Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Since his first day
Speaker 1: in office, President Donald Trump has taken aim at the
Speaker 1: US Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. The
Speaker 1: whole thing is a fraud, very little being put to
Speaker 1: good use. First came his executive order on January twentieth,
Speaker 1: putting a ninety day freeze on foreign assistance funded through
Speaker 1: the agency. Thousands of USAID personnel were put on administrative leave.
Speaker 1: Ngngos and contractors around the world who get funding or
Speaker 1: work with USAID staff scrambled to make sense of the order.
Speaker 1: But last week a federal judge halted Trump's order to
Speaker 1: put USAID workers on leave. We've also seen at least
Speaker 1: two other federal judges block broader attempts at freezing federal funding.
Speaker 1: As the battle over USAID's future heats up, Bloomberg reporter
Speaker 1: Simon Marx, who's based in Nairobi, says the ripple effects
Speaker 1: are already palps.
Speaker 2: A lot of people in Kenya are hopeful that some
Speaker 2: of this funding can be re established, but in a
Speaker 2: period where there's a lot of doubt, people are just
Speaker 2: putting the brakes on. So the reality on the ground
Speaker 2: is that the programs have stopped basically.
Speaker 1: After the news of Trump's order first broke, Simon visited
Speaker 1: a health clinic in Naerobi. One of the clinic's main
Speaker 1: jobs is distributing drugs to combat HIV. More than one
Speaker 1: point two million people in Kenya are being treated for
Speaker 1: the virus. Preventing its spread, managing symptoms, and combating stigma
Speaker 1: are all crucial tasks that the clinics staff perform.
Speaker 2: When we arrived at the Matari North Health Center, as
Speaker 2: we walk through the doors, there was an emergency meeting
Speaker 2: ongoing with state Civil servant staff.
Speaker 1: So that's what I say, and fourteen fels to man.
Speaker 2: And they were essentially grappling with the huge fallout from
Speaker 2: the USAID cuts. Seventeen staffers been let go. They were
Speaker 2: in a sort of state of semi crisis and disbelief.
Speaker 1: On the days Simon visited, many of the clinics staff
Speaker 1: didn't show up for work. They had been told that
Speaker 1: given Trump's order, they may not be paid.
Speaker 2: I met one nurse who said, on the first day
Speaker 2: of these cuts, she was already doing a double shift
Speaker 2: and couldn't go back to see her family.
Speaker 1: The one nazis HD years, the ones who do their
Speaker 1: testing in.
Speaker 2: Such and some of the staff worry because there had
Speaker 2: been a long queue of HIV patients line up looking
Speaker 2: for the anti retroviral drugs in a state of panic.
Speaker 1: Those Spiciens come visically.
Speaker 2: When they arrived, there was no one to administer those drugs.
Speaker 1: While Washington fights over USAID's future, the reality and communities
Speaker 1: that rely on its funding is already shifting. For the
Speaker 1: people who rely on USAID funded clinics, this faraway debate
Speaker 1: in Washington can have even life or death consequences. From
Speaker 1: Bloomberg's Washington bureau, This is the Big Take DC podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Saleamosen today on the show the ongoing battle over
Speaker 1: USAID and what the turmoil could mean for communities on
Speaker 1: the ground and American influence abroad. To understand the fight
Speaker 1: over USAID, I sat down with Bloomberg's National Security editor
Speaker 1: Nick Wattams. Nick, let's start big picture. What is USAID.
Speaker 3: USAID is the US Agency for International Development. It's sort
Speaker 3: of under the umbrella of the State Department, but it's
Speaker 3: also an independent federal agencies. And these are the guys
Speaker 3: who distribute food aid in times of disaster and crisis overseas.
Speaker 3: They also do anti HIV programs all across the continent
Speaker 3: of Africa and elsewhere. It's also a way to prevent pandemics.
Speaker 3: So USAADA is involved in diase tracking in a lot
Speaker 3: of countries, particularly in Africa, and they launch vaccination campaigns.
Speaker 3: They also give farmers advice and instruction on how to
Speaker 3: plant crops better in situations where there's drought. So a
Speaker 3: whole range of operations that go from immediate disastered relief
Speaker 3: to sort of broader cultural exchange and community programs. And
Speaker 3: the annual budget is about forty billion dollars a year.
Speaker 1: So how did the US become such a critical source
Speaker 1: of international aid here?
Speaker 3: Overall? When you speak about pure dollars, the US contributes
Speaker 3: more foreign aid overseas than any other country in the world.
Speaker 3: When you talk about it as a percentage of GDP,
Speaker 3: the US is actually very very far down the list.
Speaker 3: But there is also a very heavy soft power component,
Speaker 3: so trying to use civil society programs, libraries, interaction with
Speaker 3: people often poor pus in these countries as a way
Speaker 3: to extend SELT power and get people to like them.
Speaker 3: And there's a geo strategic element there of doing competition
Speaker 3: with China, get people to like the US more than
Speaker 3: they like other countries.
Speaker 1: Trump took action essentially to freeze the organization. Explain what
Speaker 1: he did.
Speaker 3: President Trump essentially shut down USAID entirely through the State
Speaker 3: Department and also through some of his executive orders put
Speaker 3: a blanket freeze on US foreign aid, with some exceptions
Speaker 3: for life saving treatments, so all of those programs were halted.
Speaker 3: There are about ten thousand people who work for USAID.
Speaker 3: That includes Americans foreign service officers, but also local staff
Speaker 3: and countries all around the world. They basically put all
Speaker 3: the Americans they could on administrative leave, so paying them
Speaker 3: but telling them not to come to the office, and
Speaker 3: then did even very symbolic things like they took the
Speaker 3: name US Agency for International Development off of the building
Speaker 3: where it's headquartered. People were cut off from their email accounts,
Speaker 3: finding it impossible to communicate or even to get direction.
Speaker 3: So within a very short period of time, they basically
Speaker 3: ground USAID.
Speaker 1: To a halt. And what's the ultimate goal that Trump
Speaker 1: has presented for doing all of this?
Speaker 3: His claim and Elon Musk's claim because his DOGE group
Speaker 3: has been central to the work to freeze USAID. What
Speaker 3: they claim is that USAID became a hotbed for some
Speaker 3: of the DEI and progressive leaning initiatives that they really
Speaker 3: want to get rid of. They also claimed that USAID
Speaker 3: had essentially become a rogue agency where people were implementing
Speaker 3: these programs and despite being told to stop, were refusing
Speaker 3: to do so. We had one report where USAID staff
Speaker 3: were brought into a room with some of the political
Speaker 3: appointees who had been brought in and were told, listen,
Speaker 3: we know you're funding abortions, we know you're funding transgender surgery.
Speaker 3: You need to come clean on that and stop hiding it.
Speaker 3: And their response was, we do not do that. That's
Speaker 3: not part of USAID's remit. And the response was essentially,
Speaker 3: we know you're lying. And then they also just more
Speaker 3: broadly went through USAID's accounts and said that there was
Speaker 3: a ton of waste and fraud in there where they
Speaker 3: felt that those programs were ineffective, weren't going to produce anything,
Speaker 3: and so sort of cast it both as a rogue
Speaker 3: agency and also as an agency that was spending money
Speaker 3: in a wasteful way.
Speaker 1: Nick, why is Trump taking aim at this agency? In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, USAID's budget made up about one point
Speaker 1: two percent of overall government spending.
Speaker 3: There are several things happening here. One is that it's
Speaker 3: an easy target. They do have programs focused on priorities
Speaker 3: of democratic administrations, such as climate change, transgender rights, outreach
Speaker 3: to LGBTQ communities. It's also a small target. If DOGE
Speaker 3: and President Trump are going to go after the Pentagon,
Speaker 3: for example, or Treasury or a bigger agency, that's going
Speaker 3: to be a bigger challenge because there are just so
Speaker 3: many more people and so many more equities involved from
Speaker 3: folks who may have a stake in keeping those agencies alive.
Speaker 3: But it also reflects a bigger issue, which is that
Speaker 3: President Trump and a lot of Republicans, particularly those involved
Speaker 3: in Project twenty twenty five, want to get away from
Speaker 3: this idea of aid for aid's sake, so you put
Speaker 3: grain on a ship and it goes and helps a
Speaker 3: community that's suffering from a catastrophe. They want aid that's
Speaker 3: more economically driven, public private partnerships, where you have US
Speaker 3: companies or you have an investment driven model rather than
Speaker 3: a pure aid model.
Speaker 1: So Elon Musk is helping the president assess government agencies,
Speaker 1: and he came out and called USAAD evil. Do we
Speaker 1: know what his involvement was in the decision.
Speaker 3: Initially, what happened was that he deployed several people to
Speaker 3: USAID to try to essentially gain access to its computer systems,
Speaker 3: and there was a standoff early on where they tried
Speaker 3: to get access to classified information in a secure area
Speaker 3: of USAID and two security employees tried to stop them,
Speaker 3: and there was actually a confrontation where they said, you
Speaker 3: can't come in here. You don't have the appropriate clearances.
Speaker 3: This is not legal, and they were essentially told that's
Speaker 3: not the case. We do have the right clearances, and
Speaker 3: those people were essentially swept aside. So Doge was involved
Speaker 3: in this from the very beginning. But then there came
Speaker 3: to be this huge online pileon where people were going
Speaker 3: through all of USAID's records in terms of what it spent,
Speaker 3: because this is all public information. I mean, USAID broadcasts
Speaker 3: to the world on its website well before the website
Speaker 3: got shut down, all the programs it does. So then
Speaker 3: there was this pilon where Netizin's citizens sleuths were sort
Speaker 3: of going going through USAID's books and pointing out programs
Speaker 3: that they felt were inappropriate or irrelevant, So it had
Speaker 3: the snowball.
Speaker 1: Effect after the break. What the legal challenges to Trump's
Speaker 1: actions could mean for USAID's future, and what a world
Speaker 1: without American leadership on humanitarian aid could look like. Nick,
Speaker 1: you and I covered the first Trump term together. We
Speaker 1: kind of know a little bit about reading the tea
Speaker 1: leaves of how different actions reveal something about how decisions
Speaker 1: are made in the White House. What can you tell
Speaker 1: us about how Trump is getting advice and what kinds
Speaker 1: of conversations you think might be happening inside the administration
Speaker 1: over USAD and what it tells us about how they
Speaker 1: might handle other agencies.
Speaker 3: One of the things about USAID that's so fascinating, and
Speaker 3: I've had sources at USAID for years. USAID was a
Speaker 3: tool under the first Trump administration, particularly through Trump's daughter Ivanka,
Speaker 3: who launched federally funded women's programs using USAID. So at
Speaker 3: that time, the Trump administration in the first term saw
Speaker 3: value in USAID. Obviously that's changed. He's essentially given Doge
Speaker 3: and his lieutenant's free reign to do what they want
Speaker 3: to this agency. The other issue that's really fascinating to
Speaker 3: me is there may be a legal battle over whether
Speaker 3: USAID as a congressionally mandated agency can be destroyed in
Speaker 3: this way. But what do you do when you essentially
Speaker 3: put people in charge of the agency who believe it
Speaker 3: should be destroyed. So you can have a court say yes,
Speaker 3: USAID should stay in existence, but then you install staff
Speaker 3: at the top of the agency who essentially want to
Speaker 3: make it defunct, so it becomes almost like a zombie
Speaker 3: agency where it's the only people who are being allowed
Speaker 3: to report to work are staff who believe it should
Speaker 3: not exist. So we still haven't seen how that's going
Speaker 3: to play out because courts have so far tried to
Speaker 3: block the President from essentially putting the entire agency on
Speaker 3: administrative leave, but that appears to be what their strategy is, and.
Speaker 1: What are you watching for next in that case.
Speaker 3: It'll be interesting to see what happens in terms of
Speaker 3: whether the administration agrees to essentially put people back to
Speaker 3: work as courts have ordered. You're also going to start
Speaker 3: to see some real aftershocks here, and it'll be interesting
Speaker 3: to see what happens with Congress and how much pressure
Speaker 3: they bring to bear. A huge element of what USAID
Speaker 3: does is it buys often surplus crops from US farmers
Speaker 3: hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crops, puts those
Speaker 3: on ships and sends them to disaster zones or places
Speaker 3: in need. A lot of those shipments have been suspended
Speaker 3: or are in limbo or in the process of being canceled.
Speaker 3: We've seen some rumblings from my senator in Kansas, for example,
Speaker 3: where they have constituents, they have farmers who are not
Speaker 3: getting paid or who are watching these crops get spoiled
Speaker 3: while they await pickup. We've seen some indication that they're
Speaker 3: willing to speak up a little bit on X, but
Speaker 3: really not go to battle with the Trump administration. And
Speaker 3: then the final one I would say is just does
Speaker 3: this cost cutting actually work. There's some indication that it
Speaker 3: will actually be more expensive to the US taxpayer to
Speaker 3: defund the USAID because you have all of these staff
Speaker 3: overseas they are now going to need to be brought home.
Speaker 3: You have contracts that have to be canceled. There are
Speaker 3: going to be lawsuits, There's going to be millions and
Speaker 3: millions of dollars in US government assets all overseas. So
Speaker 3: you could see a scenario where the financial waste from
Speaker 3: destroying USAID actually in the end comes to cost more
Speaker 3: than the cuts that they had envisioned.
Speaker 1: Nick, at the start of our conversation, you mentioned the
Speaker 1: soft power element and how usad's work also benefits America
Speaker 1: in certain ways. What kind of soft power vacuum do
Speaker 1: you think could be created globally?
Speaker 3: I think that's a very real concern. I mean, this
Speaker 3: has fit a broader approach by the Trump administration that
Speaker 3: it seems very clear they don't believe in soft power
Speaker 3: the way that successive administration is basically dating back to
Speaker 3: the Cold War believed in. You have USAID and a
Speaker 3: lot of these countries providing life saving food and medicine,
Speaker 3: and very intentionally, a lot of the sacks that carry
Speaker 3: that grain or the cans of food, whatever it may be,
Speaker 3: are labeled with American flags or USAID. So there's a
Speaker 3: direct correlation that the US government has been very intentional
Speaker 3: about that, says, Hey, it's the United States government that's
Speaker 3: providing this. So the absence of that obviously gives other
Speaker 3: countries like China the opportunity to step into the gap.
Speaker 3: But then there's also just the negative effects. Hey, we
Speaker 3: were dependent on the United States and then they pulled
Speaker 3: out we don't see them anymore. They abandoned us.
Speaker 1: What could that mean for American influence the longer term?
Speaker 3: Well, if you're foreign government and the US comes and says, okay,
Speaker 3: we have all of this aid we want to give
Speaker 3: to you, but as part of our conversations, we also
Speaker 3: want to share our values or expect a certain adherence
Speaker 3: to values. And then the US is suddenly out of
Speaker 3: that situation. You have another country that doesn't put as
Speaker 3: much of a priority on those issues or actively opposes
Speaker 3: some of those issues. Maybe it's climate change, maybe it's
Speaker 3: LGBTQ issues, and so that silence will be filled by others.
Speaker 3: So that's the real concern there.
Speaker 1: Well, Nick, thanks so much for joining in unpacking all
Speaker 1: of us with me.
Speaker 3: My pleasure.
Speaker 1: On Tuesday, President Trump and Elon Musk held a press
Speaker 1: conference in the Oval Office, and they doubled down on
Speaker 1: their critiques of usaid.
Speaker 2: But overall, you say, what does the bank of the buck?
Speaker 2: I would say it was not very good.
Speaker 1: As I said, much as incompetence and much as dishonesty.
Speaker 2: We have to catch it.
Speaker 1: On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the President's advisors have discussed
Speaker 1: moving usaad funds to a government run agency created during
Speaker 1: Trump's first term. That agency, the US International Development Finance Corporation,
Speaker 1: uses taxpayer dollars to invest in private sector projects overseas.
Speaker 1: It's set to be run by the son of private
Speaker 1: equity investor Leon Black and Today, protesters disrupted a congressional
Speaker 1: hearing over USAID spending, calling for a full restoration of
Speaker 1: money for AIDS treatment. A Republican and congressmen rebutted, saying
Speaker 1: that funding was exempt and had already been restored, something
Speaker 1: that several AID groups disputed, and with other court rulings
Speaker 1: on the horizon, the battle continues. This is the Big
Speaker 1: Take DC from Bloomberg News. I'm Salaia Moosen. This episode
Speaker 1: was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards,
Speaker 1: Greg White, and Ian Marlow. It was fact checked by
Speaker 1: Audreyan Atapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sugira.
Speaker 1: Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven and our senior editor
Speaker 1: is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beemster Bower.
Speaker 1: Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked
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