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The lives of thousands of employees for the United States Agency for International Development or USAID were disrupted when the Trump administration announced it was dismantling the foreign aid agency. Nebraska Public Media caught up with a Nebraska woman who is a former long-time USAID employee and whose husband still works for the agency. Both are currently posted in Africa. We are not using her name due to her fear that her family would be sent back to the U.S. Dale Johnson started the conversation asking her about that fear.
Source: Several weeks ago, we heard that we would be forcibly removed by the military if we weren't out of the country in three days. That didn't materialize, and that gave us all a sense of what we were facing, which is quite simply persecution for having done our job for decades.
Dale Johnson: In setting up this conversation, I asked you about the trajectory President Trump's executive order has taken since his announcement in early February, and you told me “It's causing people to die.” Did you mean literally die?
Source: Of course. There are hundreds of thousands of people on medication for HIV AIDS, which was abruptly cut off. There are refugee camps where food aid was abruptly cut off. In Sudan, there are almost all of the stations where people in this war-torn country could go to get basic nutrition have been cut off. This is in spite of the fact that current political appointees at USAID have claimed, and the State Department have claimed, that the money is still flowing. The accounting system of USAID was turned off or sabotaged. It's hard to say exactly what, but the money has not been flowing, and it has been causing people to die. A couple of weeks ago, so I'm sure there have been many other instances since it was referenced during a recent congressional hearing, the House Foreign Assistance Committee of a woman in Myanmar who was in a refugee camp, taken off oxygen as a result of the end of funds and died, and that was just in the initial days of the cutoff. So there have been many more since then, in addition to things like babies being born HIV positive because the correct medicine was not administered, so that's not a death now, but there are grave consequences of this.
Johnson: If it's that bad now and there's no indication that it's going to get any better, give us samples of it getting worse.
Source: Here on the African continent, USAID has been absolutely pivotal in reducing malaria numbers by distribution of bed nets for people to sleep with, by spraying their homes with chemicals to kill mosquitos during the daytime, All kinds of things. Africa's productivity and life expectancy will plummet drastically as a result of the failure of those malaria programs, tuberculosis treatment programs, HIV AIDS treatment programs, USAID and the U.S. government have carried a really honorable amount of the load. USAID was working with countries to build their own health systems and enable them to be better able to deal with diseases that have uniquely ravaged their people. But none of that really can stick if you just pull out from one day to the next. And so this is all very different than if we had a considered and strategic drawdown of aid.
Johnson: How hopeful are you that this disruption will be resolved?
Source: I'm not hopeful, because you really can't come back from what the administration's done, but their disregard for law and their specific moves to kill the entire industry by not paying invoices from December and January has driven many companies nearly to bankruptcy. And because they've done it in an extra legal fashion, it will be difficult to come back from because once a company has gone bankrupt, once all the employees have been fired, once all of the infrastructure has been kind of sold off, because that was the requirement, then you can't come back. And I think that seems to be the intent.
Johnson: I get the sense that you feel it's not a matter of if, but when, you will be sent back to the United States. Do you have a plan in place to leave Africa? Should it come to that?
Source: We do have a plan in place. I feel very lucky to be from Nebraska. We have a supportive network. Nebraska has great schools. We'll be fine there temporarily. Of course, Nebraska isn't a hub for international development professionals, and so from a professional standpoint, there'll be a lot to figure out, but that's the case for literally everyone in this field, since the government is doing its best to decimate it.
Johnson: I'd like to talk again.
Source: Sounds good. Thank you.
Johnson: Since this conversation, the Trump administration has canceled 83% of USAID’s programs. That amounts to about 5,200 contracts, leaving about 1,000 programs intact to be administered by the State Department. Dale Johnson, Nebraska Public Media News.