This July, while we celebrated our independence from the British Empire, I experienced a different break-up: my independence from the job of a lifetime, being a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). For 15 years, my family and I lived in several interesting places (Iraq, Thailand, South Africa, Uganda), where I advanced American interests by bettering people’s lives. Then on July 1, USAID employees were laid off and the agency was shuttered.
USAID was an amazing organization. During those 15 years, I witnessed incredible work by mission-driven professionals who daily lived the American values of service, integrity and love of country. I worked with hundreds of projects, like parliamentary reform in Iraq, malaria treatment posts on the Burmese border and remediation of Agent Orange dioxins from around the Danang airport in Vietnam. I met hundreds of people whose lives were saved by American generosity channeled through effective USAID programs. My last assignment was heading up the Power Africa initiative, which helped over 200 million people get access to electricity. And at the time of our cessation in February, we were working with American companies on power deals worth $26 billion, directly benefitting workers in the U.S.
I didn’t start my career at USAID. I came to it after more than a decade as a private sector lawyer and investment banker. While I loved those positions, I wanted to directly serve my country and help the most needy around the world. I wanted to represent legendary American generosity, which is both a powerful signal of our character, and also a well-proven hack for advancing influence. Who doesn’t love a helpful neighbor?
USAID held a key position in our nation’s international efforts, supported for decades by both political parties and administration after administration. Of course each side prioritized different aspects of our work, and that is how it should be. But everyone saw the value of “development” as a companion to “diplomacy” (State Department) and “defense” (Pentagon). That’s why the sudden attack on USAID in the first week of the new administration took so many people in foreign affairs circles by surprise.
The primary reason trumpeted for USAID being eliminated was because it was rotten, overflowing with fraud and waste. While there may be larger philosophical discussions about how foreign assistance should be organized and implemented, I can tell you that claiming it was corrupt to the core was baseless. USAID made every effort possible to fight fraud and waste, and I was at the heart of it for years as an in-house attorney. In fact, with all of the audits, reports, spot-checks and other controls in place, I doubt any comparably large organization in the world had as little fraud as USAID. We did see small isolated cases of it, almost always at the lowest levels of our contractor or grantee organizations. But the amounts in question were usually small, and we stamped them out quickly. If this small amount of fraud and waste was truly the basis for cutting USAID, it would be like cutting off your arm to fix a hangnail.
The irony of the whole affair, though, is that the deleterious remarks about USAID’s work and employees, if true, would be more of an indictment of each and every administration that supported it, funded it and relied on it for decades. What company would publicly declare they are eliminating one of its divisions because it was unaccountable, its leaders hated the parent company, and it was full of fraud and waste — and had been for decades? The market would see right through these justifications and share values would drop precipitously.
My point is that USAID has been a valuable tool for the American people for decades. And even though the administration has the right to make modifications to reflect new priorities, for them to eliminate the agency on the pretense that it was corrupt and a betrayal of American values is unfounded, unprofessional and disingenuous. It raises the question as to why USAID was actually eliminated. And that is the question that remains with me as I mentally process my separation from what was one of the most noble endeavors of the U.S. government.