So much has happened in the past few weeks. And we’ve seen a speed game of sorts being played by the Trump administration to try to act as rapidly as possible to rework the administrative state of the government. One example of that is the attempts to end the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The letters have even been taken off of the building. But is any of this even legal and what are the implications of gutting USAID? Jeremy Konyndk is the president at Refugees International. He served as a senior official at USAID in the Obama and Biden administrations. Konyndk joins WITHpod to discuss progress that has already been undone, diplomatic repercussions, the effects on American soft power and the uncertain future of USAID.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Jeremy Konyndyk: This is already killing people, like this is no kidding killing people. The numbers are not yet huge, but if it continues, they will become huge because USAID supports massive numbers of people around the world.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
There is so much going on and so quickly that we’ve been sort of struggling to keep up on the show. And I thought that the podcast might be a useful place to take a little more time with some of the developments that we’ve been dealing with in the first month of the new Trump administration, which has been people use the metaphor of a blitzkrieg probably excessively, but the whole point of a blitzkrieg is to sort of take your forces and push through very rapidly in one spot so as to break through the lines of defenses.
And this is kind of like that, it is an attempt at essentially using speed of aggression more than thought-out tactics, more than even overwhelming force. It’s really a sort of speed game to try to act with a relatively small group of people as rapidly as possible to overwhelm the institutional defenses of the constitutional order of the administrative state, of the federal civil service, etc.
The place where that is being deployed most viciously acutely, and I think with the highest human cost up to this point when I’m talking to you on February 14th, which is when I’m recording this, and it’s important for me to put a timestamp, because God knows what happens between now and when you hear this.
But when I’m talking to you now, I think the place that’s been the highest level of material harm to human beings has been at USAID. There’s a ton of misinformation floating around USAID. And I just wanted to talk to someone who had spent some time there, knew the agency about what is USAID, what was it like before, how partisan was it, how much did changes happen from administration to administration? Is it filled with like impertinent and insubordinate libs who wouldn’t do what a new administration says? And so, Jeremy Konyndyk, who’s a friend of the show, he’s been on a lot, he’s President of Refugees International, a massive global NGO, he’s a former senior official at USAID in the Obama and Biden administrations, and he joins us today. Jeremy, good to have you.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Thanks so much, Chris. Good to be here.
Chris Hayes: Okay. Can we start with a little USAID 101 for people that I guess I knew about it, I’ve known people that worked with and around them, I guess I’m sort of learning more as it’s being dismantled, what is it?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, everyone is kind of gaining a new appreciation for all the great things USAID does once we learned that they’re being canceled. So, USAID is the government’s principal foreign development and humanitarian assistance agency. It was created initially in 1961 during the Cold War by President Kennedy.
He issued an executive order saying, “We need to systematize how we do and how we provide foreign aid abroad following the great successes of the Marshall Plan, seeing the important role that aid could play and the need to institutionalize that.”
And so, it goes on through the Cold War. It has a major kind of moment after the end of the Cold War where Congress and the Clinton administration looked at this agency and say, “Okay, Cold War is over, do we still need this thing or should we reshape it?”
They do shrink it somewhat, but they also, in 1998, in that law, institutionalized it permanently in law. So, the Congress establishes it as a federal standing independent federal agency and law in ‘98, but also shrinks it somewhat.
And there’s this feeling that, “Well, Cold War, peace dividend, we don’t need this thing as much anymore,” and then 9-11 happens. The U.S. goes to war in Iraq, the U.S. goes to war in Afghanistan. And there is this sort of bipartisan recognition at that point that whatever you think of the wisdom of how those wars were conducted, that it was a major strategic disadvantage to have a weak development agency, which it was at that time, it was weakened by staff cuts and by lack of political support.
And so, interestingly, you actually have George Bush from about 2005-2006 onward lead a push to really strengthen it and build it up with a lot of Democratic support because Bush sees, “Gosh, there are some things the military is just not good at, that the government needs to be able to do.”
He sees that on an HIV front. He establishes what is now called the PEPFAR program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, to combat the global scourge of HIV, one of the most successful government programs ever.
That has saved 25 million lives over 20 years. USAID is one of kind of the main vehicles for that. And we need to be able to rebuild countries after war, support democratic transitions, provide humanitarian assistance. So, he really invests in rebuilding it. And so, for about 15 years, we had a lot of bipartisan support for what USAID did until now.
Chris Hayes: One thing I think is important to highlight here in this through line, is it does really good humanitarian stuff, I mean, truly excellent things, but its logic has always been a projection of American soft power.
It’s not like Kennedy starts it in 1961 out of the kindness of his heart. We are in competition throughout the global South with the Soviet world, right? I mean, that’s the logic of it from the beginning.
Jeremy Konyndyk: There is always this kind of interplay within the work of USAID between how much of it is just pure kind of U.S. hard interests and how much of it is doing good in the world.
And the beauty of USAID is that often, those things can align. And I think what differentiates U.S. humanitarian and development assistance from, say, how China engages in development cooperations, China is fundamentally extractive. They will provide development financing, but they do that because they want something from the country. We do it much more in a kind of partnership mode without those kinds of political strings attached. And that’s actually something that Trump has said he doesn’t like.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: He doesn’t put it this way. But functionally, what he’s describing that he wants to see would look a lot more like how China engages in the world.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I think generally, he likes the Chinese model of everything.
Jeremy Konyndyk: He does, yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that, you know what I mean, like pure sort of power politics.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Totally.
Chris Hayes: One party control, purely transactional, like that is kind of his worldview and set of aspirations.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, and that’s extended here as well.
Chris Hayes: Now, I got to say, I covered the campaign pretty closely, I think it’s fair to say for my job. And I also covered Musk and I know full well that if you ask Americans, “Should we cut foreign aid,” they say, yes. If you ask them how much of the budget is, they say, a certain number like 25% —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — or something ludicrous. It’s like 1%.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, I know that foreign aid is preserved a little bit by a bipartisan consensus that might be untethered from democratic volition, that the democratic volition such as it is, is totally untethered from the reality.
And I covered the campaign and I know there’s a kind of American first train. I will admit that I did not think Elon Musk personally dismantling USAID in the first week was at all on the horizon. Did you?
Jeremy Konyndyk: I will admit, I did not see that coming either. No, the speculation right up until January, 20 and even for a couple days after because where it really dropped was January 24 when they issued this global order to stop all aid programs all over the world.
Nobody saw that coming. We were expecting a review, fully expecting that there would be an attempt to substantially cut for an aid spending. But the kind of question was, “Well, who are they going to put in charge of the agency? Is it going to be someone who fundamentally believes in the mission of the agency,” even if they are going to approach that in a very different way than the prior administration.
This whole thing that if you had said that Elon Musk is going to use his Twitter account to run a disinformation campaign to cover for the total destruction of U.S. foreign assistance, it would’ve just sounded like some sort of conspiracy theory.
Chris Hayes: But that’s exactly what’s happened?
Jeremy Konyndyk: But that’s exactly what’s happened. Yes, he has been running a firehose of disinformation to basically create a pretext in the public mind and certainly in the minds of Republicans in Congress or at least trying to kind of intimidate Republicans in Congress into getting out of the way while they go about then destroying the agency.
Chris Hayes: Now, they’ve taken the letters off the building. They want to fire 90%. They’re saying they’re going to incorporate it back into state, right?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: All these things have happened.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Again, I want to talk a little bit about what’s been happening, because I imagine you’re connected to people there and have a pretty good sense of this. None of this is legal. I mean, I really, I feel so dumb and naïve, like blowing the whistle and being like, “You can’t do this.” But Congress created this agency as an independent agency by statute.
Jeremy Konyndyk: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: It cannot be unilaterally dismantled by executive order.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Well, we’re about to learn if that’s true, right? I mean, this is what I think is so critical for people to understand, even if you don’t care about foreign aid at all, even if you virulently disagree that we should provide foreign.
This is a test case for what they could do to any part of the federal government because what they have done here is use this campaign, this real firehose of disinformation. And we can talk about some of the specific lies.
But what is really striking is if you look at almost any example that they have put out there to justify characterizing the agency as criminal characterizing these like slanderous allegations, like about the staff and so on, they’re all bullshit, they’re all bullshit.
The whole Gaza condoms thing is the perfect example of that. They spent a week talking about $50 million of condoms that they had stopped from going to Gaza. So, I have a background in relief response in public health, and the first thing that popped into my mind was, I wonder how many condoms that would actually buy.
So, I reached out to a few folks. And the U.S. pays about 4 cents to 5 cents per condom when they both purchase condoms. So, by that, that’s at least a billion condoms. There was no world in which they found a billion condoms that were about to go to Gaza. And sure enough, a week later, Elon Musk gets challenged on it in the Oval Office and says, “Well, yes, you can’t believe everything I say, basically.”
Chris Hayes: Yes. He says, “I’m going to get some things wrong. I’m knocking about a thousand.”
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes. “You should check what I’m saying.” But that’s the game, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Like they are trying to use that to create an atmosphere that then gives them kind of a permission structure to ignore the law. And so, you can destroy an agency really fast if you can ignore the law, and that’s what they’re piloting here.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: There are people around the world who work for USAID.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Talk to me a little bit about who works for USAID, like who are these people?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, yes. Well, so, I ran the Disaster Response Office there in the Obama administration, and this is the office that probably the most visible part of what USAID does. After an earthquake, we would send out the Search and Rescue teams.
So, we would deploy the Search and Rescue teams to Haiti after the Haiti earthquake or we would send the military out after the super typhoon in the Philippines in 2013. We oversaw the response to and led the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-2015. Those are when USAID is in the headlines, it’s usually that office.
And so, in that office, you have a lot of former military because we deal a lot with the military, we do a lot of logistics in that office. And so, interestingly, a lot of guys who would’ve interacted with USAID while they were in the military and liked what they saw and decided they wanted to come work there. We had a volcanologist on staff because part of what we did was monitoring volcano eruptions.
Chris Hayes: Oh. It’s like —
Jeremy Konyndyk: It was really cool, like getting volcanologist.
Chris Hayes: Volcanologist.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right, it’s very cool.
Chris Hayes: I think that’s the first time that word has ever organically popped up in a conversation I’ve had.
Jeremy Konyndyk: I try to make it organically pop up whenever I can, to be honest. But it’s like really cool. So you have technical experts in all of these different areas of humanitarian response, whether that’s nutrition, health care violence against women, feeding programs, water programs, amazing technical experts on all of these things.
You have logisticians, you have program officers who kind of keep the money flowing and oversee the programs. You have response teams that deploy out after an emergency, a really amazing infrastructure there.
If you zoom over to the other part of the agency that I know quite well, the Global Health Bureau, which is the other part that I’ve worked most closely with when I was leading the COVID response there in the first couple years of the Biden administration.
So, you have amazing experts in predictive health analytics. You have amazing experts in every disease you can think of, virologists, experts in TB, huge office to combat HIV. And go over to the education office, you have similar capability in education. There’s a really cool unit called the Office of Transition Initiatives that focuses on political transitions and supporting democratic movements and supporting civil society.
So, all of these different kind of functions of the agency, big agricultural section as well, where they blend technical expertise with the ability to make grants and basically put out money, grants and contracts, to advance programs around those areas.
And that’s the kind of core of what USAID does is those kind of targeted programs with partner organizations, whether that’s an NGO or sometimes for-profit contractor that will then implement the agriculture program or the disaster relief program, or the HIV program under the oversight of those experts at USAID.
Chris Hayes: You said something at the beginning of this answer that I just want to linger on a second, and I think we’ll spend some time on the show on it tonight, but about a lot of former military folks.
And one of the things that seems worthwhile to note here, I think about a third of all federal workers or veterans, there are active programs, and indeed, sometimes like essentially affirmative action, for lack of a better word. There are, woven into the hiring practices, a affirmative advantage to being a veteran when you’re hired for federal programs and also tons of veterans, when they get out of the service, want to keep serving their country.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I think in the ones that I’ve met who worked in foreign aid, they like the thrill of the logistics and being abroad and like all this stuff is they’re good at it and it’s speaking to a part of them that’s mission-driven where they can take those skills and they can transfer them.
And one of the things I think is not quite hitting home is that like Musk and Trump think they’re firing the deep state libs, but they’re basically mass firing veterans right now, like mass firing and mass firing veterans.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes. I mean, as you say, almost by definition, given how much there is a veteran’s preference in hiring across the government, and there is that veteran’s preference. I’ll also say the veterans that I had on my teams at USAID were fabulous.
Chris Hayes: Totally. Let me just say, I use the word affirmative action because I don’t —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: — think it has any negative connotations, like I actually think it’s good.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Hundred percent.
Chris Hayes: So.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Hundred percent, hundred percent. Yes. And they were great. And we had a unit actually, and this was often how they would get their start with USAID, we had a liaison unit because we would need to deploy the military or kind of with the military so frequently. And they are such different languages between —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — humanitarian response and military operations. So, we had a whole team of people whose job was to basically make that work, who are mostly former military, and they would do trainings for the military, so the military kind of knew our systems and we knew theirs and we could deploy smoothly together. And then they would then go from there to a lot of different roles in the organization and they were often the ones leading and working on frontline disaster response.
Chris Hayes: So, you’ve got these people both in Washington and around the world doing this. There’s grant-making happening. When Congress gives USAID a budget, does it give it just a top-line for the agency or does it give it stuff underneath that top-line for different programs?
Jeremy Konyndyk: This is one of my favorite recent misconceptions about the agency. And you heard Stephen Miller this last weekend said, “USAID is just a giant Marxist slush fund or something to that effect,” which to anyone working in the agency is like every word of that is genuinely hilarious. But the slush fund piece is the funniest part because the whole experience of working at USAID is working under intense congressional scrutiny.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Jeremy Konyndyk: USAID is one of the most, if not the most heavily scrutinized federal agencies. And the budget of USAID is written by Congress. I think it’s really important people understand this. It’s not like they give a check to USAID and go say, “Go figure out how to spend this.”
Chris Hayes: Yes. Enjoy, go to town.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, exactly. I mean, that is what Elon seems to think. I think he doesn’t understand anything about how the government actually works and I think he believes while they just have all this money and they give it to their friends. And maybe that kind of tells us something about how his mind works. But —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — the way it actually happens, USAID gives a budget proposal to the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. They cut it down, they send it off to Congress, Congress then basically throws that out most of the time and says, “We’re going to write what we want to write.” Congress writes the budget. They heavily earmark USAID, earmark in the sense of giving specific funding directives of, “You have to spend this much on education, you have to spend this much on health, you have to spend this much on humanitarian, and so on and so on.”
So then USAID gets that back. And then before USAID can spend that, they have to go back to Congress again and say, “Okay, then within that amount you told us to spend on education, here are the details of how we’re going to program that money.”
Chris Hayes: Really?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Oh, yes.
Chris Hayes: So, even the —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Oh, yes.
Chris Hayes: — section top-line.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Oh, yes, is not enough. Oh, Chris, it’s more flexible on the humanitarian stuff, which it has to be because that’s a contingency account.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And there’s just a ton of communication in real-time with congressional staff —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — about how we’re spending that. But when I was working on COVID, so the American Rescue Plan money that we got, which was also basically emergency money, because we were trying to fight a pandemic, after we got that money, we had to go back to Congress and say, “Okay, here is a congressional notification, this $500 million we’re planning to spend across these countries on these purposes.”
And before we could actually go forward with that, Congress had to sign off, four congressional committees, two appropriations in the House and the Foreign Relations and the Foreign Affairs in the House and Senate.
So, you have to have four congressional committees with a majority and a minority like the ranking and the majority leader in each of those committees sign off on pretty much every dollar that USAID spends.
Chris Hayes: It’s just insane —
Jeremy Konyndyk: It’s insane.
Chris Hayes: — that this thing that is so controlled, rightly, I mean, it’s U.S. Constitution, it’s Article I, they control the purse strings. Like, think about it the other way around. What if a president came in and said, “I’m going to double your budget unilaterally”?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, you couldn’t do that.
Jeremy Konyndyk: No.
Chris Hayes: What if the president came in and said, “I don’t think we need a state department, I don’t think we need a DOD.”
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right.
Chris Hayes: “I’m getting rid of DHS. DHS is new, it’s not in the Constitution, we made it after 9-11, I think it’s ridiculous, I’m getting rid of DHS.” Like —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — these are the stakes with USAID, right, like this.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, right.
Chris Hayes: If they can do this, if they can just say, “Okay, well, yes.” Congress, like they wrote this budget, they directed USAID to spend these amounts of money on these things. They directed USAID to exist, to have these functions. We don’t like that. The president’s policy says that he doesn’t like that. And this is what they’re doing right now in the internal communications.
And in some of their arguments to the court, they are saying, “Well, the president was elected. This is contradictory to the president’s policy therefore we’re not going to do it.” To put it mildly, that is not how the Constitution works. And if they get away with it here then that is a template that they are going to definitely export elsewhere.
You talked a little bit about the structure of the agency, the people there. There’s been amazing reporting on things in the field, I mean, people that are in the middle of clinical trials in which they have devices inside their bodies.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, horrifying —
Chris Hayes: People showing up to their clinics, a woman who was in Southeast Asia, I forget which country who essentially at a clinic where she was receiving oxygen, that clinic closed, she died subsequently. What’s the sort of ground level effect of this? And I should say, a federal judge has reversed, has temporarily stayed that funding freeze basically saying like, “It’s not clear to me, this is at all lawful (sp?). But, again, federal judges have done that before and it’s very unclear the level of compliance it’s coming from —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the DOGE homies hanging out and in the back end of the payment systems, whether that money starts flowing again.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, exactly. So human impact, you’ve mentioned a few of them, it was a refugee in Thailand who was not able to get her routine medical treatment and passed because her clinic closed.
So, important to understand first, this is already killing people, like this is no kidding killing people. The numbers are not yet huge, but if it continues, they will become huge because USAID supports massive numbers of people around the world.
So, to put some of that into perspective, 20 million people around the world are on antiretroviral treatment, supported by the U.S. government to keep their HIV infection suppressed.
Your HIV infection can rebound under a month if you are disrupted from treatment. And so, that is potentially 20 million people who could be at risk of HIV rebound, at great risk to their own health but also at risk of then spreading the virus because when you are suppressed, you also mostly can’t spread it. So that wouldn’t just risk those people. It risks huge numbers of other people who could be infected as a result of letting that transmission get back out of control again.
There was an HIV vaccine trial that was about to start in eight different countries across Africa that was supported by USAID. That had to be put on hold and potentially canceled if they do move forward with canceling all this funding.
Think of the transformative potential of an HIV vaccine. Mindboggling to think of the benefit that could do. Now, that opportunity could be lost. On the humanitarian side, the U.S. is the biggest humanitarian donor in the world, provides about half of global food aid in the world.
A lot of that is bought from U.S. farmers. About $2 billion a year of that is bought from U.S. farmers. A lot of that is now stopped in the pipeline and not moving, the food is not getting distributed.
There have been Stop Work Orders sent to the world food program and to many of those NGOs. And there was a waiver issued. There was a waiver issued by Secretary Rubio for humanitarian lifesaving programs and for HIV programs. But the problem is, for that waiver to be more than words on paper, you have to have a machine underneath them, mechanism underneath it —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — to actually do the doing. And so, that’s what they’re wrecking, right? So, if the whole agency is dead.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: If all the logistical structure of the agency —
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — to deliver anything is dead and then you individually give waivers to specific programs, they can’t rely on the rest of the structure of the organization to do it.
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And a couple examples of just how careless and clumsy this is even with respect to their own interests. When they were doing some of the initial Stop Work Orders for the first phase of this freeze, they were doing it alphabetically and they got to one of the major contractors, a group called Credence, so they were in the seas.
Well, Credence was the organization that was employing a lot of the contractors who were then doing the doing. So, suddenly, they couldn’t send the letters out anymore because they just accidentally fired the people sending out the letters by freezing that contract.
And they realized this just in time apparently, but there’s a system called Phoenix, which is the financial management system for USAID, they nearly canceled the Phoenix contract not realizing that they were about to do that. And that would’ve just completely ended any ability to do financial management of any foreign aid.
So, like, you have these guys just walking around in dark rooms swinging sledgehammers and having no idea what they’re hitting because they don’t fundamentally care, they just think it all needs to be burned down.
Chris Hayes: No, they want to do demo. I mean, I had a guy, I was —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Not this?
Chris Hayes: Yes, they’re doing demo. You can give that job to the least skilled guy on the crew.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And that’s what they’re doing basically with the thing (sp?). I mean, I’ve heard some crazy stories too about this, like the sort of hunting for wokeness, including programs that are geared, you said, violence against women.
Like, I don’t think most Americans think of the U.S. funding programs to protect or end violence against women, survivors of violence against women, as some coastal academic (INAUDIBLE) wokeness.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: I think most Americans think that preventing sex trafficking, stopping women from being victims of sexual assault and domestic violence is like a core thing. It’s not some maybe fashionable, slightly, oh, out the edge thing. But my understanding is like, those are some of the programs that are getting hunted.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And words having to do with them are getting pulled from programs.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Totally, yes, absolutely. Gender is a word they hate, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: They hate the word gender. Well, you have a whole sector of activity called gender-based violence. And I’ve —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — worked a lot on those programs. I was an aid worker in West Africa for a few years in the early 2000s. And it was right after there’d been a huge scandal of widespread sexual abuse by some aid workers who were using their ability, kind of their control over aid resources to demand sexual favors of recipients.
It was a huge scandal in the AIDS sector 20 years ago. And it spawned the creation of tons of new programming and tons of new safeguards to prevent that. And we kind of collectively call that gender-based violence or GBV programming.
I wonder where that will go because you can’t talk about gender and they are doing what seemed to be like keyword searches to determine what they’re going to kill off. But what these programs do is they save women’s lives. They save them and try to avert harm against them, help them to avoid some of the risks and to provide them services when they are harmed.
That is not a partisan thing. I don’t think it’s something that Middle America would be at all offended by, but this is the risk when they’re operating as clumsy as they are.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: Talk a little bit about the people that work in the field. I mean, we’ve heard some, like, genuine horror stories. People basically called back at a moment’s notice from places that are relatively unstable, Democratic Republic of the Congo being one particular horror story there of sort of trying to get out and being essentially abandoned.
But it just seems like these are not people that are like, if you’re working as a USAID worker in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, you’re not doing it for the salary, like you are in it, you are hard core for the mission, like anyone that’s out there doing this work does it because they believe in it. And now, they’re being just messed with at an unreal level.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And this is one of the most just offensive elements of all of this, is this slander and the mistreatment that’s been directed at USAID personnel. When I was overseeing the Ebola response and you think back to the fear that we felt even in this country in 2014 when we got an Ebola case here, the whole country went crazy for a couple of months, fearful over that. And meanwhile, I was directing my team members to go —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — out to Liberia and they were not resisting that. I’m not going to say there was not fear, there was absolutely fear on the team, but they went in because they really believed in it.
And we put a lot of safeguards in place and all of that, but they were not hesitant to go and do the mission. And so, I think that is the first thing to understand, is that the people who work at USAID and particularly, those who were serving overseas, are extraordinarily mission-driven.
They are doing this out of a really deep belief and a really deep commitment to their programs. And it is intensely painful for them right now both the impact on their own lives but also to watch the things they’ve built that they know save lives be destroyed.
They’re being treated incredibly badly right now. There was a point a couple weeks ago when all of the overseas contractors which are basically people who are not federal employees but they are contracted directly by USAID, and a lot of the workforce are on that kind of a model because it’s an easier kind of quicker contingency way to hire people.
They just all had their email turned off. So there were people stranded overseas who were the day before had had working badges, working diplomatic passports and were under embassy security protection, all of that routes through your email identity, your online identity.
Suddenly their email didn’t work. They were cut off from that so they didn’t have a way to communicate with the embassy. I mean, I saw photos of the apps. So, if you’re a U.S. official overseas in a dangerous place, you will have an app on your phone, that’s basically your rescue app, that if you go into that, we send an alert through that, the embassy will know you’re in trouble, they will deploy a team to come and try and track you down. That stopped working because that didn’t sync to people’s email.
Chris Hayes: Jesus.
Jeremy Konyndyk: I mean, people were terrified. They really felt stranded and abandoned by their government. And this is the reality. And again, I don’t think that Pete Marocco, the guy running this at the State Department cares.
Chris Hayes: Oh, the guy who was in the Capitol on January 6th, that guy, that Pete Marocco?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Allegedly, yes.
Chris Hayes: Allegedly?
Jeremy Konyndyk: But that guy, yes, that guy, and I mean, that’s an important element of all this, like for as much as Rubio is trying to maintain publicly that they’re doing this in a responsible way and it is a real review, behind the scenes, you’ve got Pete Marocco just destroying everything he can as quickly as he can, just like you said earlier, because they need to speed run this in order to get away with it.
Chris Hayes: So, we’ve talked about the kind of constitutional implications, the humanitarian implications for the agency. There’s international implications here too, like I’ve seen a few —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — photos floating around of, like, China aid vehicles, which is like their version of USAID in —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — spaces. There’s been actual reporting saying, they’ve been reaching out saying, “We’ll take over some of this work –“
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: “– in some places.” What are some of the international implications of this?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes. So, you see all that, you see China saying that they’re going to fill some of these vacuums. We’ll see if they actually do. Whether or not they do though, they’ve already gotten the public diplomacy benefit of making us look unreliable and bad and making themselves look like the rescuing heroes.
Russia is cheering this on from the sidelines at a very high level of their government. Iran is cheering this on from the sidelines. So, governments that are widely seen as adversaries of the United States are thrilled at this right now because they recognize the benefit to U.S. national security and to U.S. interests when we can use AID to protect U.S. values abroad. That convergence of interest and values is what makes USAID so powerful.
And that’s really not something that any of those adversary nations have. And the great example of this that I like to give for my own, uh, history with this, so when I was leading COVID response efforts at USAID, China would go to countries with their vaccine diplomacy approach, which was basically extractive, and they would go to a country and say, “Okay, we will sell you our vaccines, we’re going to sell them at a high markup. And in order for the privilege of buying our expensive vaccines, you have to give us political and economic concessions.” So they would often require breaking off ties with Taiwan and things like that. And countries would take that deal if it was the only deal on the table.
When we got into that game, which we were a little slow to because when we came in under Biden, there’d been no infrastructure laid by the Trump administration. They explicitly didn’t want to do that.
When we could then go to those countries and offer a better deal, that was fundamentally a deal based on solidarity and partnership and fighting the pandemic. We offered better vaccines for free in higher volumes and we were not being extractive about political concessions because we really approached it as partnership.
And so, it strengthened their relationships with the U.S. and also, they didn’t have to make these concessions to China anymore. We lose the ability to do that kind of thing and we lose the ability to counter China in that way when we destroy an agency like this.
Chris Hayes: Yes, what does it reputationally do too? I mean, that’s an interest issue, right?
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, again, I have to sort of take a step back and like just note for the record that I understand the left critique of all this as essentially a kind of iron fist inside a velvet glove that this is sort of soft side of American hegemony and dominance that, yes, we’ll throw some grain at you that we bought from our farmers anyway —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right.
Chris Hayes: — because we want to fundamentally control you and we want to maintain. And like U.S. global dominance hegemony is a very real thing, which is incredibly morally fraud and complicated. So, I just want to like note that as I’m like, I’m not taking the side of this project, I’m sort of explaining it descriptively.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I think you think it’s good and I just want to flag my own sort of positionality on this. But —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — there’s a reputational cost too. I mean, I just like, what’s the family of the woman who died when she got taken off oxygen kind of thing? I mean, I saw the —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — videos of people showing up the HIV clinic that’s closed.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes,
Chris Hayes: Twenty million people whose HIV medicine was being supported and not aren’t going to be like, “Well, I’m just glad for when they gave it to me.”
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right. It makes the U.S. look fundamentally callous and unreliable.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And again, that’s not a terrible description of Donald Trump, but that is how it makes us look. And that’s not good for our long term relationships with these countries. It is not good for people-to-people diplomacy and relationships.
I mean, to your point on the left critique, one of the experiences of working at USAID is getting mischaracterized by both sides, right, because from the perspective that you just articulated well, we’re not actually doing this to genuinely help people.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: We’re just doing it to project American power. And that’s —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — false. I mean, the people who work at USAID are doing it to help people genuinely.
Chris Hayes: Yes, no, that I know —
Jeremy Konyndyk: And I know —
Chris Hayes: That’s the case, for sure.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — and I know you know that, but like what’s so amazing and really when I worked there, where I felt a lot of pride was being able to help people in service of your country, like that’s an amazing feeling.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And it’s really unique. And I love the NGO sector, I’m in the NGO sector. Now, it’s a very different feel when you’re in government, you feel that obligation and patriotism that you are serving your country.
And that’s what the right-wing critique gets wrong too, and you hear Rubio said this recently, “Oh, they just think they’re a big NGO.” Literally, no one working at USAID thinks they’re working for an NGO. There is a palpable, constant feeling and kind of ethos that you are working on behalf of your government.
Chris Hayes: You are a G.O.
Jeremy Konyndyk: You are a G.O., that’s right.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And I think also that there is some kind of consistency in this worldview between going after USAID and pulling out of the World Health Organization.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Showing up in Europe to sort of tell them they’re all idiots, calling Vladimir Putin to say that you’re going to sit down with him in Saudi Arabia to carve up Ukraine and then sort of admiring China and Putin’s like hutzpah and their pluck, which really is an attempt to completely undo basically the post-World War II set of international institutions in order —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which again has a very mixed record, but my feeling is it’s probably on the whole better than whatever Donald Trump is envisioning it for it to come afterwards.
Jeremy Konyndyk: It’s the altruism that you never knock down a wall if you don’t know why it was put up in the first place.
Chris Hayes: Yes, right, yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And that’s what we’re doing in the international system right now —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — or what we risk doing. People love to dump on the U.N. Look, we could spend a three-hour podcast on my complaints with the U.N. system.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And, Chris, anytime you want to do that, I’m game.
Chris Hayes: Well, let me just say, one thing that has been ironic about all this, as I know many federal workers and I’m watching the 19-year-olds at DOGE strip the wires off of it, no one can give you a more detailed chapter and verse about their frustrations with federal bureaucracy than federal bureaucrats.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Oh my God, yes.
Chris Hayes: So, you try to keep in mind that like —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I even talked to someone who used to work in like digital spaces, was like, kind of wish I could do what the DOGE guys are doing on some of the code that I saw. So —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: — we can’t be precious or non-clear-eyed about the status quo, and everyone closest to it can tell you.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But what they can tell you is from the position of granular proximate knowledge —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — of the deficiencies of sclerosis in bureaucracy as opposed to a Northeastern freshman with a few years of coding under his belt.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Right. Like when I was in the last time working on COVID, it felt at certain times like half of my job was just a game of hopscotch trying to make sure we didn’t fail to hit a single square that we needed to tap in order to legally spend money.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And the day-to-day work of a lot of people at USAID is that, and it’s really unfortunate like —
Chris Hayes: It’s literally the opposite problem, yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: It’s literally the opposite problem. And if DOGE had come to USAID and said, “Boy, this bureaucracy fucking sucks, let’s help you clear this out,” they would’ve had everyone eating out of their hands.
Chris Hayes: Yes, right, right, right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Because it is painful. And this to me is the irony of all this. Well, one of the many ironies of all this is like, I don’t think there is really a kind of a preemptive hostility towards an incoming administration.
When I left office or left government the first time, left AID the first time, one of my team members said to me, and I don’t know what her political leanings were because I never asked, but she said, yes, you know, often, we find that the management under Republicans is a little better. And I don’t think she was saying that to tweak me personally.
But what she meant was like, often, you’d have Republicans come in from the business sector and they would have like pretty good management skills and they would run the agency well. Even if they were running it on things that I might disagree with policy-wise, they were running it —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — effectively from a management perspective. And there’s a degree of hopefulness that they might bring some of that. And instead, what we see this time is, I suppose, Elon is bringing management techniques that he brought to Twitter that were highly destructive, and that’s what they’re bringing here. But there is so much to fix. And what really, I think, is heartbreaking on some level about this is we really do need good —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — faith administrative reform of the U.S. government because there is a lot of sclerosis. Like the diagnosis is not completely wrong. I would associate myself a lot with what Jennifer Pahlka has been writing recently and saying about this.
She did an episode with (INAUDIBLE) last year talking about the healthcare.gov debacle. You changed the words, she could have been describing almost verbatim the experience that I had trying to push COVID work through at USAID because you run into all the same structural problems. We do need to fix that.
And instead, what’s happening is they’re kind of taking an opportunity to really fix things and just turning that into code for destruction, which will make it harder to ever get some of these things fixed.
Chris Hayes: Yes, that is exactly right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And it’s useful and good to say that because one of the things that ends up happening because of the sort of forces of negative polarization, because they’re constantly trying to destroy things, you get negatively polarized into defending the status quo. You know what I mean? So, it’s like —
Chris Hayes: Hundred percent.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — you end up in this position where, like, in other contexts, it’s like, “Well, prosecutors would never bring up case that’s not on the merits.” It’s like —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — “Oh, no I don’t believe that obviously,” or —
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — “God, there’s nothing in the federal government that like –“
Chris Hayes: That’s right, that’s right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, and we need the ability to institute good faith change in the government. And frankly, we need the ability to hold people accountable for performance.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: It’s very hard to do that in the federal workforce right now. That is not to say that most of the federal workforce are not performing well. I think, in my experience, they are. But when you have someone who isn’t, it’s very hard to do —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — something about that because of the protections against exactly what’s happening right now. But this is what’s so insane about this, right? So, let’s say there’s an issue and I think I’ve heard this from other people, right? And we’re talking about literally millions of people, so —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — any generalization here is insane. But I’ve covered the federal bureaucracy in different ways. I know a lot of people who moved in and out of it. Mostly I would say, the federal civil services is some of the highest quality and highest talent.
Chris Hayes: No question.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Both in the world and also certainly in the U.S.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Like when you compare them to municipal offices or wherever.
Chris Hayes: They’re excellent, yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: They’re excellent. And, I mean, of course, there are also civil protections, those are important. It is also the case that sometimes low-performers, people not doing well can be hard to get rid of.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: You hear this in a bunch of places.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: What’s so crazy in the same way that like what you were saying before about the spending, like there’s too many strings to spend money and they’re doing the opposite, they’re destroying the agency and making it not spend any.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: What they’re doing on federal staffing right now is just clear cutting.
Chris Hayes: Hundred percent.
Jeremy Konyndyk: It obviously is the case that if they’re just saying whoever’s in their one-year probation period is gone, you don’t know if maybe you fired the best people around who are going to come and replace the people who are not that good. Obviously, no one knows anything about the —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — skills, abilities, talent, merit, whatsoever, is purely a clear cut.
Chris Hayes: Purely a clear cut.
Jeremy Konyndyk: There’s a presumption underpinning that, that most federal workers are probably bad at their jobs and are redundant.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And so, if you just get rid of a bunch of them, it’ll all come out in the wash and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. I should have said earlier, and I want to just make this clear, when I talk about some of the bureaucratic sclerosis in the U.S. government, which is very real, that is not primarily coming from the agencies. That is primarily coming from how the agencies have to comply with congressional requirements.
So, a lot of the day-to-day paper pushing is because Congress has created all of these financial management requirements and monitoring and evaluation requirements and process management requirements and all of these, there are bills upon bills upon bills.
There’s a former USAID administrator under George W. Bush named Andrew Natsios, who is kind of legendary within the agency, and we are different political parties, but I absolutely love the guy.
He wrote a great paper a few years ago called, “The Clash of Counter-Bureaucracy.” And he talks about this whole system that exists within USAID to do all of that monitoring and administrative oversight and all that, and he kind of calls that the counter-bureaucracy.
And the basic idea is that is the kind of the set of hurdles that the workers of the agency have to navigate through in order to do the mission of the agency. And he starts that paper with a wonderful letter from, I think it’s Ward Nelson (sp?), written back to the U.K. where he says, “Well, look, you’re asking me to account for every boot and every bullet and every bit of food. So, do you want me to do this accounting exercise or do you want me to win the war?” And that is the feeling of being a federal worker.
Chris Hayes: And what’s so crazy about that, and, again, we come back around to where we started, is that is all about Article I legislative branch flexing its powers, micromanaging, doing all this stuff —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which, again —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the Constitution gives him the right to do.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes
Chris Hayes: I mean, it’s all of our money, but they are the ones that appropriate it. To go through that, to know about that, to know the layers of congressional approval and then watch someone come in with zero congressional approval, no one has not one word. They didn’t consult with the chairs.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Nothing.
Chris Hayes: Nothing.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Nothing.
Chris Hayes: And literally, quote, “delete” the agency.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Is just it’s a shocking constitutional abdication.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes, yes. And this is what is in addition to the horror that is resulting around the world because of those actions, the damage that’s doing to tens of millions of human lives around the world, which is very chilling, by the way, that they’re willing to cause that level of damage as casually as they are.
Chris Hayes: It’s sociopathic.
Jeremy Konyndyk: It really is. But let’s even set that to the side for a moment and just look at what this means for our system of government. If the lesson here is that as long as Elon Musk tells enough lies at high enough volume at a frequent enough clip and you had this great graphic on your, I forget if it was Twitter or Bluesky, of just the kind of a scatterplot, the frequency of Elon Musk tweets.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: And it just gets like almost completely covered over time.
Chris Hayes: Yes, 24 hours a day, yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: Twenty-four hours a day, right? So, that is very intentionally trying to create this perception that the agency is compromised, it’s corrupt, and therefore he should be allowed to do whatever he wants.
And it is working so far with respect to a lot of Republicans in Congress. From talking to Republican friends on The Hill, I don’t think he’s persuading most of them on the merits. There are a few who are kind of fringed who are persuaded by him.
But most of them, they know what USAID does. They have traveled to USAID programs. Many of them have praised USAID over the years. They know the reality, but they don’t dare speak that reality for fear of getting crosswise with this torrent of disinformation or being targeted by it.
And so, they are then basically abdicating some of their constitutional responsibilities. And ultimately, these are not self-enforcing. So, if Congress doesn’t choose to enforce its prerogatives, the executive will fill that vacuum. If the courts don’t assert their prerogatives, the executive will fill that vacuum.
And that is what they’re trying to do right now. And the game plan is to do it as quickly as possible so that they can leave a smoking carcass of the agency. And by the time the courts or Congress catch up, it doesn’t matter because it’s too late, the staff are fired, all the implementing —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeremy Konyndyk: — organizations have gone bankrupt, all the programs are shut, and there’s nothing left to salvage.
Chris Hayes: One final question for you. I don’t know if you know Marco Rubio at all, but to someone who’s on tape talking about USAID, we’ve got the tape of him and defending it in —
Jeremy Konyndyk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — presidential primaries, like, it’s this kind of Stalinist thing where this is the party line now.
Jeremy Konyndyk: I am very curious how much he even has a kind of day-to-day handle on what’s being done under his ostensible oversight. Running a federal agency is a huge and all-consuming task, and I don’t say this to kind of defend what he’s been responsible for, but he’s brand new, he doesn’t have much of a team around him yet. The way that a leader exerts control over the building is by getting their own team of their own people around them. He doesn’t have that yet.
Pete Marocco, the guy who is doing most of this, is not one of his people and has cover from the White House, is connected to the Trump family. He’s a loyalist, which Rubio is not, or is not perceived as anyway.
And so, Marocco is kind of acting as an authority unto himself in the department right now and Rubio is constantly playing catch up. And there were notes from a meeting that he did with USAID mission staff in one of the missions in Central America during a recent trip there, where they were really traumatized by what was happening to them and happening to their agency, and he didn’t fully defend it.
And he kind of portrayed himself in those notes as almost a bystander to it, like, “I didn’t know this was the plan before I came in,” and he was making commitments to them about, “Well, we’re not going to pull your kids out to school,” and things like that, that were directly contradictory to what Pete Marocco was actually ordering at that very moment.
So, I don’t know when and how that comes to a head. I will say, Pete Marocco got bounced out of four jobs in the first Trump administration because he was so toxic to the people around him, so abusive, even the Trump-appointed leadership of USAID in the first term couldn’t put up with him.
So, I don’t know how long he will last. And he probably doesn’t either, which is maybe why he’s trying to do as much damage as quickly as he can.
Chris Hayes: Jeremy Konyndyk is the President at Refugees International. He’s a former senior official at USAID in both the Obama and Biden administration. Jeremy, that was great. Thank you so much.
Jeremy Konyndyk: My pleasure. Thanks, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Jeremy Konyndyk. And we’d love to hear from you about what you thought of the conversation, particularly if you’ve worked in NGOs or in foreign aid or USAID.
You can email us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod, or you can follow me across what used to be called Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky with the name Chris L. Hayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
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