Ep 17: Feeding the Wood Chipper: Why USAID Was Destroyed

What happens when you take decades of American development work — the programs that fed families, kept clinics open, and gave people reasons not to flee their homes — and throw it all into the wood chipper? That’s exactly what happened to USAID in 2025. In this episode, I dig into what was lost, why it matters for people abroad and here at home, and what it says about how power is being used in Washington today. 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Maryam Muhammad told us abouther 7-year-old son who died.
Here she is holding some of hisfavorite clothes.
Babagana had been a happy kidwho loved biking, but he had
sickle cell disease, and onenight in February he developed a
fever.
The next morning, Maryam rushedhim to the US funded clinic
where he had been getting carebefore.

(00:20):
When they got there, it wasclosed.
The clinic had received a stopwork order from the US
government the week before.
Maryam, who is a widow says shedidn't have money to go to the
government hospital.

(00:41):
Her son died later that day.

Raheel Khan (00:45):
That was NPR sharing the tragic story of
Babagana who died because theU-S-A-I-D clinic that provided
his treatment was shut down.
His and Mariam's story is areminder that foreign aid isn't
some abstract policy concept inWashington.
It's real lives, depending onthat aid to survive.
And when it was suddenlyterminated people like Mariam

(01:06):
and Babagana are the ones whopaid the price.
And their story is just oneamong hundreds of thousands.
By May, researchers estimatedmore than 330,000 people had
died because of what happened ona single weekend in February,
2025.
A weekend when the richest manin the world decided his new
hobby wasn't rockets or cars, itwas wrecking the US Agency for

(01:30):
International Development.
And he honestly seemed prettypleased with himself.
Here's Musk.
As, as we dug into U UsA-U-S-A-I-D it became apparent
that what we have here is, isnot an apple with a worm in it,
but we have actually just a ballof worms.
Um, and so at, at the point atwhich you, you don't merely,

(01:51):
like if you've got an apple,it's got a worm in it, maybe you
can take the worm out.
But if you've got actually justa ball of worms, it, it's, it is
hopeless.
Um, and USID is a ball of worms.
hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode
of Khannecting the Dots.
What you just heard isn't justcallous, it's built on lies.

(02:11):
A ball of worms cooked up fromfraud, fake reviews, conspiracy
theories that somehow becamegovernment policy.
So today I want to tell you thereal story because this isn't
just about cutting foreign aid.
About completely changing theplaybook on how the United
States wield its influencearound the world.

(02:32):
Let's start with what wasactually destroyed.
Because U-S-A-I-D wasn't justsome random government agency.
It was created in 1961 byPresident John F.
Kennedy as America's Cold warweapon.
Kennedy had seen firsthandtraveling through Asia and Latin
America, how poverty leftcountries vulnerable to Soviet
influence.

(02:53):
So instead of only sendingtroops or weapons, he decided
America would help countriesdevelop, build their economies,
their institutions, theircapacity to govern themselves.
The idea was simple, prosperousdemocracies don't turn to
communism.
And for 60 years that strategyworked.
U-S-A-I-D became America'sprimary tool of soft power,

(03:16):
preventing conflicts, buildingalliances, and creating markets
for US goods.
Here's what that looked like.
From 2001 to 2021.
U-S-A-I-D programs helpedprevent an estimated 91.8
million deaths, including over30 million children under the
age of five.

(03:36):
When disasters struck, U-S-A-I-Dwas often first on the ground.
When food aid was shippedoverseas, much of it came from
American farmers, stabilizingfamilies abroad while supporting
jobs here at home.
This wasn't charity.
It was strategic investment instability and prosperity, and
for decades it worked.

(03:57):
Now, let's be clear.
U-S-A-I-D was not perfect.
No government agency ever is.
Just weeks before Doge targetedthem.
PBS NewsHour aired ininvestigations showing serious
flaws.
It's actually a fewer, less than10% of our foreign assistance,
uh, dollars.
Uh, flowing through USAID isactually reaching those

(04:18):
communities.
Walter Ks with a group calledUnlock Aid formed in 2021 to
draw attention to a system inwhich a relative handful of
private companies calledimplementing partners are
awarded most contracts byU-S-A-I-D.
One of the best things that, uh,government can do is to move
away from measuring success interms of outputs.

(04:40):
How much money do we spend on aparticular problem and moving
toward an orientation of, uh,results.
A lot of people will be shockedto hear that that's not the
case.
Well, it's true about 98% of,uh, USAID grants.
Uh, pay for activities, uh, andnot results, and the results are
not flattering.

(05:01):
According to the Agency's ownInspector General's office,
which studied U-S-A-I-D awardsfor three years, 2017 to 2019,
uh, 43% of them failed toachieve, uh, about half of the
intended results.
But in spite of that, they stillgot paid in full almost every
time and sometimes more.
Those were real problems, but here's what Doge

(05:22):
never told you.
Solutions were already inmotion.
When Samantha Power took over asadministrator in 2021, she
pledged to shift funding tolocally led efforts.
25% by 2025, 50% by 2030.
Progress was slow, only 10% byearly 2025, but the direction
was right and some programs werealready showing results.

(05:46):
In parts of Africa, livestockMarkets.
U-S-A-I-D helped start, were nowself-sustaining.
Local irrigation projects werebringing consistent water to
farmers.
In Central America.
1800 direct grants gave peoplereasons to stay.
As one former administrator putit.
"As a direct consequence of thatinvestment, the migration from

(06:06):
those countries has gone downconsiderably." Not a wall, not
deportations.
Real results beyond food andhealth.
Building communities, creatinglong-term opportunities,
reducing migration, and eventurning conflict zones into
places of growth.
In Columbia, for example, oneproject turned former gorilla

(06:27):
fighters into eco-tourismguides.
Tourism surged violence fell,and former combat zones became
travel destinations.
And it wasn't just Columbia.
In Malawi, former poachersbecame conservationists with
plans to grow the tourismeconomy.
These weren't one-offs.
They were part of a broadershift.

(06:47):
Programs that were working,scaling, and proving that smart
development could solve realproblems.
The very kinds of reforms PBShad found were needed,
results-based funding, localpartnerships, sustainable
development.
And then in a single weekend, itwas all fed into the wood
chipper.
So why go after U-S-A-I-D?

(07:10):
Project 2025 had alreadytargeted the agency for having a
woke agenda?
But completely destroying it.
That was a Trump and Musk thing,and they went after it for the
most Trumpian reason possible,they heard about it on a
podcast.
According to the WashingtonPost, Elon Musk didn't mention
U-S-A-I-D once on social mediauntil December 10th, 2024.

(07:33):
The world's richest man hadapparently never heard of the
agency that distributed half ofall US Foreign Aid.
What changed?
A man named Mike Benz.
Benz had been buildingconspiracy theories about
U-S-A-I-D since 2022.
He worked in Trump's firstadministration.
Before that, he was an alt-rightinfluencer promoting white

(07:55):
identity politics andantisemitic conspiracy theories.
For years, Benz had beenclaiming that U-S-A-I-D was
behind everything.
Mass censorship of Americans,rigging elections abroad,
overthrowing governments, the2019 Trump impeachment.
He even tied them to startingthe COVID Pandemic.
Then on December 3rd, 2024, Benzappeared on Joe Rogan's podcast

(08:18):
to promote his theories.
Take a listen.

(08:56):
Now if you listen to Benz, hesounds persuasive.
He rattles off real programs,names real groups, and strings
together facts that aretechnically true, but he twists
the framing, stretches thedetails, and suddenly routine
development work looks like CIAtradecraft, a hidden plot,
hiding in plain sight.

(09:17):
That's the playbook.
Take something ordinary, stripit of context, and sell it as
proof of a grand conspiracy.
Here's the reality.
U-S-A-I-D did fund programs totrain journalists to spot
misinformation, support civicgroups, and secure elections
from cyber attacks.
They were meant to strengthendemocracies, but to people
already primed to distrust thoseefforts, it was easy to recast

(09:40):
them as manipulation.
And that framing, not audits,not evidence, is what Musk and
Trump ran with.
Only a week later, Musk startedsharing Benzs' commentary,
calling U-S-A-I-D, a"Viper'sNest of Radical Left Marxists,
who hate America","a criminalorganization", and saying"Time

(10:01):
for it to die".
And just like that one Roganappearance, re wrote decades of
bipartisan foreign policy.
As I've shown in previousepisodes where Trump goes, the
entire Republican party followsno questions asked.
Many of the Republicans nowattacking U-S-A-I-D had praised
the agency before.

(10:21):
Senator Joni Ernst had evensought additional funding back
in 2022.
And Secretary of State, MarcoRubio, he had praised the work
of U-S-A-I-D for over a decade,and in 2019 actually said.
"Anyone who suggests thatcutting foreign aid will balance
our budget is misleading you.
Foreign aid constitutes lessthan 1% of our budget".

(10:42):
But with Trump as his boss, he'ssinging a whole new tune.
On March 10th, 2025, Rubioannounced that after a"thorough
review" of 6,500 U-S-A-I-Dprograms, 83% would be
terminated.
Thorough review?
Rubio, loved U-S-A-I-D.
That must have been reallycomprehensive, right?

(11:03):
Not even close.
NPR interviewed six officialswho had direct knowledge of the
process.
Every single one said the samething.
The review was surface level.
Staff didn't look ateffectiveness.
They ran keyword searches.
If a program descriptionincluded words like gender,
family planning, climate, orequality, it landed on the

(11:26):
chopping block.
According to one of theofficials.
"Nobody looked at theeffectiveness of the programs.
It was just a question ofpolitical alignment".
And the wasteful programs theWhite House gave as examples,
misleading at best, fabricatedat worst.
Here's Press Secretary, KarolineLeavitt at the podium.

(12:30):
There was just one problem.
Three of the four examplesweren't even funded by
U-S-A-I-D.
They were state departmentprojects, and the one that was.
A rounding error in a$40 billionbudget.
But worse yet, those examplesweren't even what they were made
out to be.
According to factcheck.org, theSerbia project promoted

(12:51):
workplace inclusion training ina country where L-G-T-L-G-B-T-Q
people faced seriousdiscrimination.
The Ireland musical was acultural event with the American
and Irish artists.
The Columbia Opera was auniversity performance with the
Bogota Philharmonic.
The Peru comic book was actuallyan education project tackling
anti-gay prejudice, and it wonawards.

(13:15):
Not exactly their frivolousprojects, the Trump
administration made them out tobe.
But while they were fabricatingexamples of fraud, real fraud
was being caught and prosecuted.
On June 12th, 2025 months afterU-S-A-I-D was gutted, the
Department of Justice announcedthat A-U-S-A-I-D contracting
officer named Roderick Watsonhad pleaded guilty to a decade

(13:39):
long bribery scheme.
Over a million dollars in bribesmore than$550 million in
contracts steered to companiespaying him off.
This was real fraud, realcorruption.
And it was caught not by Doge,but by USAID's own inspector
General, working with the FBI.

(14:00):
The system designed to catchfraud was actually catching
fraud.
And that same inspector general,he tried to speak up about the
sham reviews that Trumpadministration was airing and
was fired the next day.
By March, 2025, U-S-A-I-D waseffectively dead.
Nearly 10,000 employees replacedan administrative leave.

(14:21):
Only 294 were allowed to stay.
A 97% reduction.
The fallout at home was Swift.
Uc.
Davis permanently lostagricultural research labs that
have been running since 1996.
John Hopkins announced plans tocut 2000 jobs after losing$800
million in funding, and Americanfarmers were left with 66,000

(14:45):
tons of food aid sitting instorage.
Food meant to feed millions.
They're on track to lose 500,000tons total.
These losses aren't hittingbureaucrats.
They're cutting American jobs.
Packaging, shipping, farming.
Doge cut nearly 20,000 of themwith up to 200,000 at risk

(15:07):
across the supply chain.
Abroad, the human cost wasdevastating.
Sure, some life saving HIVtreatment continued prevention
and new enrollments stopped, andeven patients already on
medication faced dangerousdelays and disruptions.
Major clinics shuttered over 30clinical trials of malaria, tb.

(15:29):
Cholera and cervical cancer werehalted.
By May, 2025.
Boston University researchersestimated at least 300,000
deaths due to the cuts.
A Lancet projection warned to 14million preventable deaths by
2030, including 4.5 millionchildren under the age of five,
if the shutdown holds.

(15:52):
When Secretary Rubio testifiedto Congress in May, here's what
he said.
NPR published Babagana's storyjust a week later.
And they didn't stop there.

(16:13):
In July, 2025, Congress passedthe rescission package, clawing
back another$8 billion inU-S-A-I-D and foreign aid
funding that had already beenapproved, pushing those worst
case scenarios closer toreality.
Remarkably PEPFAR, the largestglobal h hiv aids program was
spared, so its lifesaving coretreatment pipeline is slowly

(16:37):
resuming, but clinics andprevention initiatives are still
struggling to reopen and reachfull capacity after months of
disruption.
This wasn a reform.
It was a shutdown withcollateral damage at home and
overseas.
So all of this raises a realquestion.
If the cost was so high, whyeliminate U-S-A-I-D in the first

(16:59):
place?
Trump made it clear he wasn'tinterested in discipline or
reform.
He wanted demolition.
He said the foreign aidestablishment was"run by a bunch
of radical lunatics", while alsocomplained about giving"billions
of dollars to countries thathate us." Even Project 2025, the

(17:20):
conservative playbook had setits sites in U-S-A-I-D calling
it woke for the promotion ofabortion, policies to mitigate
climate change, andacknowledgement of gender
identities.
But they wanted to reform it,bring it to Heel.
Trump didn't want reform, hewanted it gone, and it wasn't
just U-S-A-I-D.

(17:40):
His administration hassystematically dismantled the
very tools of American softpower, voice of America, radio
Free Europe, radio, Liberty, theFulbright program.
Institutions that for decadeshelped the world hear us, trust
us and work with us.
And as Joseph Nye, the scholarwho coined the term, wrote

(18:00):
"Trump's the first president toreject the idea that soft power
has any value in foreignpolicy".
Why target soft power?
Because it proves government canwork, that public institutions
can reduce conflict, expandopportunity, and build
legitimacy without coercion.
For an ideology that needsgovernment to look broken, those

(18:22):
successes are a problem.
So their plan wasn't reform whatfailed, but de-legitimize what
works.
Smear the mission as woke.
Sideline watchdogs who foundreal fraud.
Redirect public capacity towardprivate winners.
Because this administrationdoesn't believe in helping the
poor, addressing climate change,or building international

(18:43):
cooperation.
They believe in coercion,threats, and dominance.
And to make that worldviewstick, they need to convince
people that institutions likeU-S-A-I-D, the very face of
American soft power didn't work.
If diplomacy and developmentlook broken.
The only answers left are forceabroad and a strong man at home.

(19:06):
And the consequences are alreadyvisible.
American farmers are losingexport markets.
anti-American sentiment isgrowing as we abandon people who
depended on our help.
Chinese and Russian influence isexpanding to fill the vacuum.
That's the real agenda, not topersuade, not to build trust,
but to prove that only forcematters.

(19:28):
Where Teddy Roosevelt believedin speaking softly and carrying
a big stick.
Trump's playbook is theopposite.
Stomp loudly and beat peoplewith that stick.
What happened to U-S-A-I-Dwasn't reform, it wasn't
efficiency.
It was dismantling institutionsthat proved America could lead
without force, and the costwasn't abstract.

(19:51):
It was Babagana.
It was Mariam Mohammad.
It was millions of peoplesuddenly cut off from medicine,
food, and hope.
It was American farmers losingexport markets and tens of
thousands of US jobs inpackaging, shipping,
agriculture, and research gone.
But here's the part thatmatters.

(20:12):
It doesn't have to stay thisway.
U-S-A-I-D was created byexecutive order in 1961.
It can be recreated in 2029.
The expertise exists, the needhasn't disappeared.
What we'll have to rebuild istrust.
Trust in America's word, trust,in our ability to show up when
it matters.

(20:32):
That trust took decades to earnand it was destroyed in one
weekend.
America hasn't always been aforce for good.
Far from it.
But when we abandon the fieldentirely, we leave it to others
whose agendas may be far worsefor both us and the world.
Thanks for listening toKhannecting the Dots.

(20:52):
I know this episode was a lot,but these stories matter and if
it helped you see the biggerpicture and what the loss of
U-S-A-I-D means, I hope you'llshare it with someone else.
Conversations like this are howwe push back against the
alternative facts that keepgetting thrown our way.
In a future episode, we'll lookat another Doge target, the
Consumer Financial ProtectionBureau, and as new crisis

(21:15):
unfold, I'll take the time tocover them too.
Because connecting dots doesn'tmean ignoring what's right in
front of us.
Until next time, stay curious,stay critical, and stay
connected.