Elon Musk promised to feed "USAID into the wood chipper." The way he's dismantling the agency provides a roadmap for the administration moving forward. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Devan Schwartz, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Flowers are left at the USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C. Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is USAID and its historical significance?
It was way back in 1961 that John F. Kennedy, uncle of fluoride, established USAID.
The people who are opposed to aid should realize that this is a very... powerful source of strength for us. Its motto?
From the American people. And the American people gave a lot, hundreds of billions, for removing landmines in Vietnam, combating Ebola outbreaks in Africa, reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan, more recently, humanitarian support in Ukraine and Gaza, and all for less than 1% of the federal budget. But if you go to USAID's website today... All you see is blank space, just a wall of white.
Without the explicit authority to do so, the president has gone and dismantled the agency. We're going to ask a guy who used to run it what a world without USAID looks like on Today Explained.
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Chapter 2: What happens when USAID is dismantled?
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Andrew Natsios served as deputy chief of staff for George H.W. Bush. And then when H.W. Bush's son became president, Natsios got to run USAID for several years. We asked him what he makes of all the USAID RAMA.
Well, I'm appalled by all of this stuff because it's damaging the foreign... affairs apparatus of the US government and this just beginning, they're going after the CIA, the FBI. We have people all over the world that are very sympathetic because they know the American system because they used to work for us in high positions of power.
The training ground for the developing world were our scholarship programs and the foreign service nationals who worked on the staff. All of that is being wiped out now. The Chinese, by the way, during the Cold War, we used to give 20,000 scholarships a year to people who get their master's degree and PhDs in the US.
A lot of countries like South Korea and Taiwan, those PhDs ran the country for 30 years. And they're all very pro-American. There's a reason for it, because they went to the United States to get their education. That was 20,000. They've cut the budget back, and now it's getting wiped out. Guess who does 40,000 scholarships a year? The Chinese government does to promising students.
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Chapter 3: How does the dismantling of USAID affect global humanitarian efforts?
And if you leave the rest of the world and think we can build a wall around the United States that's going to protect us from this chaos, you're living in a fantasy world.
I just want to get something clear from you. Are people going to die because of this political decision?
Absolutely, indisputably, they are going to die. And it's not going to be a small number. Now, usually in a famine, I've been to famines in the Somali famine, which was horrendous in 1991-92. I watched children die right in front of me. So it is seared into my mind. I was in Rwanda just after the Rwandan genocide. The Americans, we've been a little insulated from this. We've never had a famine.
in the United States. I mean, people said, oh, some of the pilgrims died of starvation in 1620 during that winter. That's not a famine. Famines are when thousands of people die in a certain geographic area, and it takes two or three years to stop it. Now, one of the things that's disturbing me, which shows what the, either ignorance or they're doing it deliberately.
I don't know, and I don't wanna judge. I think it's ignorance. The famine early warning system is the driver of a lot of what we do in the emergency area of food security. What is it? It is a predictive model. We take aerial photographs every day from satellites. All over the world, in the food insecure areas, we compare the color on the ground from one year to the next.
So in the first week of June, if the ground is green one year and brown the next, we assume there's been a crop failure. That is not sufficient to tell what's happening on the ground. So we send teams in. There's a vast network of people who work with AID that actually don't work for us. They work with us.
These are local people and they're economists, they're food experts, and they go in and find out what's going on the ground. That system, now they shut down. Well, basically it's like driving a car with no steering wheel. The fuse system is the steering wheel. So you have a car full of food, it can't get where it's going because there's no steering wheel. And I've raised this repeatedly.
They're not interested.
There's incredible optics of having, you know, the richest man in the history of our human race boasting about feeding USAID to a wood chipper. We know the sitting president thinks that this agency is helping a lot of, you know, quote unquote, shithole countries. And yet Marco Rubio is the one who's like most in front of this decision.
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Chapter 4: What are the political implications of cutting USAID funding?
Instead of dealing with the entitlement program, they're going after the infrastructure of the federal government. I think we're over-regulated in terms of regulations, all agencies and departments. But there's a thoughtful way of doing that. A giant sledgehammer to smash the government, you do incremental changes.
You don't do with a sledgehammer and retire 10,000 people and shut down agencies and programs. The first thoughtful thing any administrator does, left or right, is what are the unintended consequences of any action we take? I always did that in any program. They are not only doing that, they don't care. And that's the thing that's extremely dangerous here.
There's going to be a catastrophe caused which we can't predict.
Andrew Natsios, he's a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. President Trump and Vice President Musk are just getting started. What we can learn from USAID when we're back on Today Explained.
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Chapter 5: What is the future of USAID under current administration?
If you've got an apple that's got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you've got actually just a ball of worms, It's hopeless. And USID is a ball of worms.
I just really want to underline that they can't do this. This is money that was appropriated by Congress. Legally, the president does not have the power to stop funding that was authorized and mandated by Congress. But they did it.
And even though there have been court rulings against them doing this in general, there haven't been specific USAID rulings, but there have been rulings about this general power, they do not appear to have stopped. Step two is pulling staffing.
And so if you were trying to implement, say, like a delivery of food to Sudan in the middle of their civil war and possible famine, it's possible the person doing that is an actual federal employee. It's just as possible that that person was an institutional support contractor and they largely got furloughed by their organizations and were out of the building.
Then they started in on people who were actually in the civil and foreign service, who directly worked for the government and were important in running USAID. The Monday after the inauguration, so a week after inauguration, Trump or Trump's representatives within the aid infrastructure put about 60 people at the very top level of the civil and foreign service on administrative leave.
It's like trying to run a middle school if you've put the principal and all the vice principals on leave. And so you're in a situation of like pretty serious disarray to start with. And then the people who would have like walked you through that situation are gone. And that's, I think, when people realize this isn't just sort of a temporary funding freeze.
This is like a serious effort to dismantle this agency.
Okay. So step one, pull the funding. Step two, pull the staffing. Step three?
So I think a very important part of this has just been instilling a culture of fear. One question I've had throughout this is, like, why aren't the contractors suing? And I think part of why that hasn't happened is that people are terrified that if you make yourself a problem in this moment—
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Chapter 6: How does public perception influence USAID funding decisions?
This is more or less a crank theory that the Supreme Court unanimously ruled was not a thing and not constitutionally permissible in the 1970s when Richard Nixon tried to do it. Um, USAID was a test case for can we impound things and get away with it?
And I think there was a sense of a lot of people in the Trump administration that in the first term, they were frustrated again and again by what they call the deep state, which is just federal civil servants who are apolitical and, um, are responsible for saying when something is illegal or goes against existing regulation and were often a thorn in Trump's side.
And so I think they spent the four years out of power thinking a lot about how to dismantle that element of the civil service once they got back. And USAID, I think, is one interesting illustration of how that works.
Okay, Elon Musk is out there saying there is gross waste in USAID. Some of the claims he's making are completely made up, complete fabrications, like these millions of dollars on condoms for Palestinians.
In that process, we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.
However... Do they have a point that this agency was out of control and was wasting money, was wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars?
In part because I think foreign aid is an incredibly important government function. I think it's important to spend every dollar as effectively as you can. And this has been a shared goal of USAID administrators during the Obama years. Trump's first USAID administrator, a guy named Mark Green, who was a former congressman from Wisconsin, said,
Under Samantha Power, who was Biden's, there's been just broad bipartisan agreement that not enough programs are grounded in high quality evidence like randomized control trials, that there's too much overhead with private contractors, that more programs should be run locally by specific countries rather than by Western contractors coming in. I think they made a lot of progress on that.
It's not perfect, but they launched sections like Development Innovation Ventures, which is a small unit within USAID that functions kind of like a venture capital fund and moves really fast and scales up sort of pilot programs.
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Chapter 7: What role does USAID play in US foreign relations?
Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent at Vox.com. His latest is titled The Worst Thing Trump Has Done So Far. Guess what it's about? Miles Bryan and Devin Schwartz produced the program today. Jolie Myers edited them. Laura Bullard kept it legit. And Andrea Kristen's daughter handled the mix. It's Today Explained. Today Explained
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