USAID foreign staff in the dark about plans to return to US

Donald Trump campaigned on curtailing government waste and foreign aid to countries like Ukraine. Once in office, he gave billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk free rein to identify drastic government cuts as the head of a new task force called the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge.)

Trump, Musk and their allies have used USAID as a symbol of wasteful government spending, with Musk calling it “evil” and a “criminal organisation” on X.

A portion of Americans might be open to the cuts: about six in 10 US adults believed the US government spent too much on foreign aid, a March 2023 poll from the Associated Press and NORC suggested.

The US is the world’s biggest provider of humanitarian aid, but that still represents just a fraction of total federal spending.

On a tour of Central America this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio – also now acting head of USAID – urged patience and defended the changes at a staff meeting in Guatemala.

“I know it’s hard to ask for patience,” he told USAID Head of Mission Haven Cruz-Hubbard, the New York Times reported. “I know it’s hard to ask for trust, because you’ve never met me before.”

But his harsher comments towards USAID came on Fox News, when he accused the agency of “rank insubordination”.

USAID staffers told BBC the comments did not instil confidence. “We work around the clock to answer all the tasks, questions from DC, so I really don’t honestly know what he means,” a USAID employee in Central America said.

The White House and state department have highlighted foreign aid they believe does not align with the administration’s goals.

“I think what is important is the United States has to get its financial house in order for us to be able to do good anywhere in the future, and we’re in the process of doing so,” Republican congressman Mike Turner told the BBC on Thursday.

Republican Senator Jim Risch, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he supported Trump, noting that “the idea of merging USAID and the state department has been floated by nearly every administration” since 1998.

USAID programming can sometimes be “highly inefficient”, acknowledged a recently laid-off employee at a nonprofit that relied on USAID funding. She and other colleagues were let go when that funding stopped.

Asking to remain anonymous given her precarious employment situation, she said programmes can be redundant, and she had seen nongovernmental organisations make mistakes with paperwork or operations abroad. But efficiency is not behind USAID’s demise, she said.

“A lot of this is a distraction to create chaos,” the nonprofit worker said. “To distract us from what exactly? I think it’s dismantling the federal government and amassing power.”