Dr. Mark Moyar
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Mark Moyar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hey, it's great to be with you, Dr. Drew.
Yeah, I joined USAID as a Trump appointee in 2018. And I, for several months, was just an advisor there. And then I was put in charge of an office later that year. And as soon as I was given that job, I was inundated by complaints from people within the office about all sorts of misbehavior. And some of this was just bad management, toxic leadership. But some of it was criminal corruption.
And the most egregious case that I came across was that my own deputy in the office was the chairman of the board of a company that was getting federal contracts. At the same time, he was a government employee and helping that company get contracts through his job, which is a flagrant violation of conflict of interest.
Yes, it's usually a little more indirect. Or you have your son, Hunter, do it.
Yeah. I mean, and part of it was that how brazen it was, as you said, you didn't even bother using a family cutout, which is how this often happens. And this person had even gotten permission from government lawyers to do this, which was indication of how corrupt some of these government lawyers were. And so I went to agency officials who were supposed to deal with this kind of thing.
And I said, look, I'm new here, but my employees are telling me all this stuff and it sounds pretty serious. And they said, well, you know, it's commendable that you want to raise this issue. But in reality, most people don't bring these sorts of things up. And they didn't really explain why. And I later found out why. It's because you become the target when you do that.
But, you know, I said, you know, I came here to drain the swamp. And so we're going to do we should do an investigation. So investigation goes ahead. And things unfold a bit slowly, but to make a long story short, they ended up allowing this corrupt individual to keep his federal job by going to the Department of Defense, where he still works. This is part of their usual shell game they can play.
reassign you somewhere to be punishment in the meantime they made this fraudulent accusation against me and then violated my due process rights to get me fired and i've been fighting ever since i'm still in court five years later trying to get this sorted out and is the new administration i get in the book is is chronicling this is that correct
Yeah, the book tells the story up until about the beginning of 2024 when I'd originally hoped to have the book out earlier and the case closed. But part of the nature of this whistleblower retaliation is that they try to string you out because the government has all the lawyers and the money in the world and they know that you don't. And so they hope to drag it out.
So, but again, it's been in court for three years. We spent two years trying to get the inspector general to help us. And that's another huge part of the problem. The inspector general at this agency, like so many other agencies, is part of the problem. And they're in cahoots with a lot of these bad, corrupt actors.
Well, they asked me to serve in this new Trump administration, and I really wanted to do so, but we have a child with cancer. severe health problems. And for personal reasons, I couldn't do it. But the book has been made available to a lot of the people who are making decisions. And so I do think that the Inspector General, the Office of Security is another one.
I talk in the book as well, the Office of Security, which has all sorts of important functions. They're part of the problem too. And so what happened was As soon as Trump took office, they went to the Office of Security and said, give us your files, and they refused to turn them over. So that's when they started putting people on leave.
And so aid has become something of a testbed for what they're doing.
Yeah, USAID and the problems they've encountered. I mean, I think they first went there because they knew how bad it was. And some of that is documented in the book. And so, you know, also foreign aid is very controversial. So they went there and quickly encountered this resistance, which then made it all the easier for them to justify these crackdowns.
You know, I think it's a combination of factors. I mean, part of it is bureaucracy inherently is prone to becoming self-absorbed and self-serving. And you can go back in our history and you see that. You also have, I think in this case, a lot of the bureaucrats, well, it is a bureaucratic issue. ideological echo chamber.
I think 97% of the employees were Democrats, and so they reinforced their ideological bias, and then a lot of them bought into these ideas that somehow this was the end of democracy, and this was, you know, the fascists were coming in. So therefore, we can do anything we want, basically. The ends justify the means. And then I think also, too, you have broader ethical problems because our...
bureaucracy, like much of the ruling class, is very secular. They don't have the same sort of sense of religious, moral obligations, I think, that your average American does.
Yes, well, certainly you've got to find some new blood to take over the leadership. And that was a part of the problem too in the first Trump administration is they didn't actually select some of the political appointees carefully enough. And so, as you said, you do have to purge some of the bad apples, but you've got to find good people to go in there.
I think what they're also looking at is converting a lot of these jobs into at-will employees because most of the agency's employees were unionized, and so it was almost impossible to fire them. And so if you can change that, I think it won't come as a surprise to most people. If you look at teachers' unions, you have the same issue.
When you can't fire people, you're not going to get good performance out of a lot of people.
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