What Happened w USAID? Rhetoric, Reality & Real World Impact w Former USAID Leaders Andrew Natsios & Jeremy Konyndyk

Coming up on "Why Should I Trust You?" [MUSIC] USAID. It's been one year since America's largest foreign aid agency was dismantled by the Trump administration. At the time, the administration accused the aid agency of being wasteful, woke, and riddled with inefficiencies and fraud. Doge, led by Elon Musk, declared USAID a "criminal organization." And he posted, "It was time for it to die." Now, a year out, the conversation has centered around the fault line of the impact of cutting off aid. Has it led to an increase in preventable deaths around the world? Spend a minute online, and you'll see the fight that has broken out between Elon Musk and his supporters, and people like Nick Kristoff, Samantha Power, and others. Today, we'll speak with two former USAID leaders about the view from the inside. One of them ran the agency under George W. Bush, and the other was a senior leader there during the Obama and Biden administrations. Did the dire warnings about what would happen if USAID was scuttled come to fruition? What reform should have happened over the years? But never did before the Trump team pulled the plug. Doesn't a president have the right to steer US-4 and aid how they see fit, even if that means steering it into the ground? And what kind of world will America face if we no longer play a humanitarian role in it? We have lots of ground to cover today, so let's get started. Welcome back, everyone. This is our second episode this week. We are just churning them out. It is good to be back with you. Tom, we're really excited about our guests today. We've been noticing this conversation, this kind of spat-taking place online about USAID, but it's also, I think you noticed, it was the one-year anniversary since all the major dismantling went down. So we decided to invite two heavy hitters in the world of US humanitarian aid, Andrew Nazios from the George W. Bush years, and Jeremy Kinnindijk from the Obama and Biden era. But first, who are we? I'm Brent out of Kari. Yeah, I'm Tom Johnson, and this is why should I trust you? To podcast all about the breakdown and trust in public health, medicine, science, AI, and what if anything can be done to build that back? Maggie's producing today. Dr. Mark is on vacation and we'll be back soon. Our big reminder, give us a like, a rate, leave a comment, and you can always email us at questions at whyshytrustu.net. Okay, so before we get to our guests, Tom, help us understand everything USAID. Yeah, I mean, there are two basic ways. America projects itself to the rest of the world. One is through hard power. That's, of course, our military. The other is through soft power, and you can think of that as both diplomacy and foreign aid. And soft power was a phrase coined by an American, the late Joseph Nye, to define how a government derives influence around the world without using its military or financial muscle. Speaking to CNN, the week before his death, Nye said, quote, "I'm afraid President Trump doesn't understand soft power," adding, "When you cancel something like USAID, humanitarian assistance, you deprive yourself of one of the major instruments of power." So up until recently, we have been spending about 13% of our budget on our military or our hard power, while we spent about 1% of our budget on soft power, which is funding for both the State Department outreach like our embassies and our foreign aid, which brings us to what was America's single biggest mechanism for dispersing that aid, which is USAID. The United States Agency for International Development, which was an independent federal agency. So, brief history, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961, which authorized the president to administer U.S. foreign assistance. President Kennedy used that authority to create USAID with an executive order, and nearly four decades later, in 1998, Congress codified USAID in federal law. The agency's goal from the start was to disperse humanitarian aid to improve and save lives, and this is very important, to support the development of nations, including their economic development, that were of strategic importance to America. So it's about saving lives, but it's also about winning hearts and minds. And over the decades, those strategic interests have shifted when Kennedy and LBJ got the agency up and running. We were all about thwarting the threat of communism. That gave way to stopping terrorism in the post 9/11 years. So the aid followed that arc. And veterans of the agency said, you know, just like any agency, it perpetually needed reform. There were complaints of bureaucracy, you know, onerous compliance rules. They talked about politics getting in the way, all getting in the way of getting the aid out. And a big debate was also about how to get more of our dollars directly to affected communities and less going to middlemen. Still, in 2022, an independent assessment gave USAID its top rating for rigorously using evidence and data to decide what to fund. So among our agencies, it put USAID in the top third. Overall, the agency was not controversial. It had bipartisan support. In fact, the man who would later oversee or help oversee its dismantling was once one of its staunch defenders. Back in 2012, then Senator Mark Rubio said, quote, in every region of the world, we should always search for ways to use USAID and humanitarian assistance to strengthen our influence. So the institution hummed along. And that included during the first Trump term. USAID was the largest funder of humanitarian and developmental aid on the planet. It distributed about $35 billion a year. Two huge buckets, humanitarian assistance and health. On the health side, USAID was one of several agencies delivering PEPFAR, which of course is George W. Bush's anti-AIDS program, which is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. So in short, it was an agency that managed this massive supply chain of aid and development projects all around the world. We're talking, taking on malaria, polio, distributing vaccines, responding to natural disasters. It built schools and trained teachers around the world. It was also like our early warning system and our rapid response system for emerging disease outbreaks in famine. He provided some form of food assistance to 50 million people a year. That's about the size of the population of Spain. On the first day of President Trump's return to office, he froze all US foreign assistance. There were reports of confusion setting as programs around the world just stopped distributing aid, distributing medicine. Doge, that was the government efficiency team, immediately began to focus on USAID. And it said that it was revealing how wasteful this organization was. On February 2nd of last year, Elon Musk wrote on X, quote, "USAID is a criminal organization, time for it to die." The next day Musk wrote, "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. The White House put out a press release laying out a long list of what it labeled was USAID waste and abuse. We'll remember some of these examples, like $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $2.5 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam, hundreds of millions to support poppy growing in heroin production in Afghanistan, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia. These are the sort of examples that they were pushing forward into the public. Fact Trekkers immediately jumped on this and showed that some of these programs weren't actually USAID projects, but rather under the State Department. But by the end of that week, in February 2025, Marco Rubio at the State Department had been placed in charge of USAID. Its website had been taken down and its staff had been placed on leave. So it's important to note, and to be very clear, the USAID Inspector General had found examples of fraud before the agency was dismantled. In one case, an officer took bribes, de-steer, about a half a billion dollars in contracts, and another aid was diverted to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. But the agency's Inspector General also warned that massive cuts to the agency would cripple the monitoring that actually catches the fraud and abuse in our foreign aid. And the day after that warning, he was fired by the administration. So flash forward to last July, July 1st, operations at USAID effectively shut down. Roughly 83% of the programs were canceled, and what was left was folded into the State Department. Eight billion dollars of USAID funding was retracted, and thousands of workers were laid off. So you might be thinking what did the other two branches of our government do about this? A federal judge ruled Doge's dismantling likely violated the Constitution. But that ruling was stayed by a circuit court. And remember, USAID was not technically eliminated, but rather sort of neutered, and the courts have let it happen. So how about Congress, arguably the one branch that can terminate the agency? They did not move to stop the dismantling. They did, however, fund foreign aid for this year, instructing the State Department to disperse it. Pro-publica last month reported that the administration, though, is delaying spending that money while labeling some of the funds unallocated so they can sit unspent. So that brings us to the big question, what has been the impact of America's slashing foreign aid and development aid around the world? And a very public debate has broken out within the last couple of weeks on X over that exact question. So it began when Representative Rokhana, who's a Democrat from California, he said that Elon Musk possibly sentenced to death, that was his phrase, possibly sentenced to death, 4.5 million children through his cuts to foreign aid. Musk fired back and posted that those who claim doges cuts of USAID have led to people dying, quote, "can not cite a single name of someone who died out of the millions they falsely claim have died." Not a single name. Nicholas Christoff in New York Times responded with the names of people he said died as a direct result of the US cuts and disruptions from his reporting over the past year, including someone dying as a result of US cuts to anti-malarial medicine, fuel for ambulances, life-saving AIDS medicines, and that war continues online right now. Beyond anecdotes, what do we have? Well, in a study published in the Lancet last June, so that was right in the middle of all this coming to a halt during the wind down. Researchers tried to model what they thought the impact would be on lives. They estimated, first of all, that over the past two decades, USAID funded programs have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children. Looking forward, they warned that their modeling showed that cuts could result in 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths among children under the age of five. Again, important to stipulate this is a model, an estimate, their best attempt at it. Looking back at what may have taken place over the past year, researchers at the University of Washington, again, projected that child mortality rose for the first time this century. By about 200,000 additional deaths, do not just to USAID being drawn down, but to the reduction of AIDS being provided by all countries across the globe. Given that we're talking developing nations, it's going to take time before there are hard numbers, and that's even if we get hard numbers given all the cuts. And finally, what does the American public make of this? There was a survey released just a few days ago, and it found a majority of Americans 54% still hold a favorable view of foreign aid. And that support the pollsters say jumps when you get specific. 90% of Americans back humanitarian relief and disease prevention. And 81% say the answer is to reform and strengthen foreign aid with tougher standards, not eliminated. That was really good, Tom. Thank you so much for that walkthrough. And in a moment, we're going to be joined by Andrew Natcio, who headed USAID for the years under George W. Bush, and Jeremy Kanindy, who was a senior USAID official under both the Obama and Biden administrations. Hey, a big why should I trust you? Welcome to Andrew Natcio's and Jeremy Kanindy. You know, we invited you both on the show to talk about cuts to USAID, helping us, you know, separate rhetoric from reality and to talk about much needed reforms. You know, to be honest, in the last few weeks, the conversation about USAID has really centered around the issue of whether the cuts have directly resulted in people dying and we're going to get to all that. But first, we wanted to talk about USAID itself, but let's introduce you to our listeners. Andrew Natcio's is the former head of USAID. He served under president George W. Bush, and he was the former head of USAID from 2001 to 2006. He's a longtime Republican public servant. He led the agency through some of the world's largest humanitarian crises, and he helped oversee USAID's role in the launch of PEPFAR, the landmark global AIDS initiative. He's also the author of the new book, Guns Are Not Enough, Foreign Aid and the National Interest. And finally, Andrew teaches at the Bush School of Government at the Texas A&M University. Welcome to the show, Andrew. Nice to see you. And next, we've got Jeremy Kanindy. He is the president of Refugees International, and he's a former senior USAID official who served in both the Obama and Biden administrations. He led USAID's response to international disasters, including the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. And he later oversaw the agency's global COVID response. Between those roles, he helped develop proposals to reform USAID at the center for global development. Welcome to the show, Jeremy. Thanks so much. Great to be with you. So I'm going to start with a question to Andrew. Marco Rubio about a year ago. In fact, almost exactly a year ago, he had written this mission, making foreign aid great again. And he started off by saying every public servant has an obligation to American citizens to ensure any programs they fund advance or nation's interest. I want to read a couple of other things he said in that state in that mission. He said USAID had decades and a near infinite taxpayer budget to advance American influence, promote economic development worldwide, and allow billions to stand on their own two feet. Development objectives have rarely been met. Instability is often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown. And finally, he said beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex that taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the cold war. Andrew, starting with you, was USAID failing in its core mission? Absolutely not. Virtually everything that he said in that statement is utter nonsense. First, we have, according to Alex DeWal, who has never got a cent of money from AID. He's a scholar a famine. He wrote a book called Mass starvation. He said there's been a steady decline in the incidents of famine in the world since the Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s, during which time the infrastructure and AID was put in place to make AID the most robust strongest responders to famine complex, we call them complex emerging civil wars, genocides, refugee crises in the world, up any biliner, or even multilateral agents. And he says if you look at the statistical data, it would be the exception of the North Korean famine which was hidden from the world by the North Korean government. There's been a steady decline until recently, until recently, in the number of people starving to death. Is that a success? I would say so. My great uncle starved to death during the Greek famine of 1942-43 during the Nazi occupation of Greece, where they stripped the country of food to feed Rommel's army. 300,000 weeks died in that famine. So this is a very personal thing for me. I told the mission directors of a famine takes place while you were in charge in a particular country. I will hold your responsible. Even though you didn't cause it, we can stop it. And we did. And that's true in the Obama administration. It's not a partisan question. Starvation is not a partisan question. So I can go through area after area. We created the global development alliance when I was the administrator. Every administrator after me no matter who the president was continued this partnership with American business to get American businesses to invest in development programs, mostly development programs. And it's been a huge success. American businesses put $62 bid in dollars into AID projects. This is not charity, by the way. This is to get them in the supply chains and it dramatically increases people's income. I wouldn't say that's a failure. That's a success. Yeah. And we will, Andrew and Jeremy get, I want to get really granular actually into the details of like dollar spent and life saved. And we and we will get to that. But Jeremy, let me bring you into this conversation. You know, one of the things that that there's a narrative around USAID being this sort of holdover from like a post cold war. It's like a relic in a way that it was created at a time when America, when its main fight was against communism. In your mind, what were the much needed changes that it did need before it was kind of thrown into the Whitchipper? Yeah. And I have a lot of opinions on that. I think anyone who served any like the time at USAID has a lot of opinions on that, including Andrew who read a great monograph called the clash of the counter bureaucracy a few years ago, which I'm sure he will talk about in which was very influential. My understanding of the agency when I first arrived there. You know, like like a lot of the US government, it was a very bureaucratic place. And that was not by choice. That was largely because of mandates that Congress would impose on the agency, reporting requirements. So what was really unique of about the part of the agency that Andrew and I both ran at different times called the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance was that we could cut through a lot of that. We had these emergency authorities and we could just go and do things and we did that very, very effectively. And for me, it was very interesting serving in two different parts of the agency. So I first came in at Obama, at Randolph-D.A., very operational, very hands-on, very fast, very effective, and not a lot of bureaucracy. We've had a lot of trust from Congress. They would give us our money. And I remember when I first came into that job, one of the things you said to me was just go talk to Congress as often as you can. And I did because it builds up that trust. A lot of the rest of the agency didn't have that. Most of the rest of the agency didn't. And so when I came back in under Biden, I was working with the Global Health Bureau, which has done a lot of excellent work, but was a much more bureaucratic entity. And so the experience of the day-to-day experience of your average USAID officer was not, I'm going to look at this development challenge and think really hard about how to fix it. Instead, the path to doing anything tended to be, okay, what is the procurement mechanism that we already have that we can dump some money into that? And it just gets very much into the red tape because you have to take all these boxes in order to do anything. And that is mostly because you have to answer this question for Congress. And that question for Congress. And this question for the State Department and this question for the White House. And by the time you do all that, you are spending much of your time in the White House. And by the time doing that kind of bureaucratic sludge and not doing the real work of development. And I think that that is common across the US government. A lot of parts of the government have that. There was a great book by a woman named Jen Palca, who served as the deputy chief information officer, technical officer, CTO, I think in the Obama White House, where she talks about this as a government white dynamic. And she talks about that in the context of like the HHS and the healthcare.gov rollout debacle. And when she was talking about that, exactly the same thing could have been said of USAID, exactly the same pathologies. And one of the ironies to me of the whole Doge experience was like, if I could have come in to USAID with the ability to break crockery that Doge had, I could have done so much good. And the first people who could have told me how much good to do would have been the people who had to deal with that shit. Can I swear on the show? Yeah. You had to deal and like, wade through that shit day in, day out. They were more like the people working at USAID were more frustrated by it than anyone. And so there's this real, I think a bitter irony that they're the people who suffered the most of dealing with all that bureaucracy were the ones who were then blamed for it. They didn't choose it. It was Congress that largely chose it. And part of the reason why, you know, I think the State Department has been, well, I was kind of seeing this very light touch, very small approach now at the State Department is basically because Congress is just not enforcing its own rules. And I think the state's going to be in for a rude awakening at all. The little bits of USAID that survived are now over at state. And Congress is basically not doing any oversight. But as soon as Congress starts doing oversight, again, it's going to be a very rude awakening for the State Department. Let me just take some of what you just said there, Jeremy. You know, an agency needed reform. I mean, any agency needs reform, right? We live in that kind of a continual cycle. If we just steal man, the Trump administration's argument, and I'm not saying I've ever read this argument anywhere, I'm just trying to make the best case argument here for that. Constitutially, President has the authority, expansive power. The President has authority to take this thing down to the studs strategically. We are no longer going to be the piggy bank for the world. We're going to stop our funding for humanitarian issues because it's going to drive other countries. If they really want to get involved, chip in and help, they're going to chip in and help. And furthermore, strategically, it's my personal opinion that we should just drive this agency into the ground and not have it. And that's my, that's my two cents. You elected me. That's my two cents. And then morally, I think it's more moral to keep American taxpayer money in the country than to be pushing it abroad. Like, where is, I'll go to Andrew just to rotate this a little bit, but Andrew, where is that? Why doesn't the President have the authority to make these decisions and to do in this four-year term what he or she wants to do with this aid agency? Well, because there's a thing, this is not a dictatorship. This is the United States Congress passes laws. We have to enforce them. The President signs them. Why does he sign the laws if he doesn't agree with them? We have to enforce what the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court decide. We're not independent of the government. And that's what my article of the Congress of the County of bureaucracy and development goes into. They have layered over 30, 40 years accountability systems to make sure every single dollar is counted. The notion that there's widespread corruption and AID is a lie. I called the three when this was going on a year ago. I called up the three former Inspector Generals and I said, "Did something happen when I left the things deteriorated?" He said, "No, they didn't, Andrew." I said, "Is there widespread corruption?" He said, "It's a boldface lie." They all said that. They all said this was a lie. Now they're the Inspector General. That's all they do is audit all day and they do investigations. So if there's widespread corruption, don't you think we'd hear about? Number two, the notion that there's an open checkbook and we can spend all the money. There's also one percent of the federal budget. 75 percent of the federal budget are entitlement programs and mandatory spending like the national debt, like pensions. No one wants to touch any of that stuff. It's very emotional. The checks go to people in the United States. 13 percent of the budget is the defense department. That's 87 percent. Anything else, including not just AID and State, but things like HHS, the Interior Department, the Agriculture Department, those are all part of that tiny thing that remains. And we are one, we were, one percent of the federal budget. So I think that most serious crisis-based defense in the country is the national debt. But if you think we've solved that by abolishing an AID, you're either stupid or you're delusional. This had nothing to do with a national. I'll tell you what this was about. This is about apartheid. The career people immediately when this happened, they said, "This is Ellen Musk taking revenge for AID's role in the end of a partheid." Brian Atwood was the head of AID under Clinton. He went in 1998 to an assembly, the national assembly in South Africa, and that speaker of the house pointed to Brian Atwood and to Bill Clinton and said, "AID played a larger role than any other institution outside of South Africa in ending apartheid." If you know what apartheid is. And it was because Congress ordered us to do it with the equivalent of $90 million. Okay? Does that mean Andrew? Does that mean that as a priority, it was Elon from your understanding that this was all Elon. This wasn't Project 2025 or Trump or Rubio. It was all Elon. Trump didn't even know what way AID did. This is Elon Musk and Russell Vogue. Elon Musk did this. I think it was in Project 2025 and that could be the Russell Vogue connection you're referring to. But not the destruction. It was not the destruction. The agency was not in Project 20. They made some conservative recommendations that would not have destroyed the aid. They would have moved to the right. But whenever Republicans take control, they move it to right of center. The Democrats take it. They move it left to center. That's the way democracy works. But let me just get back to this whole notion that we're a rogue agency. Marker Rubio was the biggest supporter of foreign aid and AID when he was in the US Senate. In either party, listen, watch this, the lecture he gave with the Brookings is. We quoted from that and they'll lead into this. Yes. I think he is very ambitious. I supported him in 2016 against Trump and the primary didn't last very long. He got wiped out in the primary by the president. By some guy. Yeah. By some guy. So this was Musk and vote as the Christian nationalists. And he said the federal government is full of it's called the dark state and they are undermining what we do. I told the career staff I was going to move the agency to the right to focus on economic growth, the focus on private sector and a group of other things that I did. And the career people said, well, tell you how to do it. So you don't get into trouble. And did they did help? They did not resist it. The career people in any agency, including the defense department, do resist radical changes. So if you try to destroy an agency, they will resist you. Absolutely. But that's normal. I mean, if you read James Q Wilson's book, bureaucracy, the greatest book written on the federal system in the last 50 years, he says the problem is not ideology. It's not the career staff with some dark conspiracy to undermine the president. Presidents think that. But that's not the reality. According to Wilson, I had Wilson as a professor at Harvard 40 years, 30, 35 years ago now. And that's books of classic work on this. So my book is based on his theory of bureaucracy. I try to explain what AIDs from a bureaucratic standpoint. But let's go back to this. Again, this notion that AID has not accomplished anything. The PEPFAR program saved 26 million people's lives. 26 million people's lives. The malaria program cut infection rates for malaria by 50% in the countries in which the money was being spent. It was hugely successful. Now, are there issues? The only way to reform AID is frankly to abolish OMB. I'm not seriously proposing that. And to curtail the power of the United States Congress to interfere in the management, I was called every day. My congressional staff was telling me what to do. And I said, who is running this agency? Me? Are the congressional oversight agencies? Jeremy, let me bring you in here. You're not in at a lot of this. Lay out, I created that steel man in the argument, where's a breakdown for you? Yeah, I agree with everything Andrew said. I think that just one really important quote, I think there's somebody a few years ago said, anybody who tells you that we can slash for an AID and that will bring us balance in the budget is lying to you. That's a direct quote from one Marco Rubio back when he was a senator. So we can conclude what we can conclude about who's lying to whom. We kind of wish version of Marco Rubio do we believe? It's not saving a significant money. The US, the US just spent more on President Trump's failed war in Iran in a few short months than USAID would spend doing all that it did around the world in a year. And you know, Andrew has run through some of the greatest hits of USAID. I think amazing accomplishments on global health in particular. Very important, amazing accomplishments on humanitarian relief over the years, green revolution, agricultural yields through the the the future program, electrification and power in Africa through the power Africa program. You have many, many different major initiatives that you can point to. Not everything USAID did was wildly successful. I think you could make an argument that and I would agree frankly that the agency was trying to do too much. And I think you could narrow some of what it did. Again, a lot of that was exactly what Andrew's talking about. These, you know, 16 different voices in Congress, each of which want their own initiative and their own program will put an earmark in to make the agency do the thing that they care about. That's very hard to navigate and reconcile. And you had to do this sort of like budgetary Jenga game of how do we make sure that we can address each thing that each individual member of Congress is writing into the bill within the money way. I mean, it was a crazy exercise. So yeah, stuff to reform there. On the president's view and you could you could come in and say, yeah, we think that the agency is not doing the right things. That's fair. You can change policy. You can change priorities. What you can't do as president is unilaterally just decide to nuke a federal agency that Congress has required exist and has funded. And again, this is where I think that Congress has been so servile and not standing up for their own prerogatives, not really acting as a co-equal branch of government. They've let him get away with this. But in law, it is still required that USAID exist and technically in law still exists. But it sounds like the constitutional crisis may be that Congress is funding these programs and the administration is not spending the money. Yes, yes, yes, the crisis is shifted, right? The court said that's right. That's right. And is it the case, Jeremy, that the money isn't being spent? Like, help us understand, help us kind of fact check, you know, that USAID has been dismantled and therefore none of the money is going out or where are we at right now? Yeah. Well, so to look at humanitarian relief, for example, last year, US-Humans, so Congress was appropriating basically the same amount of year on year. The last year, the Biden administration, so calendar year 2024. The US spent $14 billion globally on humanitarian aid. Now, that sounds like a big number, but that is vastly less than probably literally anything that the Pentagon does. So I think it's important to keep these things in relative perspective. That dropped by $10 billion last year to just $4 billion. And a lot of that $4 billion was just holdover stuff that was already funded and kind of in the pipeline when Biden left. So they massively slashed US humanitarian aid last year. They did not spend the money they were given. That's going up a little bit this year, but they're still way undercut. Again, just to be clear, like, USAID effectively shut down. Yep. Responsibilities pushed to state department. And the money appropriated is not being spent. Yep. And that's where they are still spending at least some humanitarian and global health. There's at least some money going out the door. Not everything that Congress has appropriated. If you look at anything else, you look at basic education, water, economic development, things that Congress is still spending is sending them money for. You're marking it that they are required to meet these spending requirements. And they're just ignoring it completely. And so it is this, it's a sort of like a quiet constitutional crisis where Congress has under, you know, a Trump friendly Congress has just decided to give up on enforcing their own paragas. But that is a huge budgetary crisis or huge for a constitutional crisis rather because if that sets the precedent, that a president can basically get away with ignoring bills that as Andrew said, he himself signed that Congress sent him. Then that hugely tilts the power of the whole federal government towards an almost imperial presidency and takes Congress out of the picture. Andrew. Right out. There's another. Sure. The mechanism for spending the money and we can have a debate over this Jeremy. And I can disagree on some of this. I believe that what they call it, the aid industrial complex, what they're talking about are NGOs, domestic local, local NGOs, indigenous to the country, international NGOs, the UN system, the international committee that read cross and aid contractors and universities. My university used to get a lot of money from AID. So to almost all the state schools, they get a large amount of money from me. We were the principle implementing mechanisms because during the Cold War, we transferred large amounts of money for geospatial reasons into the treasuries of developing countries. One, the program didn't work, in many cases, not all cases, particularly in Africa, they didn't work. Two, the money disappeared. It was stolen. There were corruption issues. And the reason we created this system of partners, implementing partners is because they are accountable for the money. They are accountable for the money. And particularly in humanitarian assistance and emergencies, where the governments of the country are frequently the ones killing the people who we are trying to keep alive. But are you suggesting Andrew that that implementing partner system got better, or that it was, and therefore what that aid was getting out and being implemented? Or because I, again, like to kind of take the best faith version of an argument for a second here, do you think there was an issue with implementation? That a lot of this money was not actually getting out the door. What were you observing during your time? In fact, it's the exact opposite. It's not getting out the door now. What they just did in Kenya, it's just hand $2 billion over the Kenyan government to run the HIV/AIDS program and the Moeery program, all these programs, the Indian government can't spend the money. Even if they had the accountability system, which they don't, I might add, they don't have the capacity to spend that much money. Why is that? I'd predict that at the end of the period, some of the lot of money will disappear. That's not- Because the USAD, like the USAD mission in that country is defunct. No, there's no defunct. Right, it's gone. So if you give, if the State Department then still disperses the money for HIV/AIDS to Kenya, it's handing over the government. The government doesn't have the infrastructure to handle the money, to spend the money to- Ken, Kenya is a middle-income country that is not in the middle of a civil war. If you're in Sudan, where there's a famine going on, and thousands of people are dying, and there's no effective government in the country, the only alternative are the NGOs and the UN agencies. Wait, this is really interesting. I don't think bar listeners, or at least I certainly wasn't aware that the replacement for it is direct payment for the government. So if I'm opposed humanitarian aid and foreign situations, the aid seems to still be going out, but not being implemented. I mean, am I accurate in that journey? Not the money going to the UN-Otra off is based through five billion dollars, much to my shock. I don't think UN-Otra can spend that much money, even through the operation. I need a diagram, you guys. Let me try in that. It is, first off, if it sounds nuts, that's because it's kind of nuts. So, you know, back to the Constitutional Crisis point we made a minute ago. You know, that Constitutional Crisis comes in with something called "Impoundment." That's basically, if Congress says, "Here, President, your job as President under the Constitution is you execute the laws created by Congress." And if the President, which includes where money goes, that's a law. Every year, they pass an appropriations law. So when the President doesn't do that, that violates the law, that violates the Constitution, and that becomes a Constitutional Crisis. And Russ Vogue at the UNB hasn't fully wanted to own a direct confrontation with Congress on that just yet. So they are kind of going through some motions of still trying to push some money out the door, so particularly around humanitarian relief and global health. The problem is, they have destroyed all of the systems that the US government had for how to do that. So in the humanitarian bureau that existed at USAID, prior to Doge, there were about 1,100 people, which is, you know, it's not a huge number of people running about a $10 billion budget, 10 plus billion dollar budget to do all global humanitarian assistance. That same amount of money is still getting appropriate to the State Department, but they only brought between one to 200 people over from USAID to do this. So you've basically, you've cut the workforce dramatically. A lot of what those people would do is they would send a grant out to a, this partner and send a different grant out to this partner and some people would manage, this country and some people would manage that country and we would have these teams that would be overseeing the response to major crises and disasters. All that is gone. So it's completely gone. Been clear cut. Similar story on global health. You would have had a team that worked on HIV, a team that worked on malaria, a team that worked on Ebola, a team that worked on outbreak response, a team that worked on all that's gone. So state now with a footprint that is like a fraction of a fraction of the workforce that existed at USAID still needs to spend money without the means to do it. And the implement partners that we were talking about earlier, the NGOs have been mostly written off by Rubio and the administration as a bunch of lefty radicals who are ideologically opposed and they don't want to touch them, they hate them. They think they're the enemy. So where does that leave you? Okay, you don't have the bodies to push money out the door in a responsible way. You have written off most of your partners as just ideological apostates you can't touch. So what's left? What's left is basically, okay, we think the guy who runs Ocha, Tom Fletcher, that's the UN, kind of humanitarian coordination entity. We think Tom Fletcher's a good guy. He is a good guy, I like Tom. Let's just give him the humanitarian money. And so that's where they're putting the humanitarian money because they need an entity that can just absorb a big check and similar with the health. They need entities that can absorb big checks because there's this ratio in government, you have the amount of money and the bodies that you have managing it. And that basically, that ratio tells you how big your checks have to be and how many you can write. You just can't push a lot of small checks through, it's like pushing through a small straw, right? So they have to write a very limited number of very big checks. Who does that leave you to work with? That leaves you the United Nations agencies because they're big, they can absorb big checks and that leaves you foreign governments because they're big and they can absorb big checks. Whether they can spend them well, that's a different question is interested. And Andrew, I think of the State Department, I think of diplomats diplomacy. When I think of USAID, I think I think of logistics people. I think you've almost compared it to more like the Pentagon. Like get stuff done, we push critical aid out the door, not what the State Department does necessarily. So this is even more, I would imagine, you would think this is even more of a mess. Well, first, we deployed the first dark team when I was the FDA director, 19 emergency response team. Disaster sisters, sports teams. When we first started them, they were five to 10 people. We only had 60 people in the staff. And that the budget was $40 million. President Bush massively increased the budget by $200 million. I didn't even ask for them. I just sent it in and say, the world's collapsing. You need to get out there. We like what you're doing. We're giving you more money and they did. And we got more staff. But over the years, the budget has increased because Congress and both parties appropriated the money. It's very interesting, the chairman of the committee that made life miserable for me when I testified on behalf of AID, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, masked. He went after me. Every time I say something, he didn't like to turn my microphone off in the middle of a sentence, which I thought was just, I've testified before Congress 30 times, that's 35 years. No one has ever turned my microphone. They didn't repeatedly during that. That's how they debate. They just turn your microphone on. He issued a press release three weeks ago, which I was shocked at. He said, we will be the first country in the front lines in any emergency. We will prevent starvation. We will help rip. I said, you just destroyed the whole system for responding to these emergencies. How dare you issue a press release saying, we're going to be doing all this stuff. They are not doing it in state. It's, look, I, I, I, I, I, I, the state department is a diplomatic institution. Diplomacy is like a chess game, OK? AID is a program management entity. That's why I compared it in testimony to the Pentagon. Pentagon officers, the military, I like dealing with AID. In fact, 13% of the workforce are former military officers. By the way, when they say they're all communists, I never thought of the Pentagon as employing a lot of communists in the office of court, but that's who joins AID when they retire. A lot of missionary kids join AID who have brought up in the development. Why? Because they speak several languages. They brought up. They know the developing world. Well, I remember PEPFAR being very popular amongst evangelical Christians. Yes, it's good. Back up. Let me zoom out for a second and I'll ask both of you this. So, you know, I can imagine some of our listeners listening to this conversation. You've got one man who worked under George W. Bush, another man who worked under Obama and Biden. No daylight between the two of you really on this. And they could, I could imagine them saying, "Well, this is what you get. It's the neoliberal order where, you know, people representing a failed war in Iraq that got us into this mess that led to an a mess in Afghanistan that then the other administration did a messy, you know, withdrawal on. We're now in a messy war in Iran. I've had it up to here with the US having to clean up the rest of the world's messes. I want you, Jeremy, to respond to this at best. Kind of existential crisis our country appears to be having with how to show up in the world these days. On the one hand, it's like fully, you know, I don't give a fuck. Let's just pull it all out and that's a mess as we know. In fact, many of our listeners, I just want to say, who support the Maha movement, who maybe even voted for Trump, are not fans of what Doge did. So I almost want to table aside the like destruction. We all, I think agree the destruction was not the move. But this notion that the United States has to play the leading role in humanitarian aid. I think doesn't sit right for a lot of people. Respond to that. Yeah, I mean, if you look at polling actually, like it's very interesting. There was some, there's some new polling out from Rockefeller, Pew pulled this a couple of years, like a year or so ago. Humanitarian aid and global health aid actually have broad support in both parties. And so I think what you're seeing from me and Andrew, there's plenty we would disagree on, particularly if you got beyond foreign aid policy. But yeah, don't get us started on taxes. Let's talk about charter schools next. (laughing) But what you're seeing here is like, there is an alignment between me and Andrew that reflects the alignment you see in the US public, where if you talk about life saving humanitarian and health aid, you've got 70 to 80% public support, including majorities in both parties. But the idea, Jeremy, of the US playing the main role, like address that. But are we like, are we a global leader or are we not? I think that this does come to a kind of philosophical question, right? Like, do we want to be just another country? If we want to be just another country that just starts along and doesn't play a leadership role in the world, okay, I wouldn't agree with that. I don't think it's how most Americans want to conceive of our role in the world. I do go back, I know you open the episode with some discussion of Kennedy when he launched USA. Part of what he said was, look, we are as the richest, most powerful country in the world. We do have an obligation to help lift others up and by lifting others up, we actually do well by ourselves in the long run. I firmly believe that. Not everyone does. I think on some level, there's a philosophical difference there, but I think there is, there's this old aphorism of like, you never knock down a wall if you don't know what it's keeping out. So we're just knocked down a wall. We're going to learn what it was keeping out. It was keeping out things like a resurgence of HIV globally. It was keeping out things like what's a huge and growing and worsening Ebola outbreak in Eastern Congo. It's keeping out instability. So I think there are a lot of ways that this served our interest as well as our values. And I think what was really a beautiful and unique thing about USAID was that convergence. It was this idea that by exemplifying the best of American values abroad, we were also serving American interests. Let me add something to that in terms of what AID has done over the years. We were attacked in 9/11. That took place in the United States. Who attacked us? Osama bin Wat? Where did he do that from? He did that from Afghanistan. When the Russians invaded AID was required by the State Department, appropriately so maybe to leave Afghanistan. We actually didn't leave. We moved to Peshawar in Pakistan. We ran humanitarian aid programs in the 1990. But our program was scaled back. The State Department left. There was no embassy. The CIA left. The Defense Department left. All the federal agencies, except for aid in terms of helping NGO. OK. Where did Osama bin Wat? On the United States? In a failed state, Afghanistan. Where was bin Wat? Before he was in Afghanistan, he was in Sudan. The countries that's in chaos now. He lived there for eight years. And we ran large-scale aid programs there. But we shut them down in the 1990s. Because Congress cut all the programs back, frankly. and. And they cut back the aid budget almost disappeared in the 1990s. Now people want to know, is there a connection between our national security and our absolutely? And the example of that is 9/11. The man who led the radical Islamic movement, his name was Hassan Al-Turabi. I knew him personally. I dealt with him for 30 years. He died a few years ago. He was an intellectual father to Ben Laden. He brought Ben Laden to Sudan to live and his niece married Ben Laden. In fact, the woman who was shot when they killed Ben Laden was a Sudanese woman who was the niece of this guy, Hassan Al-Turabi. Trabi's plan was to use Sudan as a base to radically Islamize and start civil wars all of Africa. Most of Africa are suficists that are hostile to the Muslim brother. They don't like the Muslim brother. They don't like radical Islam. They have their traditional Muslims. They don't want civil wars. And he wanted to start a civil war. We stopped him. We did. Now that was not the purpose of the A-Probably, but that was the other effect of it was to support the southerners in their war against the North. You know, the North killed 2.2 million southerners. Jeremy, let's move now to the current conversation that's taken place that I'm sure you all have been following, which is the sort of one-to-one impact. And so, like we said in our, you know, Tom so beautifully laid out in the walkthrough, this was all started when Rokana made the statement that the USAID cuts that there's modeling that shows that it may result in as many as 4.5 million deaths. That's the sort of like upward projection of children. Some people have then brought that down to like 750,000 or something. Like, and there's some range. I want to read to you. And then there's been this ping-ponging back and forth between people like Nick Kristoff and Samantha Power. I saw you get in there, Jeremy. There's one thing that one of his allies, I don't even know whose guy is, this guy Nick Carter. He said, even if you, and he tweeted this on June 27th, they're exposted it. He said, even if you do bite the bullet and reason in purely utilitarian terms, Musk's net effect from fully self-automated driving and starling alone, think of how much utility is created from a billion of the global South-Having Internet is many, many times the lost utility from USAID, even if you pretend USAID was his call and a net utility engine, it's not. It's just an astonishingly stupid argument from the critics. And I've seen this echoed and he got like shared many times, which is why I mentioned him. Make the case that the literal diminishing of aid has literally resulted in deaths. Sure. I will do that. I also want to just want an insane way to frame a question that if he saved lives through self-driving, he's entitled to kill people overseas. Like, that's the logic we're going with. I've been a humanitarian for 25 years. I saved a lot of lives in my humanitarian zone. Do I mind title to kill some people now? Like, that's insane. I'm sorry. That's just insane. Good point, Jeremy. I guess I can't even, I mean, I don't know. If you buy into that way of seeing the world, I can't help you. Has it killed people? Absolutely. It's killed people. And I will say with some of these, like, these huge numbers, like the Lancet study that you referenced, there's an old saying that all models are wrong and some are useful. And what that basically means is a model is not a prediction of the future. A model is a model. And it depends on the inputs you put into it and the conditions that you assume and all sorts. So it's not like a one-to-one prediction of the future. So I personally avoided saying 14 million people are definitely going to die. Because that really depends on what we do. And I think that was a presumption that, or kind of a modeling of, if at the point where everything had been turned off, if it stayed that way and nothing offset or filled in that that could be the outcome. Yeah, what we've seen interestingly since then is that they have been quite, State Department has been quietly undoing some of the stuff that Doge did. They have turned some of these programs back on because they were saving lives. They have turned some of the functions back on. They have turned the Dart team deployments back on, which were basically wrecked at one point last year to the point when there was a huge earthquake in Myanmar. They couldn't even get rescue teams off the ground. They can't get it because they undid some of what Doge did. So if you look at what Doge did and where Elon left things when he left, I think that 14 million was in the cards. Today, I think it's going to look a little bit different. We will have to see where the world is in 2030 to kind of have a better sense of the net input and net output and that effect of that. But what we can say are people dying? Absolutely. Are people dying in significant numbers? Absolutely. Christoph and others in the media have reported on some of the individual stories and the ways that the aid cuts are killing people. Christoph had a very powerful piece last September of a young refugee girl in a refugee camp in Uganda who became ill with a fairly, I think it was more like a fairly pedestrian disease that's normally easily treated. But she got malaria because the distribution of bed nets that would normally have happened in her refugee camp had been disrupted by the aid cuts. The health center that she would normally have gone to had suspended services because of the aid cuts, the ambulance that would have taken her to the next health center over had been disrupted because of the aid cuts and so she died. There are a lot of cases like that. We don't have an accurate count of how many. I think what we can do is look at some individual, you know, we can look at some individual countries and instances and crises and begin to get a sense of the impact that this has beyond that kind of anecdote, single story scale. Color and South Sudan. Now, color is a, with the right tools, color is a fairly straightforward disease to avoid. It is a disease that you can avoid by just making sure you're not drinking contaminated water. Very simple. A lot of things have to break for that disease to get out of control. It got out of control in South Sudan last year and it killed, officially killed 1,600 people. The real number is probably several multiples of that because the systems that would have recorded the deaths were also shut down because of the aid cuts. Pro-Publica had a really powerful piece looking at deaths from that color outbreak and reporting that like the, you know, one of the women they talk about in that story normally would have gone to her local clinic, which had been funded by USAID. South Sudan, obviously, a big scale in ongoing sort of war on crisis zone for many years, not much of a government to speak of. So that clinic was shut down. She didn't have anywhere to go. She also was not recorded in the official death toll because the clinic that would have recorded her death was gone. So when, you know, when we get this pushback of like show me the bodies, well, we've also lost the ability to even count some of those bodies because the systems that would have tracked that were also shut down. Well, we know that you've got thousands of people who died last year of a color outbreak, needle-slinging, South Sudan, basically because of the aid cuts. My organization, Refugees International, is right now doing some work tracking this in Afghanistan. And I got a briefing from my team on this yesterday. We've gone out and talked to some midwives in Afghanistan. And we've found at least just over the last several months, at least 100 cases amongst us. We pulled a few hundred midwives to see, do you know of cases of people who died because they couldn't get treatment? And this is women in childbirth and their children. At least 107 have died there. And this is a small kind of sample. This is not the whole of the country. This is just among this group of people we talked to. So there too, the Disruption Services is killing people. These are women who are having postpartum hemorrhaging. Normally that is something that a competent health facility could deal with and save the woman's life and save the child's life. And that is not happening. And those women and those children are not dying because those those are disrupted. Have other countries, Andrew, filled in any gaps? What would you know about that? Okay, several things. First, the notion that we are the leaders in spending aid money. It's the complete nonsense. We're 24th. However you count it as a portion of the federal government budget per capita spending. We are way at the bottom of the list. The Europeans spend far more than we do. Far more and have been for 40 or 50 years. Now in humanitarian assistance and emergencies, we are one of the leaders. But on all the other development stuff like health, they spend far more than we do per capita. Now you don't expect Norway to spend as much as us because they've got four million people. But look at what they spend per capita versus how much we spend per capita or how much of the GDP we spend. It's we're at the bottom of the heat, not at the top. Yeah. That's the first thing. The second thing is that we're both a large country and a rich country. You've got Norway which is rich but not large. You've got China which is large but not nearly as rich. We're both large and rich and that gives us a lot more ability to be a leader than some of those others. That's a good way to put it. A good way to put it. The second thing. Other countries, even though they don't like to admit it, they follow us. There is Stomer before he was removed. I don't know if he's still primary, but he's about to be removed as prime minister. He announced a massive increase in the defense department budget for a good reason because Putin is threatening Europe. Yeah. It's a very serious problem. You know how we funded it? A 40% cut. in the foreign aid budget, by the way, the best aid agency in Europe bilaterally was different. And they merged it under Boris Johnson into the foreign ministry, and it's been a disaster by, I mean, look at the economist did an article and the comments are not particularly pro-foreign aid. They did an article about it saying it's been a disaster. And conservatives in the parliament are saying the same thing. Okay, so what the same thing happened in Germany? They cut the aid budget, sweetened, cut the aid budget. The only place they increased it was Switzerland and Japan. Okay, everybody else started cutting their aid. Now, the Spanish haven't cut their aid budget, and the president's angry with them over NATO and all this stuff with Iran. But the reality is other donors are following us. There were cuts, I must say, even before Trump took over, under Biden by Europeans and their commitments to the global aid program out of Geneva. If you look at the contribution levels, what they pledged and what they actually delivered, we were the only ones actually meeting on that issue. But generally speaking, the Europeans spend a lot more than we do. - Yeah, as a share of their wealth much larger. And they tended to fall, it's shinder. They tend to follow the US's lead in some form. Tom, I think it was US earlier, you know, will this, when you're trying to do the steel man argument, well, will the US stepping back mean others will step up? Actually, I think it means generally the opposite. What I always saw in my career was when the US stepped up and showed leadership and said, there is a problem here. We need to do something about this. That's what prompted others to step up. Like if we are an Ebola and West Africa in 2014, which I helped to oversee for the Obama administration, is a great example of that. The rest of the world stepped up when the US put a focus on the problem and put our own skin and the game and our own money on the table. It's a very different thing to say to the world. We don't think this is a big enough issue that we're going to invest in it, but we think you all should. Like that is not compelling and that is effectively the way that that argument is heard by other countries. Jeremy, can you address some of the whole woke thing in terms of projects, right? Like the transgender opera and like whatever, investing in yoga classes and stuff? Like, I mean, because honestly, I know we laugh about it, but like as somebody who doesn't know a lot about it, right? There is, it's rather stunning when you hear that your taxpayer money is being used towards things that in your mind, you have this assumption it's going towards malaria, nets and whatever. Sure, sure, sure. And that there is a soft power perhaps to art and culture, but really, you know, what do we need to know about that whole thing? So let me break that down into three categories, if I can. I think there are the things there that were just all right, lies. There were the things there that were real programs that were not USAID programs, including the one you mentioned. And then there were some of the things that were real programs, but actually if you spend three seconds to understand them, had a failed reason for them. So the lies. There was a point at which Elon claimed that they had turned off $50 million with the condoms that were going to go into Gaza. That got a ton of airplay. The president repeated it. He at one point, he doubled it to 100 million. I've done a lot of global health work in my career, and I called up a friend of mine who works for an organization that used to procure condoms for USAID, because USAID for its HIV and health programs did procure a lot of condoms. And I said, how many condoms would $50 million be? And the answer was about one billion condoms. There was no world in which anyone, anywhere in the world, USAID or other was going to send a billion condoms to Gaza. It's a lunacy, because they made it, it's just, they made it up. It's made up shit. So that was just like an outright lie. Like some of this was just like that. They were doing it. They later admitted it, right? Like this. Oh, yeah, that was bullshit. The second category, including like the kind of famous transgender opera, which was not actually a transgender opera, but some of those things. There was a list of like 10 different programs that the White House put out, and it press release as reasons why they were shutting USAID. And in fact, most of those were not USAID programs. Most of those were state department programs. Most of those were things, including that opera example, that were funded by so each ambassador, each in each embassy, has a little bit of money to fund like local cultural things. And they will spend them on very, you know, though it's like $25,000. Like it is, you know, in foreign aid terms, small, small money. And so it's that. So if you don't like that kind of thing, well, don't move foreign aid to the state department, because it was through the state department that that stuff was getting funded. The third category is, and this is where, I think it is important to just play one or two of these things out. Like did the US through its HIV budget invest in circumstances? Yes, you know why? Because circumstances dramatically reduce the risk of HIV transmission. A circumcised man is dramatically less likely to transmit HIV to a partner. So, you know, in Elon's Twitter feed, at one point, like he has bio as like global circumcision provider or something or that. Like, "Ha ha, isn't it funny? We're talking about penises now." Yeah, the reason we're talking about penises now is because penises transmit HIV and there's a way to make them transmit it less. There were also investments in programs around engaging with transgender communities, engaging with lesbian, gay, bisexual communities in countries, often through HIV work, because those were communities where HIV were circulating. So, if you want to, you know, whether it's HIV or impacts, if you're just going to kind of cover your eyes and your ears and not pretend those communities don't exist, that's how you let those diseases get out of control. You have to go where the diseases are circulating. But Andrew, was it, it is true that the Biden administration did push forward LGBTQ+ whites globally as part of their aid strategy, right? Right. I could identify out of 5,200 grants and contracts, 23 that for in-a-idee purpose. However, you have to look at this, okay? If you look carefully at it, there is a lot of violence in some countries against gay. So, I mean, they have go into graphic detail about what they do to them. They castrate them and they kill them and all that. And this was an attempt to reduce the violence against gay. I don't think it was very effective. In fact, I think the data shows it wasn't effective. And it offended a lot of countries that are very conservative on these issues like African countries and arrow countries. It's a debatable question as to whether it was a good, but it's a tiny amount of money and most of these grants in fact were made by the state department, not by AID. Now, let me mention something else. We did distribute condoms in Afghanistan. There is a famine in Afghanistan right now. People are starving to death. Now, no one knows about it why 'cause there's no media there, right? We set up hundreds of health clinics across Afghanistan and we supplied them with condoms why. In a famine who dies first, children under five, pregnant women and lactating mothers. That's the first three groups. All the demographic data shows that, okay? If you are a woman and you're pregnant and poor in a famine, it is a kiss of death. That's what it is. So, do we, do we, where we distributing condoms and I hope we were because the only way to prevent women from getting pregnant and dying is through condoms. I explained that in Fox News and it was the only time Fox was ever allowed me on. They all allowed me on once and they never did it again. They then asked me by the way, they gave me the questions and said, we'll ask you on a second time, but you have to answer the questions ahead of time. I said, you know, I've been in politics for 50 years since I was 22 years old. I've never been asked to answer the question before I go on the program. So, I did and they said, I don't think we'll add it and write to it again. They invited me a second. So, I said, are you aware of who dies in a famine? You know, have you ever been to a famine before? Have you ever watched someone die of starvation? Jura, may I have, and it's not a fun thing. It's a horrible thing to walk. So, we distribute condoms in Afghanistan and the clinics and the poorest area. Absolutely. We should have done that and I as a conservative Republican supported it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. So, the inferiority thing to me about a lot of that that I will call a disinformation because misinformation is not necessarily intentional. This was very intentional. This was disinformation intended to justify the destruction of the agency. And it's actually not hard to explain most of these things. There are some of these things, you know, like the LGBTQ rights programs that I think there are just, there are political disagreements over that are, you know, within the bounds of what you normally see from what administration to the next. But a lot of this stuff was not that. Most of this stuff was not that. Most of this stuff was programs that had very valid purposes and very valid reasons that when you have a bunch of like young 22, I was a young 22 year old idiot at 1.2. Yeah. At a certain age as an adolescent, you think penis is a really funny and sex is really funny and anything to do with that. That's sort of the, that's like the vibe, the mentality that they were bringing to these decisions. They weren't trying to understand what these programs were about. It was like, how, how penis is, including for Neelon. And you know, that was the, like, one of the things I just cannot get over with all this is that is the mentality that destroyed a federal agency. It's totally uncomfortable and it's killing a lot of people. There's something else that the president did and is, I think it was the state of the union address. He said, "A ID was funding." Our 8th program is this funding Transgender. mites. Oh, that's right. Yeah, he did say that. Brands genetic mites genetic mice are mice who are bred to have their organs in the same location as human beings. So they can experiment on them on cancer research. AID doesn't breed any mice anywhere for anything ever at the National Institute for Health does that not AID. And it's not brand gender. It's transgenic. You know, it's ridiculous to confuse the two. Now, did they do it deliberately? I think they did, but I mean, I don't know. You are both, you are both making a really persuasive case. I mean, I'm putting myself in the sort of shoes and the mind of some of our listeners who may have doubts on the US kind of role in the world right now. And some of this stuff stuff is just so stupid and was weaponized. And I'm certainly getting very convinced of that. You know, are either of you sensing a shift from somebody like Marco Rubio, who, for instance, has been talking about kind of like re-reconnecting with like Gavi, which is the world vaccine, the lions and things like, I mean, I doubt that there will ever be an admission that there were mistakes made. But in terms of kind of undoing the damage, are either of you noticing that have you gotten any calls about that? Like, where Andrew, let's start with you and then we'll go to Jeremy. Okay, the very interesting thing, this article appeared in the Times, the British newspaper, one of their major most recent like the Wall Street Journal of Britain. And it reported that a pack had been set up by Trump's mega people to give money to Republicans and primaries who were pro-Foreignated. I said, what? That's a little weird. They have done polling among evangelicals and Pentecostal Christians and conservative Catholics, not liberal Catholics, conservative Catholics. 80% are upset. The cuts were made to humanitarian assistance and to health programs and want them to store. Why is the administration giving pack money to people who you'd think would be a hostile to Trump if they got elected? Why? Because their polling data is showing that there's an erosion of support for what must be it and what the prison did. People are beginning, I mean, the church and I come from the church community that I work for World Vision, the largest Christian NGO in the world, for five years as vice prison. I have to tell you, the evangelical church is not running around bashing for an aid and even because conservative Catholics are not doing it. You know, one of the first people they fired an aid who they said was a communist, she described, I'm not going to mention her name. She described herself as a pre-Vaticant to Catholic. Now, I can tell you what the code word means. It means she only goes to Latin masses. She doesn't accept all the modern forms of the 1960s. Do you need like a deep cut? Yeah. There's another woman who I know very well and she's a Pentecostal Christian, Black American woman and she is part of the holiness movement of the Pentecostal and the Methodist church. And I'm saying they called her a communist. I know her. She is not. She's very conservative. And was PEPFAR carved out and saved in the dismantling sort of like? PEPFAR is caught up in this now. But they're trying to basically take PEPFAR out of the organizations that have been working on it for several decades now and make that part of this transition to governments. In principle, if you can do that, yeah, in the long run, that's great. Like it would be great for governments to run that. If they can do so accountable and you know, some of them I think we'll be able to. But the problem is like even if that's your long-term goal, does it serve that long-term goal to like hit pause on the whole program while you sort that out? Which is effectively what they did last year. It's a hugely disruptive. It's like saying, I'm going to get a new car, but I want to crash my current one first. Like it doesn't it doesn't help you. Jeremy, pick up on Brenda's question because you alluded to this before about how Marker Rubio and the State Department may be quietly bringing things back online. Just talk more about that. Yeah, I think they look, I don't think Marker Rubio went into that. I think he was caught as caught off guard by this as anyone when he won't be undoing this last year. He also knows that his political future depends on being a good soldier right now. So he has been a good soldier and gone along with it. But if you look at what is Congress doing, is Congress validated these cuts through their appropriations of funding? No, they have kept doing the same thing. The administration now that stuff has moved over to state, and including some of the individuals who were involved with this, have moved out of Bernadol down mode and now are actually responsible for doing things and they don't want those things to fail. They don't want to be seen to fail. And so they have, a lot of it is optics wrinkling more than substance, but they want to maintain the pageantry of sending out dark teams as they just did in Venezuela when they sent the US search and rescue teams to Venezuela, which would not have been possible a year ago because so many of those systems had been wrecked. What you see now is where state is doing some things. They're basically riding on the co-tails of what USAID had built. So the dark teams are a great example of this. They have brought, you know, the people who deployed those search and rescue teams to Venezuela a couple of weeks ago, who have been pulled, spent, you know, spent a week poigning saving people out of the rubble. Those are the teams that USAID built. They came up through USAID. They are deploying USAID systems at the state department in a kind of like a lighter touch, non-isrobust version. And, you know, this is not a state built. This is tough USAID built that they have realized they have to turn back on and preserve. The problem is the way they've done that is a little bit like if you took a, but to say if you took like a battalion of Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs, but just the fighters, just the warfighters, without any of the support infrastructure, without any of the doctrine, any of the training, without any of the process that produced those people and said, you know, go, go run a mission. They could run that mission. They could run a few missions for you. At a certain point, though, that's going to degrade because the infrastructure that keeps all that running has not been preserved. And that's kind of where things are at state right now. They've turned some of the things back on. They've taken some of the very small fraction of the talent from USAID over, but without an understanding of how that was produced and generated over time. And so it is going to degrade. I don't think that what they've built right now, they can sustain. But they are, I think they are feeling the pressure to not fail. It was very humiliating last year when the US in response to a major global earthquake for the first time in many years could not deploy its team. And that was a black eye for the administration. That was a black eye for the country. So I think they want to avoid that kind of really over black eye and where things are more public, more visible, they are trying to do something about that. But it is nothing like the scale of what happened before and it's not as effective. So you mentioned there was a black eye that we couldn't deploy. And I think this gets us to our final question. Andrew, you wrote talking about the humanitarian budgets that were getting shut down. You wrote cutting these budgets will lead to the death of innocent people and ruin the humanitarian legacy of the US. So I just want to ask you both, what is lost if we lose or ruin our humanitarian legacy? Well, I don't need geostrategic justifications for what we do. The moral justification of saving people's lives is sufficient. And it's sufficient even for the far right Jesse Helm said I would abolish aid, but I would leave the disaster response even Patrick Buchanan said that when he ran a president Bush and the Republican primary, he said the disaster response stuff we should leave alone. Don't touch them. So there is a broad consensus, but they still destroyed it. They destroyed the infrastructure. People actually look to the United States. Europeans privately will say, what are you guys planning? Because we'd like to work with you on this. And they put a lot of resources, but they there there's a whole bunch of countries there. They fight all the time with each other, frankly. And the UN agency sometimes will come to AID and say, what are you guys going to do? We'll work with you, but you have to lead it. Gueterra is the secretary general of the UN said the UN does not work unless the United Nations provides leader doesn't pay for the whole thing. They pay for late 18% of it. And the other donors pay for the rest of it. Unless unless the United States provides leadership. That's correct. Unless the United States provides leadership things don't happen. He said that publicly. I was shocked that he didn't. You know, most human people think that, but they would never say it publicly. Okay. It's too humiliating to say, but it's true. It is true. Now, what's the consequence for all? There are strategic consequences. And I'll give you one example. The Ache tsunami, you remember 130,000 people about were killed within 15, 20 minutes when a massive tsunami killed the city of Ache after earthquake under the attack. That's right. It was in December 25th or 26th in 2004. I report. Okay. Yes. And we launched a massive response. The US military was returning from Afghanistan, President Bush diverted the fleet, but we had 125 officers out there. And the mission director decided to take the USAID logo, which by the way was known all over the world, USAID from the American people, which we put in place while I was the administrator in 2002, 2003. He made 50,000 big, big signs post put the one everything that we were distributing. Now, people say, oh, you're just trying to as publicity's done, no, public diplomacy. he does count. Our poll ratings in Afghanistan, Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, one of the largest countries in the world, was 26% favorability rating. Osama bin Laden had a 58% approval rating when we had a 26%. This is run by the way, Indonesian newspapers, not from the US government, okay? Five different newspapers did these polls. After within three months, our poll ratings went from 26% to 63%, and bin Laden's collapsed from 58% to 28%. And the CIA told me bin Laden was furious over it, okay? The president at the time, I'm gonna tell you his name, he said to me privately, Andrew, I like President Bush. I am pro-American, but it's really hard when you're so unpopular here to work with you in public about terrorism issues and military cooperation all that. But if we have a 63% approval rating, it's much easier, okay? Now, did we do the response to improve our image? No, we didn't, man. But that's what happened, okay? And it happened. I can show you data from all over the world, the same thing. The A-programs improve the public perception of the United States. Soft power, I don't like using that word, because it implies weakness, but the humanitarian programs and the development programs of the United States government are welcomed by people, particularly at the grassroots level. But Jeremy, I guess the last question to you, I know we teased the last question, but just to ask in a realistic yet potentially optimistic way, how and when and how long, if the will is there, political will is there to build this back, USAID back to something it resembled, where does the future look like? And is the future to build it back to something it resembled or something new? Like, help us understand that. Yeah, I wouldn't build back, I wouldn't build it back as it was. And I don't think, if you gave them the choice, I don't think there are many people who worked at USAID, which used to build it back the way it was. I think we are in a different world now than if it was a 60-year-old agency, it had some of those holdover systems, it had some of the bureaucratic sludge that I talked about earlier. I think it can be built back. I think it's important to build it back both because I don't think the State Department is going to do a good job of this. I think we're already seeing that. We're seeing a lot less oversight and much more transactional, much more corrupt, behavior out of the State Department, at least out of this State Department. I don't think that's inherent to state necessarily, but it's what we're seeing. The US just gave $7.5 million to Equatorial Guinea from the Refugee Aid budget. The budget intended to help support refugees and keep them alive so that they would accept people deported from the United States who were not from their country. They cut that deal with the vice president of the country. The vice president of the country also happens to be the son of the president. It just happens to have a massive fleet of luxury cars, to have a collection of luxury watches, to have a personal Michael Jackson museum. He is invited Stephen Miller to come visit his country. I don't think Stephen Miller has taken him up on that. That's how they're using some of the aid budget now. That is not the sort of thing that happened to the US. That's the same. It's genuinely insane. That is some of the risk of how they're doing some of the using some of the aid budget now. I think it's important to get back to a place where we have an accountable professional aid agency because aid and development are just a different discipline than diplomacy. They are different things. They are linked. They should be linked. They should be tied. They should try to work together. But they are different things. It's also important constitutionally. The law still, if the law means anything in this country, the law still says USAID exists and there should be an independent aid agency. Very interestingly, the administration hasn't even pushed that hard to change that because they know they won't win it in Congress. I do think it should come back. I think what we should build back should be different. I think it should be lighter. I think it should be more narrowly focused. I think that a future administration of whatever party that comes in without a doge mentality should go back to Congress and say, look, that whole world of a million earmarks that made it impossible for us to actually set priorities in a strategic way. If you waved it for Trump, that's not coming back. Trust us to do it right, but then give us the flexibility on that trust. That's the bargain when Andrew and I both ran the office of foreign disaster assistance. Probably the most single effective part of that agency. The reason it was effective was because we didn't have to follow those rules. We didn't have to spend all of our life ticking boxes. We could just look at a problem and try to solve the problem. I think that's what I would want to see as an ethos and a culture of a new development agency, a new aid agency. But to do that also depends on not reinventing the whole bureaucratic sludge architecture that has overtaken USAID. Just hearing you guys talk today, you've really described a level of beyond what people think philosophically about programs and how the US should show up in the world. You want a government that's competent. You want people in charge who know what they're doing. You want to show us why should I trust you. You want to trust that people are making decisions with the best interest of both the United States and other countries in mind. I feel completely comfortable in saying that I'm very worried about how all of this has left us. I just want to thank Jeremy Kinnindike, who worked with a senior official for USAID under Biden and Obama administration and Andrew Natios, who was the head of USAID under George W. Bush. I really want to thank you both for joining us on why should I trust you today. I was also under Bush 41. Both Bush and Sunday. Hey, Bush dad and Bush son. All right. Got that in there. Thank you both so much. So that was why should I trust you for this week. We had a couple episodes this week. I'm Brind out of curry. He's Tom Johnson, Maggie Bartlett, producer for us. Mark Abdul Malik was on vacation this week. He'll be back with us next episode. Please send us questions, comments to questions at why should I trust you.net. Leave us a rate, like, subscribe, all that good stuff. We'll see you right back here next week.