February 13, 2025 • 17 mins
President Trump’s attacks on a key international aid agency, USAID, has left its work frozen and kicked off a fierce legal battle between his administration and US courts over its future.
On today’s Big Take DC podcast, we hear from Bloomberg’s Simon Marks and health care workers on the ground in Nairobi about how the fight playing out more than 7,000 miles away is affecting HIV treatment there. And national security editor Nick Wadhams explains why Trump has taken aim at USAID and what a gutting of the agency could mean for US soft power.
Read more:
- USAID Cuts in Kenya Reveal Risks to Lives and American Influence Worldwide
- After DOGE's Chaotic USAID Shutdown: Wasted Supplies, Layoffs and Lawsuits
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Since his first day
in office, President Donald Trump has taken aim at the
US Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. The
whole thing is a fraud, very little being put to
good use. First came his executive order on January twentieth,
(00:24):
putting a ninety day freeze on foreign assistance funded through
the agency. Thousands of USAID personnel were put on administrative leave.
Ngngos and contractors around the world who get funding or
work with USAID staff scrambled to make sense of the order.
But last week a federal judge halted Trump's order to
put USAID workers on leave. We've also seen at least
(00:47):
two other federal judges block broader attempts at freezing federal funding.
As the battle over USAID's future heats up, Bloomberg reporter
Simon Marx, who's based in Nairobi, says the ripple effects
are already palps.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
A lot of people in Kenya are hopeful that some
of this funding can be re established, but in a
period where there's a lot of doubt, people are just
putting the brakes on. So the reality on the ground
is that the programs have stopped basically.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
After the news of Trump's order first broke, Simon visited
a health clinic in Naerobi. One of the clinic's main
jobs is distributing drugs to combat HIV. More than one
point two million people in Kenya are being treated for
the virus. Preventing its spread, managing symptoms, and combating stigma
are all crucial tasks that the clinics staff perform.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
When we arrived at the Matari North Health Center, as
we walk through the doors, there was an emergency meeting
ongoing with state Civil servant staff.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So that's what I say, and fourteen fels to man.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
And they were essentially grappling with the huge fallout from
the USAID cuts. Seventeen staffers been let go. They were
in a sort of state of semi crisis and disbelief.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
On the days Simon visited, many of the clinics staff
didn't show up for work. They had been told that
given Trump's order, they may not be paid.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I met one nurse who said, on the first day
of these cuts, she was already doing a double shift
and couldn't go back to see her family.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
The one nazis HD years, the ones who do their
testing in.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Such and some of the staff worry because there had
been a long queue of HIV patients line up looking
for the anti retroviral drugs in a state of panic.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Those Spiciens come visically.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
When they arrived, there was no one to administer those drugs.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
While Washington fights over USAID's future, the reality and communities
that rely on its funding is already shifting. For the
people who rely on USAID funded clinics, this faraway debate
in Washington can have even life or death consequences. From
Bloomberg's Washington bureau, This is the Big Take DC podcast.
(03:08):
I'm Saleamosen today on the show the ongoing battle over
USAID and what the turmoil could mean for communities on
the ground and American influence abroad. To understand the fight
over USAID, I sat down with Bloomberg's National Security editor
Nick Wattams. Nick, let's start big picture. What is USAID.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
USAID is the US Agency for International Development. It's sort
of under the umbrella of the State Department, but it's
also an independent federal agencies. And these are the guys
who distribute food aid in times of disaster and crisis overseas.
They also do anti HIV programs all across the continent
(03:53):
of Africa and elsewhere. It's also a way to prevent pandemics.
So USAADA is involved in diase tracking in a lot
of countries, particularly in Africa, and they launch vaccination campaigns.
They also give farmers advice and instruction on how to
plant crops better in situations where there's drought. So a
whole range of operations that go from immediate disastered relief
(04:20):
to sort of broader cultural exchange and community programs. And
the annual budget is about forty billion dollars a year.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
So how did the US become such a critical source
of international aid here?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Overall? When you speak about pure dollars, the US contributes
more foreign aid overseas than any other country in the world.
When you talk about it as a percentage of GDP,
the US is actually very very far down the list.
But there is also a very heavy soft power component,
so trying to use civil society programs, libraries, interaction with
(04:58):
people often poor pus in these countries as a way
to extend SELT power and get people to like them.
And there's a geo strategic element there of doing competition
with China, get people to like the US more than
they like other countries.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Trump took action essentially to freeze the organization. Explain what
he did.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
President Trump essentially shut down USAID entirely through the State
Department and also through some of his executive orders put
a blanket freeze on US foreign aid, with some exceptions
for life saving treatments, so all of those programs were halted.
There are about ten thousand people who work for USAID.
(05:40):
That includes Americans foreign service officers, but also local staff
and countries all around the world. They basically put all
the Americans they could on administrative leave, so paying them
but telling them not to come to the office, and
then did even very symbolic things like they took the
name US Agency for International Development off of the building
(06:02):
where it's headquartered. People were cut off from their email accounts,
finding it impossible to communicate or even to get direction.
So within a very short period of time, they basically
ground USAID.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
To a halt. And what's the ultimate goal that Trump
has presented for doing all of this?
Speaker 3 (06:21):
His claim and Elon Musk's claim because his DOGE group
has been central to the work to freeze USAID. What
they claim is that USAID became a hotbed for some
of the DEI and progressive leaning initiatives that they really
want to get rid of. They also claimed that USAID
had essentially become a rogue agency where people were implementing
(06:45):
these programs and despite being told to stop, were refusing
to do so. We had one report where USAID staff
were brought into a room with some of the political
appointees who had been brought in and were told, listen,
we know you're funding abortions, we know you're funding transgender surgery.
You need to come clean on that and stop hiding it.
(07:05):
And their response was, we do not do that. That's
not part of USAID's remit. And the response was essentially,
we know you're lying. And then they also just more
broadly went through USAID's accounts and said that there was
a ton of waste and fraud in there where they
felt that those programs were ineffective, weren't going to produce anything,
(07:26):
and so sort of cast it both as a rogue
agency and also as an agency that was spending money
in a wasteful way.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Nick, why is Trump taking aim at this agency? In
twenty twenty three, USAID's budget made up about one point
two percent of overall government spending.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
There are several things happening here. One is that it's
an easy target. They do have programs focused on priorities
of democratic administrations, such as climate change, transgender rights, outreach
to LGBTQ communities. It's also a small target. If DOGE
and President Trump are going to go after the Pentagon,
(08:06):
for example, or Treasury or a bigger agency, that's going
to be a bigger challenge because there are just so
many more people and so many more equities involved from
folks who may have a stake in keeping those agencies alive.
But it also reflects a bigger issue, which is that
President Trump and a lot of Republicans, particularly those involved
in Project twenty twenty five, want to get away from
(08:28):
this idea of aid for aid's sake, so you put
grain on a ship and it goes and helps a
community that's suffering from a catastrophe. They want aid that's
more economically driven, public private partnerships, where you have US
companies or you have an investment driven model rather than
a pure aid model.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
So Elon Musk is helping the president assess government agencies,
and he came out and called USAAD evil. Do we
know what his involvement was in the decision.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Initially, what happened was that he deployed several people to
USAID to try to essentially gain access to its computer systems,
and there was a standoff early on where they tried
to get access to classified information in a secure area
of USAID and two security employees tried to stop them,
(09:21):
and there was actually a confrontation where they said, you
can't come in here. You don't have the appropriate clearances.
This is not legal, and they were essentially told that's
not the case. We do have the right clearances, and
those people were essentially swept aside. So Doge was involved
in this from the very beginning. But then there came
to be this huge online pileon where people were going
(09:43):
through all of USAID's records in terms of what it spent,
because this is all public information. I mean, USAID broadcasts
to the world on its website well before the website
got shut down, all the programs it does. So then
there was this pilon where Netizin's citizens sleuths were sort
of going going through USAID's books and pointing out programs
that they felt were inappropriate or irrelevant, So it had
(10:06):
the snowball.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Effect after the break. What the legal challenges to Trump's
actions could mean for USAID's future, and what a world
without American leadership on humanitarian aid could look like. Nick,
(10:28):
you and I covered the first Trump term together. We
kind of know a little bit about reading the tea
leaves of how different actions reveal something about how decisions
are made in the White House. What can you tell
us about how Trump is getting advice and what kinds
of conversations you think might be happening inside the administration
(10:50):
over USAD and what it tells us about how they
might handle other agencies.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
One of the things about USAID that's so fascinating, and
I've had sources at USAID for years. USAID was a
tool under the first Trump administration, particularly through Trump's daughter Ivanka,
who launched federally funded women's programs using USAID. So at
that time, the Trump administration in the first term saw
(11:17):
value in USAID. Obviously that's changed. He's essentially given Doge
and his lieutenant's free reign to do what they want
to this agency. The other issue that's really fascinating to
me is there may be a legal battle over whether
USAID as a congressionally mandated agency can be destroyed in
(11:38):
this way. But what do you do when you essentially
put people in charge of the agency who believe it
should be destroyed. So you can have a court say yes,
USAID should stay in existence, but then you install staff
at the top of the agency who essentially want to
make it defunct, so it becomes almost like a zombie
(11:59):
agency where it's the only people who are being allowed
to report to work are staff who believe it should
not exist. So we still haven't seen how that's going
to play out because courts have so far tried to
block the President from essentially putting the entire agency on
administrative leave, but that appears to be what their strategy is, and.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
What are you watching for next in that case.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
It'll be interesting to see what happens in terms of
whether the administration agrees to essentially put people back to
work as courts have ordered. You're also going to start
to see some real aftershocks here, and it'll be interesting
to see what happens with Congress and how much pressure
they bring to bear. A huge element of what USAID
does is it buys often surplus crops from US farmers
(12:45):
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crops, puts those
on ships and sends them to disaster zones or places
in need. A lot of those shipments have been suspended
or are in limbo or in the process of being canceled.
We've seen some rumblings from my senator in Kansas, for example,
where they have constituents, they have farmers who are not
getting paid or who are watching these crops get spoiled
(13:08):
while they await pickup. We've seen some indication that they're
willing to speak up a little bit on X, but
really not go to battle with the Trump administration. And
then the final one I would say is just does
this cost cutting actually work. There's some indication that it
will actually be more expensive to the US taxpayer to
defund the USAID because you have all of these staff
(13:30):
overseas they are now going to need to be brought home.
You have contracts that have to be canceled. There are
going to be lawsuits, There's going to be millions and
millions of dollars in US government assets all overseas. So
you could see a scenario where the financial waste from
destroying USAID actually in the end comes to cost more
than the cuts that they had envisioned.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Nick, at the start of our conversation, you mentioned the
soft power element and how usad's work also benefits America
in certain ways. What kind of soft power vacuum do
you think could be created globally?
Speaker 3 (14:05):
I think that's a very real concern. I mean, this
has fit a broader approach by the Trump administration that
it seems very clear they don't believe in soft power
the way that successive administration is basically dating back to
the Cold War believed in. You have USAID and a
lot of these countries providing life saving food and medicine,
and very intentionally, a lot of the sacks that carry
(14:28):
that grain or the cans of food, whatever it may be,
are labeled with American flags or USAID. So there's a
direct correlation that the US government has been very intentional
about that, says, Hey, it's the United States government that's
providing this. So the absence of that obviously gives other
countries like China the opportunity to step into the gap.
(14:48):
But then there's also just the negative effects. Hey, we
were dependent on the United States and then they pulled
out we don't see them anymore. They abandoned us.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
What could that mean for American influence the longer term?
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Well, if you're foreign government and the US comes and says, okay,
we have all of this aid we want to give
to you, but as part of our conversations, we also
want to share our values or expect a certain adherence
to values. And then the US is suddenly out of
that situation. You have another country that doesn't put as
(15:22):
much of a priority on those issues or actively opposes
some of those issues. Maybe it's climate change, maybe it's
LGBTQ issues, and so that silence will be filled by others.
So that's the real concern there.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Well, Nick, thanks so much for joining in unpacking all
of us with me.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
My pleasure.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
On Tuesday, President Trump and Elon Musk held a press
conference in the Oval Office, and they doubled down on
their critiques of usaid.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
But overall, you say, what does the bank of the buck?
I would say it was not very good.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
As I said, much as incompetence and much as dishonesty.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
We have to catch it.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the President's advisors have discussed
moving usaad funds to a government run agency created during
Trump's first term. That agency, the US International Development Finance Corporation,
uses taxpayer dollars to invest in private sector projects overseas.
It's set to be run by the son of private
(16:16):
equity investor Leon Black and Today, protesters disrupted a congressional
hearing over USAID spending, calling for a full restoration of
money for AIDS treatment. A Republican and congressmen rebutted, saying
that funding was exempt and had already been restored, something
that several AID groups disputed, and with other court rulings
(16:37):
on the horizon, the battle continues. This is the Big
Take DC from Bloomberg News. I'm Salaia Moosen. This episode
was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards,
Greg White, and Ian Marlow. It was fact checked by
Audreyan Atapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sugira.
(17:00):
Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven and our senior editor
is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beemster Bower.
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked
this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big
Take DC. Wherever you listen to podcasts, it helps new
people find the show. Thanks for listening.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Since his first day
in office, President Donald Trump has taken aim at the
US Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. The
whole thing is a fraud, very little being put to
good use. First came his executive order on January twentieth,
(00:24):
putting a ninety day freeze on foreign assistance funded through
the agency. Thousands of USAID personnel were put on administrative leave.
Ngngos and contractors around the world who get funding or
work with USAID staff scrambled to make sense of the order.
But last week a federal judge halted Trump's order to
put USAID workers on leave. We've also seen at least
(00:47):
two other federal judges block broader attempts at freezing federal funding.
As the battle over USAID's future heats up, Bloomberg reporter
Simon Marx, who's based in Nairobi, says the ripple effects
are already palps.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
A lot of people in Kenya are hopeful that some
of this funding can be re established, but in a
period where there's a lot of doubt, people are just
putting the brakes on. So the reality on the ground
is that the programs have stopped basically.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
After the news of Trump's order first broke, Simon visited
a health clinic in Naerobi. One of the clinic's main
jobs is distributing drugs to combat HIV. More than one
point two million people in Kenya are being treated for
the virus. Preventing its spread, managing symptoms, and combating stigma
are all crucial tasks that the clinics staff perform.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
When we arrived at the Matari North Health Center, as
we walk through the doors, there was an emergency meeting
ongoing with state Civil servant staff.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So that's what I say, and fourteen fels to man.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
And they were essentially grappling with the huge fallout from
the USAID cuts. Seventeen staffers been let go. They were
in a sort of state of semi crisis and disbelief.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
On the days Simon visited, many of the clinics staff
didn't show up for work. They had been told that
given Trump's order, they may not be paid.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I met one nurse who said, on the first day
of these cuts, she was already doing a double shift
and couldn't go back to see her family.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
The one nazis HD years, the ones who do their
testing in.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Such and some of the staff worry because there had
been a long queue of HIV patients line up looking
for the anti retroviral drugs in a state of panic.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Those Spiciens come visically.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
When they arrived, there was no one to administer those drugs.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
While Washington fights over USAID's future, the reality and communities
that rely on its funding is already shifting. For the
people who rely on USAID funded clinics, this faraway debate
in Washington can have even life or death consequences. From
Bloomberg's Washington bureau, This is the Big Take DC podcast.
(03:08):
I'm Saleamosen today on the show the ongoing battle over
USAID and what the turmoil could mean for communities on
the ground and American influence abroad. To understand the fight
over USAID, I sat down with Bloomberg's National Security editor
Nick Wattams. Nick, let's start big picture. What is USAID.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
USAID is the US Agency for International Development. It's sort
of under the umbrella of the State Department, but it's
also an independent federal agencies. And these are the guys
who distribute food aid in times of disaster and crisis overseas.
They also do anti HIV programs all across the continent
(03:53):
of Africa and elsewhere. It's also a way to prevent pandemics.
So USAADA is involved in diase tracking in a lot
of countries, particularly in Africa, and they launch vaccination campaigns.
They also give farmers advice and instruction on how to
plant crops better in situations where there's drought. So a
whole range of operations that go from immediate disastered relief
(04:20):
to sort of broader cultural exchange and community programs. And
the annual budget is about forty billion dollars a year.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
So how did the US become such a critical source
of international aid here?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Overall? When you speak about pure dollars, the US contributes
more foreign aid overseas than any other country in the world.
When you talk about it as a percentage of GDP,
the US is actually very very far down the list.
But there is also a very heavy soft power component,
so trying to use civil society programs, libraries, interaction with
(04:58):
people often poor pus in these countries as a way
to extend SELT power and get people to like them.
And there's a geo strategic element there of doing competition
with China, get people to like the US more than
they like other countries.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Trump took action essentially to freeze the organization. Explain what
he did.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
President Trump essentially shut down USAID entirely through the State
Department and also through some of his executive orders put
a blanket freeze on US foreign aid, with some exceptions
for life saving treatments, so all of those programs were halted.
There are about ten thousand people who work for USAID.
(05:40):
That includes Americans foreign service officers, but also local staff
and countries all around the world. They basically put all
the Americans they could on administrative leave, so paying them
but telling them not to come to the office, and
then did even very symbolic things like they took the
name US Agency for International Development off of the building
(06:02):
where it's headquartered. People were cut off from their email accounts,
finding it impossible to communicate or even to get direction.
So within a very short period of time, they basically
ground USAID.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
To a halt. And what's the ultimate goal that Trump
has presented for doing all of this?
Speaker 3 (06:21):
His claim and Elon Musk's claim because his DOGE group
has been central to the work to freeze USAID. What
they claim is that USAID became a hotbed for some
of the DEI and progressive leaning initiatives that they really
want to get rid of. They also claimed that USAID
had essentially become a rogue agency where people were implementing
(06:45):
these programs and despite being told to stop, were refusing
to do so. We had one report where USAID staff
were brought into a room with some of the political
appointees who had been brought in and were told, listen,
we know you're funding abortions, we know you're funding transgender surgery.
You need to come clean on that and stop hiding it.
(07:05):
And their response was, we do not do that. That's
not part of USAID's remit. And the response was essentially,
we know you're lying. And then they also just more
broadly went through USAID's accounts and said that there was
a ton of waste and fraud in there where they
felt that those programs were ineffective, weren't going to produce anything,
(07:26):
and so sort of cast it both as a rogue
agency and also as an agency that was spending money
in a wasteful way.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Nick, why is Trump taking aim at this agency? In
twenty twenty three, USAID's budget made up about one point
two percent of overall government spending.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
There are several things happening here. One is that it's
an easy target. They do have programs focused on priorities
of democratic administrations, such as climate change, transgender rights, outreach
to LGBTQ communities. It's also a small target. If DOGE
and President Trump are going to go after the Pentagon,
(08:06):
for example, or Treasury or a bigger agency, that's going
to be a bigger challenge because there are just so
many more people and so many more equities involved from
folks who may have a stake in keeping those agencies alive.
But it also reflects a bigger issue, which is that
President Trump and a lot of Republicans, particularly those involved
in Project twenty twenty five, want to get away from
(08:28):
this idea of aid for aid's sake, so you put
grain on a ship and it goes and helps a
community that's suffering from a catastrophe. They want aid that's
more economically driven, public private partnerships, where you have US
companies or you have an investment driven model rather than
a pure aid model.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
So Elon Musk is helping the president assess government agencies,
and he came out and called USAAD evil. Do we
know what his involvement was in the decision.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Initially, what happened was that he deployed several people to
USAID to try to essentially gain access to its computer systems,
and there was a standoff early on where they tried
to get access to classified information in a secure area
of USAID and two security employees tried to stop them,
(09:21):
and there was actually a confrontation where they said, you
can't come in here. You don't have the appropriate clearances.
This is not legal, and they were essentially told that's
not the case. We do have the right clearances, and
those people were essentially swept aside. So Doge was involved
in this from the very beginning. But then there came
to be this huge online pileon where people were going
(09:43):
through all of USAID's records in terms of what it spent,
because this is all public information. I mean, USAID broadcasts
to the world on its website well before the website
got shut down, all the programs it does. So then
there was this pilon where Netizin's citizens sleuths were sort
of going going through USAID's books and pointing out programs
that they felt were inappropriate or irrelevant, So it had
(10:06):
the snowball.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Effect after the break. What the legal challenges to Trump's
actions could mean for USAID's future, and what a world
without American leadership on humanitarian aid could look like. Nick,
(10:28):
you and I covered the first Trump term together. We
kind of know a little bit about reading the tea
leaves of how different actions reveal something about how decisions
are made in the White House. What can you tell
us about how Trump is getting advice and what kinds
of conversations you think might be happening inside the administration
(10:50):
over USAD and what it tells us about how they
might handle other agencies.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
One of the things about USAID that's so fascinating, and
I've had sources at USAID for years. USAID was a
tool under the first Trump administration, particularly through Trump's daughter Ivanka,
who launched federally funded women's programs using USAID. So at
that time, the Trump administration in the first term saw
(11:17):
value in USAID. Obviously that's changed. He's essentially given Doge
and his lieutenant's free reign to do what they want
to this agency. The other issue that's really fascinating to
me is there may be a legal battle over whether
USAID as a congressionally mandated agency can be destroyed in
(11:38):
this way. But what do you do when you essentially
put people in charge of the agency who believe it
should be destroyed. So you can have a court say yes,
USAID should stay in existence, but then you install staff
at the top of the agency who essentially want to
make it defunct, so it becomes almost like a zombie
(11:59):
agency where it's the only people who are being allowed
to report to work are staff who believe it should
not exist. So we still haven't seen how that's going
to play out because courts have so far tried to
block the President from essentially putting the entire agency on
administrative leave, but that appears to be what their strategy is, and.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
What are you watching for next in that case.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
It'll be interesting to see what happens in terms of
whether the administration agrees to essentially put people back to
work as courts have ordered. You're also going to start
to see some real aftershocks here, and it'll be interesting
to see what happens with Congress and how much pressure
they bring to bear. A huge element of what USAID
does is it buys often surplus crops from US farmers
(12:45):
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crops, puts those
on ships and sends them to disaster zones or places
in need. A lot of those shipments have been suspended
or are in limbo or in the process of being canceled.
We've seen some rumblings from my senator in Kansas, for example,
where they have constituents, they have farmers who are not
getting paid or who are watching these crops get spoiled
(13:08):
while they await pickup. We've seen some indication that they're
willing to speak up a little bit on X, but
really not go to battle with the Trump administration. And
then the final one I would say is just does
this cost cutting actually work. There's some indication that it
will actually be more expensive to the US taxpayer to
defund the USAID because you have all of these staff
(13:30):
overseas they are now going to need to be brought home.
You have contracts that have to be canceled. There are
going to be lawsuits, There's going to be millions and
millions of dollars in US government assets all overseas. So
you could see a scenario where the financial waste from
destroying USAID actually in the end comes to cost more
than the cuts that they had envisioned.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Nick, at the start of our conversation, you mentioned the
soft power element and how usad's work also benefits America
in certain ways. What kind of soft power vacuum do
you think could be created globally?
Speaker 3 (14:05):
I think that's a very real concern. I mean, this
has fit a broader approach by the Trump administration that
it seems very clear they don't believe in soft power
the way that successive administration is basically dating back to
the Cold War believed in. You have USAID and a
lot of these countries providing life saving food and medicine,
and very intentionally, a lot of the sacks that carry
(14:28):
that grain or the cans of food, whatever it may be,
are labeled with American flags or USAID. So there's a
direct correlation that the US government has been very intentional
about that, says, Hey, it's the United States government that's
providing this. So the absence of that obviously gives other
countries like China the opportunity to step into the gap.
(14:48):
But then there's also just the negative effects. Hey, we
were dependent on the United States and then they pulled
out we don't see them anymore. They abandoned us.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
What could that mean for American influence the longer term?
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Well, if you're foreign government and the US comes and says, okay,
we have all of this aid we want to give
to you, but as part of our conversations, we also
want to share our values or expect a certain adherence
to values. And then the US is suddenly out of
that situation. You have another country that doesn't put as
(15:22):
much of a priority on those issues or actively opposes
some of those issues. Maybe it's climate change, maybe it's
LGBTQ issues, and so that silence will be filled by others.
So that's the real concern there.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Well, Nick, thanks so much for joining in unpacking all
of us with me.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
My pleasure.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
On Tuesday, President Trump and Elon Musk held a press
conference in the Oval Office, and they doubled down on
their critiques of usaid.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
But overall, you say, what does the bank of the buck?
I would say it was not very good.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
As I said, much as incompetence and much as dishonesty.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
We have to catch it.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the President's advisors have discussed
moving usaad funds to a government run agency created during
Trump's first term. That agency, the US International Development Finance Corporation,
uses taxpayer dollars to invest in private sector projects overseas.
It's set to be run by the son of private
(16:16):
equity investor Leon Black and Today, protesters disrupted a congressional
hearing over USAID spending, calling for a full restoration of
money for AIDS treatment. A Republican and congressmen rebutted, saying
that funding was exempt and had already been restored, something
that several AID groups disputed, and with other court rulings
(16:37):
on the horizon, the battle continues. This is the Big
Take DC from Bloomberg News. I'm Salaia Moosen. This episode
was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards,
Greg White, and Ian Marlow. It was fact checked by
Audreyan Atapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sugira.
(17:00):
Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven and our senior editor
is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beemster Bower.
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked
this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big
Take DC. Wherever you listen to podcasts, it helps new
people find the show. Thanks for listening.
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