Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
All this raises the question: What position will Rubio as secretary of state be put in if Trump and Elon Musk continue their effort to destroy USAID? What will the fallout be for America’s place in the world? And what will the global humanitarian consequences be? Today, we’re talking about all of this with Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior official during the Obama and Biden administrations. Jeremy, thanks so much for coming on.
Sargent: On Truth Social, Trump raged about USAID, saying, “Looks like billions of dollars have been stolen at USAID and other agencies, much of it going to the fake news media as a “payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats.” He claimed millions of dollars went to Politico. The whole thing is a ridiculous invention. What’s really going on is many government agencies have paid for many media subscriptions, and this is a fairly common occurrence under all kinds of different administrations. This has nothing whatsoever to do with helping Democrats. But critically, Jeremy, Elon Musk elevated this nonsense. Elon has said Trump has given him permission to shut down USAID. A lot of funding has already been halted. Can you walk us through what the consequences of that have already been in the world?
One of the things that was disrupted, Science magazine reported yesterday, was an eight-country phase one trial for an HIV vaccine that was about to start. So you can think about how transformative it would be for the world to finally—decades into this HIV pandemic—to have a vaccine. Well, the trials to prove a potential vaccine now will not be happening because of this aid freeze. The number of lives that could be saved if that vaccine were demonstrated to be effective is an incalculable impact, and not just for the world but also for the HIV epidemic here in the U.S. potentially.
On the humanitarian front, there’s a famine and a genocide going on in Darfur today, right now, and U.S.–funded health clinics that are providing safe motherhood, that are feeding children, that are treating children rather from malnutrition are on the cusp of shutting down. That’s going to kill a lot of people instantly. If a kid is taken off malnutrition treatment, they die. Full on, they die. There are so many more cases. The USAID works in a hundred countries. Every country you’ve got some story like that.
Marco Rubio (audio voiceover): We don’t have to give foreign aid. We do so because it furthers our national interest. That’s why we give foreign aid. Now, obviously there’s a component of foreign aid that that’s humanitarian in scope, and that’s important too... I promise you, it’s a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism, anti-American terrorism if the United States of America was the reason why they’re even alive today.... Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to a balance is lying to you. Foreign aid is less than 1 percent of our budget. That’s just not true.
Konyndyk: It absolutely has. So I’m now out of government. I’m the president of an NGO called Refugees International. As it happens, we don’t take U.S. government money, which is why I can have conversations like this one. But I served extensively at senior levels in USAID in multiple roles. I talked to Congress all the time, and I talked to Republicans all the time. And I and many of my colleagues worked really well with Republicans. I traveled with Republican members of Congress to disaster response zones. I would brief them and work with them on the Ebola response. And even though I was and am a Democrat and they were Republicans, there was a shared goal here. It’s good for everybody if we defeat Ebola. It’s good for everybody if we can get people vaccinated against Covid.
Sargent: It’s really striking. It shows what Trump has done to this party with their eager complicity. Rubio has now temporarily been put in charge of USAID, and he recently said the mission isn’t to end it. Jeremy, we don’t know precisely what Trump and Musk will do with USAID, but it seems to me that on the most basic level, they want to fundamentally wreck its core function. Is that going to be compatible with Rubio’s ultimate stance, do you think? What position does that put Rubio in, and how badly does it complicate his ability to function as secretary of state?
What they’re doing is they are trying to close all of the overseas missions of USAID, pull back all of the staff from all of those missions, fire all of the staff from USAID in Washington. Just today, what’s started coming out through some of the channels that I’m part of is, of the about 4,000 U.S. direct hire employees and then thousands more national employees of the different missions overseas, they plan to retain not quite 300 people. Just a fraction of a fraction of the workforce of USAID—and fire all the contractors who were probably half the workforce as well.
Sargent: How can Rubio function as a secretary of state in an environment like this? It seems to me that at some point, this comes to a head, doesn’t it? In other words, Rubio can’t conceivably want anything like the outcome you’re describing here, can he?
Something that I did when I ran disaster response at USAID was, after a global earthquake somewhere, I was the guy who would deploy the search and rescue teams. You’ve probably seen these on the news from time to time. Fairfax County Search and Rescue would get on a military plane, and we would fly them over to Nepal or to Haiti or wherever, and they would start pulling people out of the rubble. And it is an amazing story, and an amazing example of American partnership and leadership. That will not happen if there’s an earthquake tomorrow. We will not be there. All the people who did that are fired, or being fired, and the contracts with those search and rescue teams are being canceled. It’s a microcosm of the larger absence and retreat of American leadership in the world.
Konyndyk: Well, a few things. Obviously, a huge amount of human damage of resurgent HIV, of people starving in conflict zones, of children who will not learn to read, of human rights activists who will be unprotected, unarmed, and potentially targeted by their governments and so on. A million examples of that. At a strategic level, it also just withdraws America from a key way that we show up in the world and that we differentiate ourselves from some of our geostrategic rivals.
It also gets to another point: An extractive transactional approach to foreign aid actually reduces or removes one of our comparative advantages vis-a-vis China in that strategic competition, because that’s a way we differentiate ourselves as a partner.
Konyndyk: Yes. What’s been really striking....so who’s cheerleading this since Musk started doing it? Russia has been cheerleading it. Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia, still very close to Putin, no friend of the U.S., is ecstatic, absolutely ecstatic over this. Iran has been putting out public comments saying this is a great idea, finally, USAID gets called out for what it is. To any Republican on the Hill who is keeping their mouth closed about this, that should be a real tell. And they should take a beat, and they should think about what that means about what Elon is about to do to American power and American influence in the world if USAID goes down.
Sargent: Can you talk about what that global order is that Musk, Trump and the authoritarians want? What does it look like? What does that future world look like and how would badly hobbling USAID help them achieve that?
Sargent: Musk and Trump want a world in which dominance is what prevails, where there aren’t really any rules, where there isn’t a sense that soft power is good. Can you talk about what this vision is?
And it took two world wars for the world to get that out of its system and then begin building institutions like the United Nations and like the European Union. Which they’re deeply imperfect, don’t get me wrong. I could talk your ear off about all my problems with the U.N., but they’ve done a good job of keeping us out of world wars. We haven’t had a world war in Europe since the EU was created. That’s potentially the world we start heading back to if this attitude takes off.
Konyndyk: That’s certainly what I think they’re signaling. You can see that with the fact that, out of the gate, Trump has spent a lot more time hectoring U.S. allies and partners than he has U.S. adversaries. He doesn’t understand positive-sum partnerships. He only understands zero-sum dominance. So if Canada doesn’t agree with us on something, we have to dominate. If Mexico doesn’t, if Panama doesn’t. It becomes its dominance contest.
Sargent: Sure looks that way. I really wonder how long he’s going to last. Jeremy, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. We really appreciate it.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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