A neighbor, whose org is largely funded by USAID, shared that they laid-off 70% of their staff and they who remain are there to close-up shop. The web site is reduced to a splash page. They helped farmers farm better and more sustainably, adopting new technology and adapting to new environments, enabled locally-controlled economic development and community banking, implemented clean water and sanitation programs, and facilitated medical services capacity building.
They worked in different places around the world, but I was aware of their work supporting efforts in Latin America — places this administration vilifies and slanders and does not to want people to migrate from to here.
I’m not without a lefty critique of empire, soft power, and a suspicious jaundiced eye of the origins of USAID and what else perhaps hid or hides in the folds of its efforts. But if I were, so implausibly given Musk’s opportunity (his seemed fairly implausible until now), I would be listening and my first move would not be to blow real things real people need out of the water.
And the blowback? I already alluded this is obviously counterintuitive to the wish to mitigate migration (however you come to hoping for that). Our agricultural assistance through US aid involves buying American commodities and distributing them elsewhere acts as a price stabilizer here (there are critiques on this too, but just dropping this and not doing a better thing or fixing subsidies here, of which I hear nothing from, well… anybody). Our capacity for tracking, preventing, building resistance to disease is being wounded by freezes at NIH, CDC, pulling out of WHO, and shutting down USAID. That will hurt, and presumably kill, many. And maybe us.
And, cam anyone expect the ripple effects of pulling out these and other rugs so suddenly to not result in radicalizing some people in a way that no nation state can prevent and which has compounded the violence in the world, and our own security?