolitik reasons why we might be interested in a certain program in a certain country. Other programs are purely, I think, humanitarian, like you were suggesting earlier with Pepp for HIV prevention. Others are, again, in our own interest, like containing pandemics to make sure that they don’t reach U.S. borders. There’s Ebola outbreaks frequently in Africa and USAID dollars go towards programs to help contain endemic so they don’t become pandemics or epidemics or they don’t become pandemics. So, you know, this is there’s a lot of different reasons why we might be interested in funding a certain program.
Krys Boyd [00:10:08] You opened the piece in Sudan at this facility that cares for severely malnourished children. There’s a great deal of violence happening in Sudan at the moment. What was the scene there when staffers learned about these orders that they were immediate? To stop operating.
Brett Murphy [00:10:25] Yeah. So I mean, to back up a little bit just to, I guess, give listeners some context for what happened was the when the new administration started two weeks, three weeks ago now, the one of the first things they announced they wanted to do was freeze U.S. foreign aid spending. That raised a lot of questions at the time, but it wasn’t necessarily a five alarm fire for the current programs. A few days later, though, the agency was through the State Department. Marco Rubio at the State Department said that they were going to freeze current programs as well. That meant that the current programs being funded by USAID, unless they fit some very specific exemptions, were not allowed to spend the money that we had already given them that they already had obligated from taxpayers. And they started receiving en masse. And one by one that these stop work orders that you were just asking about Krys, you stop work order said that they were legally obligated if they were performing any functions funded by the U.S. government, that they had to stop them right away. So there were missions, lifesaving missions all over the world, from refugee camps to war zones. So the one you just asked about, which was severe malnourishment clinics in Sudan, they were immediately told that they had to stop working, stop administering lifesaving IVs to starving babies. That’s what they were told by the U.S. government. So they had a decision there when they received that stop work order, that their decision was to either listen to the U.S. government or continue working. And they decided to continue working because they didn’t want the babies to die.
Krys Boyd [00:12:12] Has there been any consequence from that?
Brett Murphy [00:12:14] Not that I know of yet. The administration in sort of a rather confusing blitz of exemptions and changes to policy, has been opening up those exemptions I was referring to earlier to make more programs eligible. The problem was when they did that, they didn’t send out those same letters right away. So those letters that people got telling them to stop or they were legally binding, they said in there, unless you hear otherwise from your contract officer at USAID, you’re under the stop work order. Even though the the administration said that they were changing course and lifesaving programs could work again. It took a while. It took, I think, more than a week or so for a lot of those programs to actually get firsthand notice. So they were grounded for a long time. But the administration has been changing course, I think giving more exemptions one by one to places opening up. But, you know, things are moving so quickly right now at USAID. You know, I’m sure we’re going to get into it. But the agency has been effectively shuttered and then reopened and a lot of workers are not there anymore to actually turn the money back on. So even if one of these nonprofits is told they’re allowed to work again, a lot of them have been unable to access their funds because for several days there a large portion of the agency was on administrative leave. So there was nobody able to actually process these requests to access their own money. So it’s kind of been this very jarring blitzkrieg for a couple of weeks.
Krys Boyd [00:13:41] Brett, I mean, you mentioned there have been conflicting messages, confusing messages. Can you just give us a brief timeline of what USAIDs like the people who are actually employed by the federal government for USAID? Some of the things that they have heard about what they’re allowed to do, not allowed to do, whether they can even show up at work.
Brett Murphy [00:14:02] Yeah, I’ll try my best. There’s a lot. And it’s confusing even to me, unless I’m looking at my notes. But basically it happened something like this one, and we reported on this once. They had access to the I.T. systems inside of USAID. And when I say they, I’m referring to Elon Musk Dodge engineers. When they had access to that, they began systematically shutting down different parts of the of the agency through different means. So what they did they did at the outset after announcing those stop work orders and the foreign aid freeze, they started putting some senior leadership on administrative leave. These were sort of like the highest echelons. Civil servants of the agency put them on indefinite administrative leave. After that, they started canceling or I should say stopping large contracts with staffers in Washington. So a lot of the agency and a lot of the US government actually operates not on direct hire employees, but on contract staffers that just work for one specific agency. So when they when they stopped the contract with one of those companies that was effectively furloughing or laying off hundreds of people at the same time, shortly after that, they closed the building. They told the engineers, told all the agency employees they couldn’t come to their headquarters in Washington, D.C.. Since then, they’ve chiseled the name off of the facade of it. They’ve closed down the place entirely. People aren’t allowed to to get in. It’s not really they’re now calling it the former headquarters of USAID Then they started putting civil servants across the agency on administrative leave on mass. People were getting locked out of their systems, sometimes with notice, sometimes without notice about their being on administrative leave. They didn’t know what was going on, but they were just locked out of their systems. This included people abroad, people all over the world stationed everywhere. Twitter is not it’s not based here. They’re based abroad. And then shortly after that, they received a notice advisory telling them that they had to come home, that they had to decamp from wherever they were. They had 30 days to do it, to come back stateside or they may not get you know, they may be pretty much on their own in terms of like transportation back to the US while they were still on administrative leave. So sort of this like 30 day ultimatum and they all had to come back right after all that happened. There was a couple of lawsuits filed or one made one and then a couple of ones later. But the lawsuit that was filed on behalf of the workers. Called what was happening unconstitutional. They said that the agency is effectively being shuttered by the administration, and you can’t do that because it was established by Congress in 98 and they moved for a temporary restraining order on all the actions the administration had taken. In other words. Reverse everything had done. And a judge issued a partial temporary restraining order, pretty much reinstating all of those all of those civil servants who were put on administrative leave and pausing that repatriation effort. So saying that you can’t force those people to come back until we have additional hearings about it. And I lift I being the judge to lift that court order. So it’s been it’s been absolute whiplash for people. They’ve been locked out of their systems. The low back in the building’s been closed. They’ve been told that they can’t speak with their. Contractors, implementing partners, as they’re called. So there’s been days and weeks without any coordination with all the people that we’re supposed to be funding. They’ve been put on administrative leave for long periods of time. So that’s when and there’s and they’re getting paid when they’re on administrative leave. So that’s effectively tax taxpayers paying for them not to work for the agency, not to operate for a while. So it’s been it’s been a lot of whiplash over the past couple of weeks.
Krys Boyd [00:18:15] What has been the response in Congress?
Brett Murphy [00:18:20] Well, it’s been you know, it’s a Republican held Congress right now. So that really limits what the what the Democrats in Congress can do about this. They’ve had a series of press conferences. They’ve written letters to Rubio, to the administration. They’ve said that this is illegal. But like I said, you know, without major Republican support, it’s very hard for it’s very hard for them to do much else of substance. There have been some, you know, a couple of Republican lawmakers who have been a little critical, a little more critical in recent days about what’s been going on, because a lot of them have previously voted to support a lot of the programs that are now being shuttered. Marco Rubio himself was in the Senate for, I think, 15 years, and he was a staunch supporter of USAID and some of the things that he accomplished. The agency, like we were saying before, a crisis, has not been without its criticisms over the years. But this has been such a heel turn and it’s been so fast. This is just not how government is, not how government usually works. So I think everyone was caught pretty much off guard here by just the the velocity and intensity of all this and the hill historically is not that nimble. But now that these lawsuits have been filed, things may slow a bit because a judge is kind of governing the pace a little bit. But, you know, we’ll see.
Krys Boyd [00:19:47] What is this 90 day review that was introduced, I believe, after the first measures to freeze what USAID was doing. But what’s the purpose of the review and what might happen at the conclusion of it?
Brett Murphy [00:20:03] So this was what this was the initial justification of pausing all the programs around the world. The guy who’s been running this whole kind of reorganization and review is now the acting administrator, Pete Marocco. He’s he’s at the State Department. He actually just filed a brief with the court about this, explaining it a little more. Basically the administration’s position is that these these programs that are being funded by taxpayers have have run amuck for years and they have not been transparent or accountable for what they’ve been doing. And we need to audit them immediately to make sure that their programs that they are conducting align with the President Trump’s America First agenda. Are they making America more prosperous and more safe? That’s what that’s what Marocco told the court was their intention. He said the only way to do that effectively, the only way to effectively review all of these programs was to shut them down, because if they were operating in tandem with the review, they would not get straight answers in a timely manner from the people that they needed them from. So they had to shut them down. And then over the three months, their plan was to review, review the ones that fit with the agenda and let them continue operating. Maybe unclear who would be what agency would be funding or how that would work. And then the ones that did not fit the agenda, he indicated, would not be receiving funding anymore. And the only way to do this was to shut everything down for 90 days. But this is a as I was saying before, a enormous, enormous sector of of the US governments, of international international aid relies on it sort of stopped something for three months would be to effectively stop all these programs because these nonprofits that that are working on our behalf, they don’t have their own cash reserves, a lot of them. All they have is their credit line that they can draw down from from the US government so they don’t have access to those moneys. They have to lay people off and a lot of them might have to close their operations would stop there, have to turn away patients. So it’s very difficult to just to turn it off for a couple of months and then turn back on, which is what led to all the chaos over the past couple of weeks.
Krys Boyd [00:22:30] Who is supposed to be carrying out this 90 day review? Is that the inspector general’s office?
Brett Murphy [00:22:36] No, it’s Marocco himself. He said he has said that he’s the one who’s going to approve which programs. And and now it’s kind of a little more nebulous. Now it’s kind of just like USAID leadership, which a lot of people take to mean the the political appointees within the government, within USAID, within the State Department. Basically what’s come down through now is. You have people throughout the agency who are writing up kind of like justifications for individual programs, making the case for why they should be back online. And then that’s above them at the political level, the political appointed officials. And I think Marocco himself will sign off on a lot of these and decide whether or not they do, in fact, fit with the agenda. And then ultimately, you know, Rubio, I think, will make the official call. But this is how they’re this is how they’re sort of calling calling the programs, you know, but doing it sort of backwards because they closed them first. And now, you know, it’s about which ones can can reopen.
Krys Boyd [00:23:44] President Trump has said that USAID and this is a quote, is run by radical left lunatics and that there’s a lot of fraud happening.
Donald Trump [00:23:54] There’s no reason for USAID when you look at the politicians that have been in there sucking the blood out of it. When you look at all of the fake deals. I mean, look, all you have to do is get a list of all of the things you can see by the heading. It’s fake. It’s fraudulent. It’s probably kickbacks.
Krys Boyd [00:24:13] What is the Trump administration alleged about USAID activities in Gaza?
Brett Murphy [00:24:18] They had a lot of claims about specific programs that turned out just to not be true. One of the ones that they cited early as sort of a justification for the way for the effectiveness of the of the review so far, figure out what the exact number was. And I think it was like 50 million in US tax dollars for condoms that were going into Gaza. The White House spokesperson said that Trump later said went further and said that those condoms were being used by Hamas to make explosives. They said that it was a specific hospital group. That was responsible for this. For all the. Providing all those condoms that became explosive. As they said, the later the hospital group said that just wasn’t true. Not a single dollar they received from the government has gone towards any family planning efforts, let alone condoms. So, you know, it’s when these things come up, it’s, you know, a lot of questions follow. And, you know, it becomes really specific in what exactly they’re alleging because there’s line items here. And that’s like a really kind of illustrative example because when you get down to it and when you look at what they were citing as an example of something fraudulent, it just wasn’t that they had I don’t know what exactly happened. I don’t know if they misread a spreadsheet or what, but the hospital group itself said that they were simply providing lifesaving care to the refugees in Gaza, including those who were malnourished and emergency services. And one of the only places to be doing it. So it wasn’t it wasn’t how they were treated at all.
Krys Boyd [00:26:06] So, I mean, the idea that that condoms can be used to make explosive devices is is a little bit hard to understand. I don’t have a military background, but as a journalist, you you pursued this, right? You tried to see whether or not that could be verified.
Brett Murphy [00:26:22] Yeah. I mean, I went to the we went to the hospital and we said, What? They’re accusing you of this. And they said, we don’t know anything about. Condoms being used for explosives. But I can tell you this, We don’t provide condoms. We didn’t use the U.S. tax dollars for that at all. Here’s what we used it for. And they said that on the record, this is like not they’re not hiding behind this. They’re saying if we don’t get if we don’t get this stop work order lifted, we only have a couple of days left before we can have at the close up shop. This is what people this is what agency organizations around the world is the case they were making. They’re providing lifesaving services and then all of a sudden they were told to stop overnight. And and often there was a, you know, an allegation like that underpinning the reason. And they obviously took umbrage with it.
Krys Boyd [00:27:16] What have you learned, Brett, about just general civilian American opinions about USAID and its expenditures? Is there a broad sense that we’re wasting resources taking care of the rest of the world that would be better spent on domestic problems?
Brett Murphy [00:27:32] That has certainly become a much more popular opinion. I don’t know if this would have been of a mind for a lot of people a few weeks ago, but I my general sense, I haven’t done polling or anything or I haven’t read a lot, but my general sense is that people care deeply about this now. So I’ve had I’ve had folks reach out from from all sides of the political spectrum saying how important this is for U.S. interests, for, you know, just defending our basic principles of of democracy and human rights around the world so that those those countries, those vulnerable countries and populations don’t don’t go towards other partners and towards the Chinese or the Iranians and the Russians. So this makes a lot of sense from that. And there’s been a lot of people from, you know, on purely humanitarian grounds saying that they like the fact that less than less than a penny for every dollar they give in federal taxes goes towards helping Sudanese babies get food so that they don’t starve to death. There’s people like that. There’s also people very much who are against the idea of foreign aid. They say we have there are enough problems stateside. This money would be a lot better spent on programs that benefit Americans directly or would be better spent, you know, not spent. That’ll fall. And we you know, our taxes should go down. It’s not fiscally responsible to be financing or holding up these other countries because we’ve been doing it for so long and they should be able to hold themselves up on their own by now. And it’s not our job, as Rubio has said. The US is not a charity, so it’s not our job to be funding or financing these democracies. So there’s that part of the argument too, that people are vocal about it. People are getting very hot about this issue. Now.
Krys Boyd [00:29:31] Assuming USAID is not restored to anything like its former scale, even after this review of operations, has the Trump administration pledged to do anything specific with the money being saved? Like would would those funds be earmarked for paving streets and fixing schools and building affordable housing in this country?
Brett Murphy [00:29:51] Not that I’ve seen. And that’s also just not the way congressional appropriations work. So it’s not like the money would be sent to everyone in the check back home. Check as far as I can tell about the plan. Maybe that is the plan, but I have not seen what they hope to do specifically with this. With their savings here, they’ve they’ve held up several programs that they’ve cut as success stories for ridding the government of waste. And this was like the big you know, this was a big campaign promise. Right. And so to them, they’re making good on campaign promise. And I’ve heard from a lot of voters, a lot of Trump voters who have said this is what I wanted. I voted for this. I wanted them to cut wasteful spending. I consider that to be wasteful spending. So I’m happy. That is been a very popular opinion I’ve heard as well. That said, that’s your question, Krys. I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re planning to spend this money on that they said.
Krys Boyd [00:30:45] Brett, why have U.S. diplomats broadly supported the aims and effects of USAID in the past?
Brett Murphy [00:30:56] Well, they you know, in a lot of regions of the world, there’s a lot of turmoil, obviously. So if the US can have a presence in these countries, for example, let me give an example. Like if there’s a if there’s a country where there’s disaffected youth and there’s an extremist movement in that country that is attractive to those youth to join, and maybe that that group has anti-West or anti-American sentiment and they are extremists with ideas to harm the US or harm US allies. USAID for years has seen part of its operations to be counterterrorism. So why don’t we start programs to employ disaffected youth so that they don’t have to go join groups like that? That is one of the there’s what this is like an idea that diplomats point to a lot as as soft power. If the U.S. is making its presence known in places like this and giving people an option or avenues towards democracy, if we are helping the civil infrastructure of these countries, they won’t descend into authoritarian regimes. They won’t become hotbeds of terrorism. They will not be open to the encroachments of our adversaries. And that way we, the West and the US, can spread our ideals of democracy. We are you know, the nation was formed on principles, not blood and soil. And we have for centuries thought of ourselves as, you know, a principal lodestar for other countries. And I think that’s what the diplomats think is is really valuable.
Krys Boyd [00:33:00] So there’s a concern that the U.S. could lose some global leverage if USAID projects that have been suspended are not replaced with something comparable.
Brett Murphy [00:33:10] Yeah, pretty much the idea that like if, you know, if the US had been a business partner of one of these countries for years or decades, largely through USAID funded programs, and all of a sudden those programs stop. Maybe it’s for, you know, battered, battered women’s centers in South America or, you know, nonprofit legal counsel in those countries. And all of a sudden those services stop. And obviously, the need for those services doesn’t stop in those countries. The countries may very well look elsewhere. And when, if and when the US decides to come back and try and make its presence known again, the worry is that we will not be as credible as a partner, because who knows if the next administration might just pull the plug again and then leave us on the outs. Because this time around, it has it has done such damage to a lot of those programs and a lot of those efforts. They may very well look elsewhere for something that’s a little more stable. It’s the instability and the confusion, the chaos that I think has really left a lasting impact on a lot of these countries.
Krys Boyd [00:34:27] Just as an example, does China have the resources to step into that void and perhaps gain greater influence in places that have historically looked to the United States for help and guidance?
Brett Murphy [00:34:37] Yeah, of course. The big the big one is Africa. We the U.S. has a major presence there in terms of development and aid programs for decades. And the Chinese obviously have a vested interest in minerals and other financially beneficial initially beneficial programs that they could, you know, really make a stake in throughout Africa. So, you know, if the US is no longer there for development and humanitarian reasons, China could very well step in. And this is everyone’s concern right now.
Krys Boyd [00:35:14] Could a significant portion of USAID projects as they existed before this freeze be classified as lifesaving? Like, you know, we talk about this term and you can look at it in the near term and in the long term. So what is life saving mean and how much of what USAID does is life saving?
Brett Murphy [00:35:31] It’s hard to So it’s this was one of the big points of confusion was that there was a. A few days in after there was there was kind of like international pushback around the aid freeze. Rubio announced that all life saving programs would be exempt. The US said he does not classify. It’s not like there’s like a spreadsheet of all the life saving ones. So it’s very easy to know which ones that applies here, which doesn’t. They don’t classify themselves that way. They’re they’re given by several different bureaus, humanitarian assistance, economic development. And within each of those bureaus, there’s different people who would consider one program, life saving and one maybe not. That program might consider itself life saving. And maybe that’s not the definition met by USAID. So there was a there was mass confusion about what that term means. And then if you are, say, unquestionably life saving, like the Sudanese baby example or PAPFAR for HIV in Africa, or you’re doing first responder work in Ukraine or in Gaza, that’s obviously the life saving, right? How do you get a waiver? How do you how do you get a piece of paper back from your contract officer telling you your stop work order has been lifted on the life saving exemption, that this was this was a a question roiling the entire humanitarian aid sector for for more than a week because nobody knew how to get a waiver. And if they did, they didn’t know where was stuck in the stuff. That is what part of the status it was in. Rubio has said repeatedly that it was clear and everyone who applied to everyone who could have qualified should have known that they could have just started again. But this was totally different than the piece of paper that they had received from their own contract. Officer is that legally binding piece of paper? The administration has blamed the NGOs, the nonprofit organizations for pulling a political stunt, like kind of being intentionally ignorance or not intentionally staying staying grounded to make a political point. But this is something that the NGOs push back against quite a bit because the thing that they want to do more than anything is get back to work and do their lifesaving mission. So it’s been it’s been very confusing.
Krys Boyd [00:37:55] I think if I understand the applications have also been a challenge because NGOs contact with USAID representatives, the people they had been working with in the federal agency, a lot of those folks are not available right now.
Brett Murphy [00:38:09] This is the this was a huge point, right? Is the folks at USAID who were supposed to be the one processing these waiver requests, turning the money back on coordinating with the nonprofits, with the organizations, doing the work first, Those people in the government were told that they were not allowed to communicate with those partners at all, with those implementers at all. So there was radio silence and nobody knew what was going on because they were told they weren’t allowed to talk to them. Then all the people, all the government workers were put on administrative leave themselves. They were locked out of their systems, locked out of their email. They couldn’t even put out out-of-office email messages for their implementing partners, you know, the nonprofits to know what was going on or like why they weren’t showing up to meetings. Likewise, Now there’s there’s trouble. People are having trouble getting the money that they’re even if they receive the waiver for this earlier, they can’t get the money a lot of the time because the person they’re supposed to help them get the money hasn’t been at work just now, though. Just starting yesterday. Those people are supposed to be back at work because of the judge’s temporary restraining order. So things are starting to. It looks like, may temporarily start to work again. But the administration has has petitioned the court. The as I said, the declaration you need to you need to lift this order and let us shut down the agency like we want it to. They want it to dwindle it from more than 10,000 to about 600 people, just essential staff in order to effectively conduct this 90 day review that you and I were talking about earlier. So we’ll see what happens. But everyone’s kind of in limbo right now.
Krys Boyd [00:39:59] What’s supposed to happen at the end of those 90 days.
Brett Murphy [00:40:04] There’s a little unclear, but it it seems from Rubio’s communications with the Hill that the plan is to potentially fold many of USAID missions and bureaus, those remaining into the State Department, possibly, he told The Hill and he told Congress that they wanted to follow the law and they were going to do this in consultation with Congress. But. Everyone who I talked to at USAID, everyone on the outside, legal scholars about this, have said that’s that’s not the way they’re doing it. They’re just shutting it down. They’re just shutting it down by themselves unilaterally, which undermines the separation of powers. This this agency was established by Congress in 98. So they can’t do that. It would be illegal to do that. That’s what that’s what everyone has been saying. And also brings up lots of questions about the Impoundment Act. There’s other laws at play that people think maybe being violated here. We wrote about one specific incident and published it on Sunday. When they originally seized the infrastructure of the agency Musk’s engineers. They also got access to personal information of all the employees. These are people. This includes like background checks, security check, background material, you know, credit card history addresses, Social Security numbers. This raises sort of immediate Privacy Act concerns. And a lot of the experts I said told me that that may have violated that that law because if they did not have proper authorization, even if the president themselves himself said that they should have access to those systems, they were still supposed to go through certain processes and training and vetting before they access those systems. And additionally, you’re only supposed to access them for like regular business routine use of the agency, which is obviously what’s been happening here. So the experts told me this could be a significant legal concern for the administration.
Krys Boyd [00:42:05] Right. Thinking about enormous global human welfare foundations. Gates, Novo Nordisk and others. Is there any scenario in which private philanthropy might step in around the world and fill whatever void is left by the shuttering or near shuttering of USAID?
Brett Murphy [00:42:23] I don’t know about private because it’s so much money, Krys. It’s like I said, 40 billion a year. It’s hard to imagine where that comes from, the private sector, from individual philanthropists. I don’t know. It does seem like the the institutions that will fill the void will have to be governmental, will have to be other nations. That’s not to say that the philanthropists stateside can’t or won’t, But, you know, there are outside groups as the W.H.O. and all that. It’s the entire sector. Humanitarian aid sector has never seen anything like that really since the Marshall Plan. There has never been such a quick shift in US policy towards foreign aid. So a lot of people are struggling to envision their future here and they are saying it could cost tens of thousands of jobs, American jobs who work in this sector. They said it’s already cost a lot of jobs and wasted a lot of money just by trying to close and then reopen some of these programs. So I don’t know. It’s very much in flux and a lot of people are pretty confused and very scared about what the future holds.
Krys Boyd [00:43:36] On the surface, the dismantling of USAID would seem to align with the idea that many people have that the government ought to put America first. Could there be consequences, though, from imploding this agency that will directly affect Americans well-being over time?
Brett Murphy [00:43:53] Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly acute things that could happen. People are worried about, say, that USAID was contributing to. An outbreak of infectious disease in Africa and their presence there had had prevented in the past that outbreak from becoming a pandemic and reaching the US. Critics of what’s happening right now would point out that that those programs aren’t in place anymore. Maybe that outbreak reaches the US and their lives at stake, obviously. Likewise, if we’re not, if the US is not around to support our allies, then the others will step in, as we’ve been talking about before, people could. Walk towards open arms of adversaries of terrorist groups who would provide the basic services that we had been providing. In other words, if we’re not around, who else is? And if those other people are adversaries of the US, that’s not good for U.S. interests either. So there’s like a lot of again, we keep going back to the thing that they call soft power. And then I think more just like pragmatic concerns in the near term about what this could mean.
Krys Boyd [00:45:13] Brett Murphy is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter on ProPublica’s national desk, where he’s been reporting on the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID. Bret, thank you for this conversation.
Brett Murphy [00:45:22] Thanks so much, Krys.
Krys Boyd [00:45:24] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and anywhere you get podcasts. Our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
