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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King. Today, we're talking about USAID. The agency that's been around since 1961, when John F. Kennedy established it. It's motto is "From the American people." And the American people have given hundreds of billions of dollars to USAID over the years, for things like removing landmines in Vietnam, combating Ebola outbreaks in Africa, and reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan. But now, the agency is being dismantled by the president. We're going to talk to a guy who used to run it, about what this means for the world.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King. We're joined now by Andrew Natsios, who served as the administrator of USAID during the George W. Bush administration.
--:-- Andrew Natsios: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Andrew, you're appalled by what's happening to USAID. Can you tell us why?
--:-- Andrew Natsios: I'm appalled by all of this stuff because it's damaging the foreign affairs apparatus of the U.S. government. And this just beginning, they're going after the CIA, the FBI.
--:-- Noel King: Can you help us understand what exactly happens around the world when a presidential administration in the United States comes in and says, we are cutting USAID off immediately, effective immediately? What does that mean for people around the planet?
--:-- Andrew Natsios: We are 40% of the international humanitarian response system and famine, civil wars, and natural disasters like earthquakes. And our response capacity is enormous. That's all collapsed completely. We used to send out DART teams. Whenever there's an emergency, DART team is a disaster assistance response team. We can send them out in 48 hours, all gone. All the infrastructure is gone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what does that mean for people in refugee camps and IDP camps, internally displaced camps?
--:-- Andrew Natsios: They're already depopulating because there's no food. There's no services left. People are going to starve to death if they just sit there. And I'll tell you what's going to happen. There's going to be mass movements of population toward Europe and toward the United States.
--:-- Noel King: And are people going to die because of this political decision?
--:-- Andrew Natsios: Absolutely. Indisputably, they are going to die. And it's not going to be a small number.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I want to get something clear from you. Are people going to die because of this political decision?
--:-- Andrew Natsios: Absolutely. Indisputably, they are going to die. And it's not going to be a small number.
--:-- Noel King: Now, one of the things that's disturbing me is the famine early warning system. It's a predictive model. We take aerial photographs every day from satellites all over the world in the food insecure areas. We compare the color on the ground from one year to the next. So in the first week of June, if the ground is green one year and brown the next, we assume there's been a crop failure. That is not sufficient to tell what's happening on the ground. So we send teams in. There's a vast network of people who work with AID that actually don't work for us. They work with us. These are local people, and they're economists. They're food experts. And they go in and find out what's going on the ground. That system, now they shut down.
--:-- Andrew Natsios: Well, basically, it's like driving a car with no steering wheel. The fuse system is the steering wheel. So you have a car full of food. It can't get where it's going because there's no steering wheel.
--:-- Noel King: And I feel like there are disingenuous arguments being made that, you know, the whole agency is insubordinate, it's gone rogue, when I think just in the previous administration, he was begging Joe Biden to increase funding to USAID.
--:-- Andrew Natsios: Both parties support AID, but now with the president and the base, the base has changed. I'm from a working class family, so I'm not criticizing working people. My grandparents were poor mill workers, $9 a week. My grandfather was illiterate in Greek and in English. But we did well. We did well over time. OK, so these people are not into this. We've lost the upper middle class. The business community is not Republican anymore. And so the base of the party is not really into what's going on in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Help us understand where this political divide came from on USAID. Why is it currently a source of conservative ire?
--:-- Andrew Natsios: It's low-hanging fruit, and the people who are going to be affected are in the developing world, and they don't vote. They're poor people, and they don't vote. And so it's easy to dismiss them, and they wanted to make an example of us. They wanted to make an example so they can go out now and go after other federal departments and agencies.
--:-- Noel King: Instead of dealing with the entitlement program, they're going after the infrastructure of the federal government.
--:-- Andrew Natsios: I think we're over-regulated in terms of regulations, all agencies and departments. But there's a thoughtful way of doing that. A giant sledgehammer to smash the government, you do incremental changes. You don't do with a sledgehammer and retire 10,000 people and shut down agencies and programs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's the thing that's extremely dangerous here. There's going to be a catastrophe caused which we can't predict.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King. We're joined now by Dylan Matthews, a senior correspondent at Vox.com.
--:-- Dylan Matthews: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Dylan, you've written about the Trump administration's playbook for dismantling the federal bureaucracy. Can you walk us through it?
--:-- Dylan Matthews: So, I think the first step is pulling funding. So the first thing they did was announce that they wanted a 90-day freeze on all grants, contracts, anything related to foreign aid.
--:-- Noel King: And isn't that something that the president doesn't have the power to do?
--:-- Dylan Matthews: Legally, the president does not have the power to stop funding that was authorized and mandated by Congress. But they did it. And even though there have been court rulings against them doing this in general, there haven't been specific USAID rulings, but there have been rulings about this general power, they do not appear to have stopped.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Step two is pulling staffing. Can you explain that?
--:-- Dylan Matthews: So, if you were trying to implement, say, like a delivery of food to Sudan in the middle of their civil war and possible famine, it's possible the person doing that is a federal employee. It's just as possible that that person was an institutional support contractor and they largely got furloughed by their organizations and were out of the building. Then they started in on people who are actually in the civil and foreign service who directly worked for the government and were important in running USAID.
--:-- Noel King: And what's the third step in this playbook?
--:-- Dylan Matthews: I think a very important part of this has just been instilling a culture of fear. One question I've had throughout this is, why aren't the contractors suing? And I think part of why that hasn't happened is that people are terrified that if you make yourself a problem in this moment, not only are you going to lose these contracts, you're never going to be a government contractor ever again. And not just at USAID, but across the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where did this playbook come from? Are they making it up as they go along?
--:-- Dylan Matthews: I think it's a synthesis of a lot of ideas that you separately heard about on the campaign trail and that people who are now prominent in the Trump administration have been speaking about for a very long time. So one is impoundment. This is the idea that when the Congress says we want you to spend $45 billion on foreign aid, the president can choose to spend less of that if he wants.
--:-- Noel King: And isn't that something that the Supreme Court has ruled against?
--:-- Dylan Matthews: Yeah, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that impoundment is not a thing and not constitutionally permissible in the 1970s when Richard Nixon tried to do it. USAID was a test case for can we impound things and get away with it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what about Elon Musk's comments about USAID? He said that it's like feeding the agency into a wood chipper.
--:-- Dylan Matthews: Yeah, that's a pretty evocative image. But I think it's actually the opposite of what's happening. This is like going up to the guy in a wheelchair in the prison yard and pushing him out of his wheelchair. And for no good reason.
--:-- Noel King: And what does this mean for the people who are affected by USAID's work?
--:-- Dylan Matthews: There are people who are going to die because of this. There are people who are going to be abandoned because of this. And it's not just about the grants that they thought were dumb. It's about the people who are going to be affected by this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks for joining us, Dylan.
--:-- Dylan Matthews: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Noel King: And thanks for listening to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm Sean Rameswaram.
