Are We There Yet? USAID is Shut Down By Decree. What is Next?
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
—Martin Niemöller
When I was a boy, with a few days’ notice, we moved to Washington, DC in mid-August 1968. I was 12 years old. The City was recently scarred by the riots after Martin Luther King’s death. My father had a small business in Connecticut, but it went downhill, and he went looking for a new job at age 48. It helped that he had a Harvard undergraduate degree, but it still wasn’t so easy to find good work. He was a man of talent and kindness, and he finally landed a position at the U.S Agency for International Development (“AID”). Hence our move.
On my first full day introduction to Washington, DC, it was 98 degrees, and the air was dense with humidity. It was so hot that to me it felt like the blast of an oven. After lunch at a restaurant, we were standing out on the sidewalk in Potomac Village, Maryland (where I still live and work today). I asked my mother how people survived in this place, since it was so oppressive. She replied: “air conditioning.” And so, I learned for the fist time how to cope with the city of northern charm and southern efficiency.
My father basically stuck with AID for the rest of his career, except for a brief sojourn at the State Department, and he worked his way up the ladder. He spent time doing procurement and commodity grant management, and that is where I first got the idea of becoming a government contracts lawyer. My father’s career move to Washington, DC is certainly why I ended at GWU Law School. When my father retired from AID in about 1985, he subsequently took a job with an AID government contractor. Shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with lung cancer and quickly died. Life wasn’t exactly fair to him, but AID was one of the good things. At his funeral, I spoke of the satisfaction he had in working for an agency dedicated to world good and how lucky he was to work on something so meaningful as the American foreign aid program.
With that background, I always had a soft spot for AID. I am not unbiased. It is thus with sadness that I see in just a few days the Trump Administration has laid waste to AID — it fired honorable civil servants, put up to 50- 60 AID executives on leave with pay, terrorized the remaining staff about their job security, imposed snooping hardware and then locked down their access to their computers, locked the remaining staff out of their HQ work place, and generally behaved as if the Administration is above any check or balance on its exercise of executive power. The agency is being closed. Foreign assistance has been frozen except Israel and Egypt. Secretary of State Rubio says exceptions may be made for core life saving programs, but exactly where that leaves humanitarian, economic development, counter terrorism training, and counter narcotics efforts is unclear. I guess American foreign aid programs and Twitter or X are to be run in the same manner. The end game came quickly and the President then announced that AID was riddled with “radical lunatics” and would be dismembered and closed. Its remaining functions, if any, may be incorporated back into the State Department. My father would have snickered at Trump’s reference to supposed radicals. Of course, the real object is to halt US foreign aid. It is not just America First – it is just America Only.
Why pick first on AID? If you are a bully, then you pick on the people you can bully easily. It is not like the world’s poor have lobbyists in Washington, DC to defend their interests. This was low hanging fruit for the isolationist part of the MAGA movement. But how this will make America great is mystifying to me. AID was one of those things which made America great. This agency is hardly a “ball of worms” like Elon Musk claims. Nor is this related to fraud, waste and abuse, as a White House spokesman claimed. They have no evidence of fraud, and coming from an Administration that just fired all the Inspectors General, that is really rich with irony. As for waste and abuse, it should be self-evident that sending civil servants home with pay and locking them out of their offices is itself waste and abuse of government resources and funds.
AID is a division of an executive agency and involves foreign policy – an area where the President does have more powers. He gets to organize his executive branch of government, within the bounds of Congressional appropriation and the law, and thus this attack on the bureaucracy is more likely to stick than some other executive reorganizations. But even poor AID is a creature of federal statutory origin and reorganization may well require Congressional consent. I read there are two statutes that confirm its existence and require congressional consent to reorganize it. But what a paper tiger the Republican controlled congress is — after all the end of TikTok is a statutory requirement, but it too is now in limbo due to an Executive Order. We are getting close to government by executive decree. Our system of rule of law, with checks and balances, may be soon a quaint anachronism.
But who cares about the niceties? Like other want-to-be authoritarians, this Administration thinks to make an omelet they have to break a few eggs. So what if 10,000 AID employees get trampled. And so what if many international partners get betrayed. So what if 40% of this foreign aid goes to Ukraine, and its freeze means Putin may triumph. There are potentially $40 billion in budget savings. Woohoo! We can use that for tax breaks for the wealthy. And so it goes. The way this dismemberment was done likely presages the Trump Administration dismissive and demoralizing actions towards the rest of the so-called “deep state” work force. It is going to be ugly.
If you’re a government contractor or work for one, don’t think this ugly moment is just a problem for government employees. As the foreign assistance is frozen, so are the contractors. Their employees will be furloughed. Indeed, the executive has even more authority over you, your business, or your employment status, and you have less protection than the federal bureaucracy. Most people stay silent, cozy up to power, or just hunker down. But soon it may be your turn. This is how authoritarian government works. Maybe we haven’t yet fallen entirely over that cliff, but the 12-year-old boy in me is not so sure.
As it says in the New Testament, specifically 1 Corinthians 13:11, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." As for the adult me, now I am very glad I decided not to buy that Tesla. And I doubt now there are enough MAGA acolytes interested in buying them going forward. Mr. Musk should soon reap what he has sown — withdrawn EV tax breaks, international boycotts, tariff-caused falling sales, and domestic demand slumps. Tesla can be dismembered as ruthlessly as AID. My guess is he won’t be the world’s richest man for much longer. He will just be the twit who paid too much to own Twitter.