Dr. Rajiv Shah
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Rajiv Shah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
immediate search and rescue services to identify any people who are still alive amongst the rubble. That required getting teams from across American counties into Haiti. It would require getting basic urgent needs, mostly water, food, and urgent medicine in place.
It would require deploying the USS Comfort to do 22,000 surgeries, including limb reattachments and other life-saving surgeries that were conducted. And it would require mounting the largest, fastest food assistance program we had ever done. And within hours, within about 36 hours, we were up reaching millions of people with food and targeted nutrition services that undoubtedly saved lives.
But aside from all that, A huge part of it was just asking for help. And this will tell you about the character of people who worked at USAID. I was new and they knew that I didn't know this, that I hadn't been through a humanitarian response of this scale. I got to my office. I spoke to the president. I can tell you about that if you want. And that night, spent all night in the office, right?
Working 24 hours. And overnight, All of our best people, our most experienced people from Afghanistan, from India, from Pakistan, from Peru, all U.S. Foreign Service officers kept calling. And they kept saying, you know, you don't know me yet, but I'm the best person at water and sanitation in a crisis. I'm on a plane tomorrow. I will come help.
And I heard that story from maybe three, four, five different people in the middle of the night. And they were sure enough there as soon as they could get there. And our teams stayed in hotels. There was a huge storm we called Snowmageddon back then that kept people from going home. They just stayed in hotels.
They're like, we're not going to miss the chance to be here 24 hours a day to run this response. And we mounted the largest and most effective humanitarian response in the first six months that our country has ever seen. And we did that by taking help from people from around the world. We took help from the U.S.
military that were heroic, landing planes in tough environments, deploying 3,000 people, General Ken Keane, a three-star commander down there, handing out food himself alongside humanitarian partners. And we took help from private sector partners That had something to offer. So that spirit of we're not going to own this thing. We're not going to have sharp elbows. We know we need help.
We're going to take it from absolutely anywhere is my advice to people who find themselves in a situation that seems beyond their initial capacity.
So the next morning we had our first briefing in the Oval Office. It was my first meeting, actually, outside of ceremonial stuff in the Oval Office. So I got there a little bit early because you certainly don't want to be late for that. And I walked in and the only two people in the office were the president and the vice president, both behind the desk.
Obama was kind of looking towards me and Biden was looking out the window. And as I walked in, I heard Joe Biden tell President Obama, he's like, are you sure about putting this Raj Shah guy in charge of this? He's 36 years old. He just got to Washington. We have this other guy.
He mentioned a gentleman named Craig Fugate, a wonderful, outstanding leader who ran FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Authority. And then Obama sees me walk in and shuts down the conversation and walks over. He's like, Raj, come in, sit down. So I was a little panicked, you know, and I was like, oh my gosh.
But then I sat down and then everyone else came in, Secretary Clinton, Napolitano, the whole team. And we just got into it. You know, we went through the scorecard and we said, here are the things that have to happen. Here's where we need the Coast Guard. Here's where we need the military. And it was a very collegial conversation, but I knew that it would take more than just me to kind of succeed.
And Craig was one of the guys in the meeting. So on the way out, I like went up to Craig, put my arm around Craig and I was like, Craig, I need your help. And he's like, absolutely anything you need, I'm on it. And he and a couple of his guys came over to USAID and for the next three weeks, basically worked out of our emergency operations room side by side with me as we led that effort.
And I do think the tactic is asking for help. I think too often people find themselves in that moment and they go inside of themselves and they say, oh my gosh, how am I going to do this? My advice to your listeners, wherever you are in your journey, is open up and ask for help and be willing to take it.
It ultimately makes you stronger and it serves the results you're trying to deliver more effectively.
At that point, I wasn't sleeping much. So it was pretty easy to not lose sleep over it because I just wasn't sleeping.
And, you know, the truth is, once you have that collaborative leadership style, I think people then know it. They mimic it. You get invited in more. They come to help you out more. And you get to say thank you and deliver results and learn from great leaders. I mean, I learned a ton the very first time I walked into the Pentagon.
It was at the invitation of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, Admiral Mike Mullen, to deliver the chairman's briefing to thousands of troops all around the world and out of what they called the tank. And it was just the spirit of let's do this together is so important in government. It's important, I think, in the private sector and it's important in civil society.
We do. Well, I'll say my tenure at USAID came to a close around the Ebola crisis. In fact, I was going to leave a little bit earlier and I extended my time in office in order to help lead that response. And I would just remind our collective listeners that in the summer of 2014, the mortality rate from Ebola was 75%. That compares with what everyone now knows is a mortality rate
COVID well under a single percentage point. And what it meant was anyone getting it was likely going to die. And it was pervasive across three West African countries anchored in Liberia. And also at the time, the CDC had predicted there would be 1.6 million cases, including hundreds of thousands in the United States.
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