The Trump Administration’s Dismantling of USAID

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was previously the largest bilateral donor across the world, was created in 1961 to use the U.S.’s soft power to influence and assist other countries. It has since grown into a department with more than 13,000 employees, the majority of which have worked overseas to provide emergency and humanitarian response, food assistance, economic growth activities, and more. Elissa Miolene, reporter at Devex, sits down to talk with us about the impact of the past few week’s chaotic attacks to USAID.

Within hours of President Trump returning to office, there was a foreign aid freeze, followed by a stop-work order. Disorder took over, with a Congressional communication that USAID would be downsized, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing he would take over USAID, and waves of furloughs and layoffs at the agency and with partners that USAID works with. The deterioration of USAID has, of course, resulted in people in countries around the world being unable to access dependable care and resources. 

Links from this episode

Elissa Miolene on Devex
The dismantling continues: Hundreds of USAID awards terminated
USAID’s inspector general fired with ‘no reason given’ 
USAID’s largest partners report furloughs for thousands of staff
Family Planning Impact of the Trump Foreign Assistance Freeze

Take Action

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

Read More

Jennie: Hey rePROs. This is Monday Jennie coming to you with a quick update to this week's episode. We recorded the interview last week, so there have been some changes since it was recorded. This week, we are focusing on the federal freeze on foreign assistance. Specifically, we focus on USAID and what the freeze has meant to USAID and program recipients and why this is so horrible and what it means going forward. We do talk about that. There were some court cases moving on and we were waiting to hear rulings. So, late Thursday night, a federal judge ruled that the administration must restore the funding that has been halted. So, that is amazing news. But as of recording on Monday at 3:00, I don't know if that is happening yet, if the money has been, has started to move and get to people. We know that the government has until tomorrow, February 18th, to show that it is complying with the order. So, you know, I debated whether we should just pull this episode, but this court order, but I highly doubt this is the last we're gonna hear of attacks on USAID, whether that means they're trying to, you know, subsume the whole agency under the State Department and gut a lot of the programs, if it means that only specific things are being gonna be defunded. I just think it's really important that we have this conversation to talk about what is happening at USAID right now, because it is part of this bigger attack on the federal government. And so, it was important to air this episode anyway. And like I said, we don't know that the government is actually complying with the order yet. So, you know, we should find out today when you all are listening on the 18th. But just know, you know, we talk about it while the freeze was still in place before the judge's ruling, but as of right now, we don't know that anything has necessarily changed. But I did wanna just flag at up top that a judge has ruled the administration must restore that funding. Okay, with that, let's go into my intro.

Jennie: Hi, rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her, and apparently Cinder wanted to say hi to y'all as well. I hope everybody is hanging in there okay. We're gonna do something a little different this week than my usual introduction. I have a wonderful conversation with Elissa Miolene, with Devex talking all about USAID and what's happening there and the importance of foreign assistance. And it's a really wonderful conversation. It is really important that we talk about development assistance and why it is so important. It is one of the three key pillars or three legs on our foreign policy national security stool, along with diplomacy and defense. So, losing development assistance makes the rest unstable. This is why it is so important that we are having this conversation about USAID and the broader things USAID does. But since Alyssa and I did not focus on the sexual and reproductive health part, and this is a sexual and reproductive health rights and justice part, I thought I would do my intro to focus more exclusively on some of the sexual and reproductive health and rights impacts that we are going to see due to this 90 day review period where we now have this stop work order. So, first thank you to Guttmacher Institute who did the math to figure out what this is going to mean for people. We know on average that 130,390 women get contraceptive care each day under US-funded programs. So, then we can do the math to see what it would mean if that service did not resume during this 90 day review period. So, over those 90 days, that means we would see 11.7 million women and girls being denied access to contraceptive care. That would mean 4.2 million will experience unintended pregnancies and 8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. So, we know that'll be devastating. And with the loss of USAID, this could be longer term than 90 days. So, these devastating impacts could continue to grow. The other thing that we've talked about on the podcast quite a bit and rePROs has some briefs on is sexual and reproductive health and humanitarian settings. And a really big player in that world is the United Nations Population Fund or UNFPA. So, I reached out to UNFPA to get some- to see if they had an idea of what this stop work order and this suspension of US funded programs in humanitarian spaces with UNFPA would mean. And thankfully, UNFPA got back to me with this list. It's long, y'all, it is gonna be really devastating. But I think it's really important that we look directly at it and hear what this is going to mean to understand the scale and the scope of the loss of these programs. So, I'm gonna go ahead and read this whole list that UNFPA sent me, and it just, it breaks my heart to read all of the people who are going to be impacted by this and what this is going to mean for them. So again, huge thank you to Rachel at UNFPA for putting this together for me. I really appreciate it and I appreciate you and all of your hard work and everybody at UNFPA. So thank you. Okay, deep breath y'all. It's, it's bleak.

Jennie: In Afghanistan, over 9 million beneficiaries will not receive maternal health and wider services. And over 1,700 female national health workers will no longer be employed. And it's important to note that Afghanistan is the world's- has the world's eighth highest maternal mortality rate. Services that will be interrupted include those provided by hundreds of mobile health teams, family health houses and counseling centers. In Bangladesh, nearly 600,000 beneficiaries are at risk for losing sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence and response services. Life skills classes for thousands of Rohingya women and youth living in Cox's Bazaar are being halted. Bangladesh's reduction in maternal mortality and teenage pregnancy rates from the last few years could stagnate with the loss of this assistance. In the Central African Republic, life-changing reproductive health services for Sudanese refugees and returnees as well as those host communities will be stopped as well as clinical management of rape for thousands of women and girls who have been raped by armed men in Sudan. In Chad, life-saving reproductive health services will be interrupted, affecting women among forcibly displaced populations living in refugee camps, reception sites for flood-affected populations and returnees and host populations. In Gaza, 50,000 pregnant women will lose critical care as UNFPA's mobile health teams are forced to halt operations. These teams provide services through home and shelter visits, especially in the hardest hit northern areas. In addition, mobile emergency obstetric and neonatal care units will be affected as well as the supply of medicines to 80 health facilities and the continued functioning of dozens of safe spaces in Pakistan. 1.7 million people, including 1.2 million Afghan refugees, will lose life-saving sexual and reproductive health services provided by 62 health facilities. In Sudan and its surrounding countries, thousands of displaced people will lose emergency, sexual and reproductive health services and gender-based violence prevention and response services. In Ukraine, around 640,000 women and girls will be affected by cuts to psychosocial support, gender-based violence and prevention and response services, safe spaces, economic empowerment programs provided by 45 mobile teams and 21 safe spaces. And in Yemen, more than 220,000 people displaced by conflict or natural disasters will lose access to lifesaving emergency relief deliveries of essential items. Y'all, this is just looking at one organization's work in humanitarian settings and it's only looking at sexual and reproductive health service impacts. This freeze on foreign assistance is going to be devastating. And the loss of USAID, if it doesn't come back, is going to just be devastating. So many people are going to lose their jobs, whether they work directly with USAID or contractors. People's health and lives are at stake in countries where US development assistance is life saving and life changing. This is a real crisis, y'all, and we don't get into it in my interview with Elissa, but I'm just gonna kind of put it up front as a take action item to call your Congresspeople, call all of them, tell them you support us foreign assistance, that you support USAID, that you support UNFPA and you want to make sure that their life-changing and lifesaving work continues. This is, this is an all hands on deck, y'all. We need to call and make our voices heard and tell them that this is important and that we need to save these programs. Okay, with that, let's turn to my interview with Elissa Miolene to talk all about what is happening at USAID right now. Okay, let's go to my conversation with Elissa.

Jennie: Hi Elissa. Thank you so much for being here today.

Elissa: Hey Jennie, thanks so much for having me.

Jennie: Before we get started, would you like to take a second and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Elissa: Definitely. So my name is Elissa Miolene. I am a reporter at Devex and I go by she/her.

Jennie: Okay. As I have taken to having to do since the new administration, everything is moving so fast, especially on the topic we're gonna talk about today that I think we need to just be clear. We are recording this on February 13th at noon. So we know some things are gonna change between when we're recording and when people hear this, but it's just important to, like, everybody needs to know when we are recording it. We're, this is true as of when we record.

Elissa: Absolutely. Things are changing so rapidly here. It slowed down like ever so slightly, but I think the last three weeks have definitely been the most fast paced of my entire career in terms of going to the shower, coming out and expecting 50 signals. And you know, what happened in those 15 minutes I was there?

Jennie: Oh yeah. I can only imagine, as somebody who does reporting on USAID, I mean there's always things happening, but not like this.

Elissa: Exactly.

Jennie: Okay. So since this podcast is a repro podcast, and like we've talked about international family planning funding and things like that, but we've not necessarily done a, like what is USAID and like really talked about USAID on its own. So maybe that's like a really good place to start before we get into what is currently happening. And there's a lot of misinformation floating. So, what is USAID?

Elissa: Yeah, good question. So, USAID was created in 1961, so this is kind of the time JFK was president. You know, we had a lot of different political issues going on at the time, but namely the Cold War, right? So, USAID actually at its core was created to kind of counter Soviet influence through foreign assistance, which today, we often think of as a bit of the US' "soft power." So at the time, president Kennedy kind of argued that the US had both a moral obligation to help other countries across the world, but also that the US could benefit from what that assistance or that soft power could provide. So, flash forward multiple decades, USAID has expanded and grown over the years. Before the last couple of weeks, USAID had a staff of more than 13,000 people. Two-Thirds of those folks worked overseas and the agency helped tens of millions. I mean, we're talking about, like you mentioned Jennie, reproductive healthcare, but also things like emergency and disaster response food assistance, economic growth activities, livelihoods, programming. So really across the gamut of foreign assistance, USAID is also the biggest bilateral or was the biggest bilateral donor across the world. So it really touches everything in the space.

Jennie: Yeah, and I think that something we've talked about on the podcast a lot is humanitarian assistance. Like, the US was also outsized in humanitarian assistance.

Elissa: Definitely, I think made up about 40%, between 40 and 50% of humanitarian response globally.

Jennie: Okay. So as we said, it has been chaotic, honestly from basically day one around foreign assistance. So that started with the 90 day pause. So, what happened?

Elissa: Yeah, so exactly, it started with a foreign aid freeze. So that was enacted when President Donald Trump first took office. So this is literally within hours of him you know, returning to the White House. A couple days later, though, there was a stop work order. And that made not just funding freeze as it had a couple of days before, but work now had to be stopped across the world, work that was continually ongoing, just halted. So after that, there was a whirlwind of activity. So there was a congressional notification stating that parts of USAID would be downsized and absorbed into the US State Department. Others would be dissolved entirely. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also announced that he would be serving as USAID administrator. And in between, there's just been wave after wave after wave of furloughs and layoffs and administrative leave notices, both with staff at USAID and throughout the implementing partners that USAID works with—so that's local organizations like nonprofit groups, also big for-profit contractors that work across DC and around the world and everyone in between. So in terms of USAID staffers, that also included people in war zones. So I had been talking to staff in Ukraine and across the Middle East that were just telling me, "I have no idea if I have a job. I've been locked out of the system. And I don't know if I'm supposed to go home and actually if I am supposed to go home, I have no way of contacting the folks that would help me get back." So, that's kind of what's been going on the last couple weeks. The latest kind of where we're at now is that last week there was a notice sent out that on last Friday by midnight, all staff that were remaining at the agency would be placed on administrative leave. Now that was reversed due to a court order. They're now placed on administrative leave until tomorrow night, Friday night at midnight, and we don't know what'll happen after that. So a lot of folks are just waiting in the wing saying, do I have a job? Do I not? And what will happen after tomorrow?

Jennie: Yeah. And like the scale of it is wild. You talked about how there were over 13,000 staff and that was cut down to 300 to now 600. Is that where the final numbers are? Like, that is bonkers.

Elissa: And one more point on that too, Jennie, is yes, your numbers are right, we think, so far. But this came after, yeah, wave after wave again, of people being placed on leave, being terminated. Then there were reports we saw an internal email stating that it would be about, I think the number was between 290 and 300 folks, and then within 24 hours that was shifted and then 600 folks, I think 611 was that number. So it was a lot of back and forth in terms of who will stay, who will remain, what that agency will look like. I mean, I think in the, at least in the 300 figure bit, that left 12 people focusing on the entire African continent. So, that's a total reshaping and re-shifting of not just US foreign assistance, but foreign assistance globally. And then, you've also got people who are outside of the agency. So, I mentioned earlier that, you know, this is impacting other organizations that receive money from USAID. At Devex, we kind of crunched the numbers last week and we estimate that USAID's partner organizations are losing out on more than $60 billion as a result of this freeze. And the worst affected organizations lost more than 80% of their revenue overnight. So again, you and I think are both based in DC and we're seeing this across the city where there's thousands and thousands of people. I think other estimates that I've seen are anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000 American jobs lost.

Jennie: Yeah. It's been kind of devastating to watch it ripple through our community and hearing all of these orgs of people who are doing amazing work getting furloughed. It's just, like, that's just, like, personal friend impacts. Like, not even counting the lifesaving life changing work they were doing and the people who are suffering because of the loss of the programs.

Elissa: Yeah, and we can definitely get into that, and we should get into that, too. But you think about these ripple effects of these job losses. And I can just tell you, I guess a couple of the stories that I've heard. So, I've heard about 1 million insecticide-treated bed nets caught in a warehouse in Ethiopia that just can't be distributed. I've heard of programs across the world, especially those in kind of conflict hotspots being completely suspended. So, that includes a couple organizations I've spoken with on both sides of the Uganda Congo border that are just simply unable to address women coming across the border after being raped. You know, we know that in the Congo, rape is often used as a weapon of war. There's no mental health services that were previously being provided. Children that are coming across the border alone, separated from their family in, you know, kind of their flea across and leaving their communities—no more support there either. We also reported last week about $500 million of American grown food. So, that's coming from American farmers meant to feed more than 36 million people again, now stuck in ports and warehouses. And that's rotting because it can't go to the people who it's meant to feed. So, the impacts, I think, are pretty extraordinary. There's also another piece of this that I think is interesting in terms of the humanitarian waivers that have supposedly gone out. Every organization that I've talked to, even if they've gotten these waivers, says that they largely still can't do the work because even if waivers are provided, that funding is not coming through. So, that funding is still largely frozen. So let's say an organization gets granted—oh, actually, I'm so sorry, Jennie, I should probably explain what the waivers are.

Jennie: Yeah, let's go back to that before we get into the impacts, we're seeing groups not being able to implement the waivers. Let's talk about the waivers and honestly even what Rubio said about them 'cause I also found that pretty wild.

Elissa: Yeah, so Secretary of State Marco Rubio came out with a waiver process. He said, you know, kind of organizations can apply for this waiver. If they are delivering life saving humanitarian assistance, they can apply for this waiver and be exempt from the funding freeze. Now, immediately after that announcement, organizations breathe a sigh of relief, they said, okay, this will be our way to continue to help people that need it. This will be our way to continue doing our work. Flash forward however many weeks—it feels like five years since that announcement was made out, but I guess it was a week or two—and organizations, most, have not gotten those waivers, even if they've applied for them, the ones that have gotten the waivers do not have the money to back them up so that that tap is still dry. So you have organizations, for example, that are doing HIV programming across the African continent, and yes, they've been allowed to continue their work, but there's no money. So, they truly cannot because they've already floated their staffing for, you know, however the last couple of weeks are. I think there's also this difficulty of just folks not being able to get information. So, as I mentioned earlier, USAID staff have largely been gutted from the agency, right? So there's, there's really no one left to answer those questions and queries from partners. And we're already hearing about programs being terminated across the space. So, you've got all of this happening at the same time. And to your point and your question about Secretary Rubio's comments about it, I mean, I think this has really been very upsetting for a lot of the organizations that I've talked to because he said, you know, I couldn't make this clearer. And organizations are just, they're kind of baffled because they don't understand it at all, and they're not getting the information that they say that they need to get.

Jennie: Yeah, it's been pretty devastating, you know, talking to groups who are, who are caught up in this and, you know, not just because they can't get the money flowing, but like supplies are getting held up, the supply chain is falling apart. And like that's always been one of those things that has been challenging. And, you know, one little kink in the supply chain can really mess things up for a long time and ensure that it's not getting to the down service people who really need it.

Elissa: Yeah, definitely. And I think that's part of the difficulty here is the ecosystem of aid is complicated, right? I mean, it's, it's one partner organization partnering with another partner organization, partnering with another one so that all of these, for example, like medications or food or whatever it is, any sort of lifesaving assistance can trickle downstream. And if one organization is stuck, doesn't have the money, doesn't have the waiver, et cetera, that kind of just breaks the entire process in half.

Jennie: And I think the other one story that I read that was, I think maybe a New York Times story that was, I found also just like, especially devastating was the people who were in the midst of medical trials who had, like, devices left in or just can't get the follow-up care they need. Like, that that is just so inhumane and wild to me that that is being that, I mean this whole process, all of USAID programs falling apart, but just every story you hear, I feel like has like new and more tragic details.

Elissa: Yeah, there's a lot. The impact is extreme. And, you know, I was at a hearing yesterday on the hill and one of the senators was just kind of asking folks in the room, they had assembled a number of eight experts and national security experts and, and it was Senator Chris Coons, and he just said, is this recoverable? You know, can we, can we undo the damage that's been done? And the answer from every expert in the room was, we can, but that window is rapidly closing. So, you know, time is really running out in order to kind of undo a lot of the damage that we've seen so far. I think something that we've continued to hear and something that we're seeing with the number of furloughs, layoffs, and organizations shuttering, is that organizations by and large simply cannot last for the 90 day review process. Most of them, interestingly, a lot of organizations will actually do work first and then be reimbursed by the US government. So, we're hearing about organizations that are actually owed money from November, December, and January for work that they've already done, and then they haven't been paid for that. So they're kind of like already in a void or feeling a financial gap, which is not allowing them to continue moving forward. And that's why you're seeing furloughs and staff reductions at such an extreme scale.

Jennie: Yeah, it's really hard to think of how it is. One of those things that I feel like we talk about with like the global gag rule a lot of, people seem to think the policy is in place and things stop and then it goes away and everything magically comes back. But that has never been the case, right? So, that is gonna be the same with all of this. People on the ground are gonna look for new funding, places are gonna close, people that we're receiving services no longer have trusted providers so, you know, they're not gonna necessarily go back to them. It's a very complicated process of when it goes away and when things come back 'cause it is not just a light switch that, like, magically everything is restored.

Elissa: Right. I mean, even think about it on the individual level, right? It’s like- if you're furloughed or you're let go from your nonprofit job and you'd love to continue doing the work that you were doing, whether it be in reproductive health or whatever it might be. But most organizations are experiencing the same downfalls as your last organization. Are you gonna stay in the nonprofit space? I mean, many folks that I'm talking to are trying, like saying, okay, well maybe I have to go into the private sector now. So this, this is a gradual erosion of folks that might have been in the nonprofit space earlier now kind of shifting gears and doing something completely different. Now, once that person goes and gets another job, it's not like, okay, everything's fixed, they're gonna come back. I mean, we're, we're seeing workforces leaving people leaving the sector and yeah, I mean, we'll see what happens whether, you know, we, we've heard, again, we've seen and heard reports of USAID's absorption into the state department and what that looks like. But going from 10,000 or 13,000, whatever the number might be to 300 or 600, whatever the number might be, is a 95% decrease, right? So I mean, just that staff alone, where are they gonna go, right? If not the nonprofit sector, which doesn't seem viable right now.

Jennie: Yeah. And it just makes me think of, obviously you can't run that same, the same scale of programs. What programs are going to be completely lost. I work in the gender and international family planning, sexual reproductive health space. Like, are they just not gonna do those programs anymore? Kind of feels likely, right? Like, it's not like things will continue on a smaller scale. Things will definitely be, some programs are just gonna go away.

Elissa: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I think we'll see how, again, everything shakes out and what programs or priorities will be emphasized. But I think what's interesting is that this is really different from the first Trump administration, which had, you know, USAID under Mark Green had a lot of really great reform work done. There was an amplification of local partners kind of shifting aid to get it to more smaller grassroots groups. There was also a lot of work being done in the private sector. So, really kind of enhancing and catalyzing the private sectors in various countries that USAID worked with. So people really, I think look at Mark Green's tenure with USAID as, you know, a lot of good work that was done at that time. This, what we're seeing now under Trump's second term, is completely different. So, I can hypothesize, but it's really hard to predict what might be retained and what might not going forward. Especially because, you know, for folks that want a reform of USAID, which I think is frankly most of the sector, right? I mean everyone can kind of agree that we could do well in the sector with reviews or recalibrations or, you know, just kind of rethinking and making sure that everything is going to speed and, and working as best as it can be the most efficiently that it can be. But you know, without enough people to put that process in place, I do wonder what will happen next.

Jennie: And I also think in that space, there's the gap of public perception and reality. Like, we know whenever people are asked how much they think goes to foreign assistance, like not just UAA but foreign assistance, it's always between like 10 and 25% of the budget. And which is so far out of step from the reality, which is less than 1%. USAID is like half of a percent. So, it's the arguments of doing this to save money and like, you know, cut government waste is so out of step from where things actually are. Not to say there aren't things that can't be done, but like-

Elissa: Yeah.

Jennie: Big picture.

Elissa: Yeah. But I, I do think you've hit on a really important point, Jenny, which is public perception of foreign assistance versus reality of how much is spent. So I, I was looking at a couple of polls that were taken over the last few years recently, and I think it was something like 70% of people thought the US government spent too much on government assistance, but like you said, most people thought that we spent around a quarter of our budget on foreign assistance, which is fair enough when you think about like, okay, the US does do so much across the world, right?

Jennie: Yeah.

Elissa: Like, we talked at the top of the call about just how big of a donor the US government is, is, but in reality we actually give, you know, comparatively a lot less than especially our Nordic counterparts, for example, kind of leave the lead the charge in terms of the percent, but still, I mean they're kind of like just over 1%. So, it's not, it's not like others are spending like crazy but it's just more so than the US. So yeah, I mean I find that really interesting. I think there's, you know, foreign aid skepticism is real. It's been around and though I think the bipartisan elements of foreign aid—the national security elements, the soft power elements like we talked about—have held true for a long time. I mean, PEPFAR was a Bush program, is a Bush program. So, I think yeah, there's a lot of kind of like swirling information going around and that affects public perception of USAID in general.

Jennie: Yeah. And even thinking through, like, global health, right? You know, fighting global diseases where they are. So they don't come here. Like I think there are so many things that are broader American benefits that happen through global assistance or foreign assistance. But I think also falling into that information gap goes back to a conversation we had before we started the call, which is they're going after something that is broadly not super popular because people, so it's easy to go after USAID, but is this just like a gateway?

Elissa: Yeah. USAID for better or for worse is, like you said, kind of an easy target, but we're seeing kind of across DC, different federal agencies now kind of being in the spotlight—I think the Department of Ed, there's been a lot of other ones too. And, and I think, you know, what I've been hearing from a lot of folks is that they feel like USAID was the testing ground for vast reductions in government workforce. And though it was the first, it doesn't seem to be the last to be affected in this way.

Jennie: Yeah. this is all just thinking how it's gonna ripple through DC, just so many people in DC work for or with the government and so much good is done by so many of these programs that may just go away, which I find personally pretty devastating.

Elissa: Yeah, I mean, I went to a- I think when the stop work orders were first announced a couple days later, there was like a gathering that was just like floated across the internet of people coming together to talk about everything and digest it together. And, and so I went just to, to talk to folks and see how people were holding up. And it was pretty insane to just see so many different tables of colleagues. You know, there were folks from a nonprofit, folks from a for-profit contractor all in the development space, but table after table after table of people that were either furloughed or terminated, most of which were, were not actually at USAID. So yeah, again, just speaks to the ripple effects, like you were saying.

Jennie: Well, and I think it's hard to understate not just the devastation of being furloughed, but like some of the people, like, real trauma for like running these programs that are seeing their life's work just like dismantled. There are so many people I've talked to that I can just see disillusionment and, like, trauma for watching something that they have cared so passionately for and fought so hard to ensure that people are getting the services they need just stop and be painted in such a villainous light in the conversations that are being weaponized to demonize USAID.

Elissa: Yeah, I think something else I'm feeling is also a bit of survivor's guilt too, among people that have their jobs and are working in different programs but can't help the people that they were hoping to help. You know, people that are just kind of, like, you know, I was doing X, Y, and Z before, but now I'm just sitting at home and just kind of like the impact that that has on folks I think is another element of all of this, you know, and that that's kind of adding to the fact that they, they don't know if they're gonna be taken out of country or the program will halt or stop entirely. But I do think when you're working with communities on the ground, you start to bear a bit of responsibility for obviously their wellbeing because that's what you're trying to accomplish through your job, right? So it's more complicated that way.

Jennie: Okay. So, as things are moving very fast and there are so many unknowns, what's next?

Elissa: So, like I said earlier, there's a couple of different court cases that are now running through DC at the moment. So, one of them, my colleague is in right now, she should have some reporting on that later today. So, we'll see what she finds during that, however many hours long session that is. But the big thing that we're all waiting for, at least us at Devex and talking to folks and sources in the space, is what happens after tomorrow midnight, because that's the deadline that's been given for the remaining USAID staff right now to be halted from being placed on administrative leave. Now that could change with the court cases, but we don't know. So, that's kind of the biggest thing that we're looking at: what happens with these legal challenges? What happens to USAID staff post tomorrow? A lot of this too is like what happens to organizations as well. So again, we talked about waivers, we talked about funding not coming in, how much longer can folks last? I mean, every week we've heard more waves of termination of awards, more waves of termination of colleagues. So, what does it look like next week? I mean, it's a moving target at the moment in terms of looking at what the impact will be.

Jennie: I was just thinking one thing we didn't say explicitly but maybe is worth mentioning that with the conversation of USAID being subsumed under state is that it was- USAID was created by Congress. Like, there's the, like, you can't just do that. Like, Congress created this separate agency to run this. So, it just feels like it would be missed if we didn't, like, clearly state that this is an important part of this whole story.

Elissa: Yeah, and this is definitely something that, that you're hearing or I'm hearing a lot from Congress members on the Hill, Democratic Congress members have really made this like a talking point in terms of, like: USAID was created by Congress, it can only be removed by Congress now. There's so much that's happened over the last three weeks that seems to be out of the regular that I don't know how it will change and yeah, and what things will happen going forward and, and what that'll look like. I mean, I think the thing though is that the Democratic congress members that are saying this are in the minority at the moment. So, when this does come to Congress more formally will be in March, right when there's, the federal budget will be renegotiated. Right now, there's, you know, just kind of a hold until March 14th for the federal budget. And that I think will be when we really start to see Congress members come to the table and kind of bat out what the foreign assistance budget will really look like. Now, whether USAID is part of state or not, there's still a foreign assistance budget. And what that will look like will be something that Congress members will have to talk about. And I don't wanna, you know, there's a lot of Republican Congress members that have been really supportive of foreign assistance in the past. It just depends on kind of, I think the priorities that come to the table this month, next month in the lead up to that resolution being closed.

Jennie: Again, just so much happening all at once to keep your eye on. Elissa, thank you so much for all of your great reporting. I will definitely be keeping close to it to make sure that I know what all is happening. But thank you for the time and talking to us today.

Elissa: Thank you so much and thanks for having me on.

Jennie: Okay. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. It's hard to say enjoy in this context. It's pretty devastating what is happening. But it was a really great conversation and I'm really grateful to Elissa for taking the time in this chaos of continuing reporting on all these things that are happening so rapidly to talk with us about what is happening. So, thank you, Elissa. And with that, I will see everybody next week. [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprosfightback.com. Thanks all!