Perspectives Series: USAID Collapse
Note: We are looking for more perspectives to share. If you have a story to tell regarding how the Trump administration has affected your life, please reach out to ryan7664discord@gmail.com or ryj.50 on Signal.
Introduction
In the current media environment, it can be hard to know what to pay attention to. Actions taken by the administration are taken and then undone. Vitriolic statements are made by public figures and then moved on from. These types of “news” make it difficult to focus on what’s most important: the daily harm happening to Americans because of the administration. In this Perspectives Series, we redirect people to these important narratives, directly hearing from everyday Americans about their struggles.
This week our topic is USAID. Shortly after taking office this year, the Trump administration swiftly and illegally closed the United States Agency for International Development, an organization which had provided development aid and humanitarian assistance to developing countries for over 60 years. This action halted the distribution of vital aid around the globe, left tons of food to go to waste, and endangered the lives of millions. But the impact was not just felt abroad—many in the U.S. who worked on these important projects were deeply affected too.
Original Art by Mike B.
A Researcher’s Narrative
Now we hear from a local researcher whose work in Guatemala was abruptly terminated during the agency’s shutdown.
At the start of this year I was the co-lead of a 5-year, $15 million project. The project was a collaboration between a Boston-area university, a university in Guatemala, and one of the largest Guatemalan exporters' associations. The project's aim was to strengthen the capacity of universities in Guatemala and Central America to support entrepreneurship and research, expanding opportunities for students to become job-creators after graduation in addition to just job-seekers. We also were looking to create opportunities for students to engage in directly solving locally relevant challenges, like access to clean water, sanitation, and nutritious food, through their coursework and entrepreneurial initiatives. This project was important because it was piloting an approach to addressing some of the most persistent poverty challenges in Guatemala and the region. In Guatemala, a high percentage of rural people don't have access to basic services or quality job opportunities, so young people migrate out of the region—often to the U.S.—looking for more promising opportunities that don't exist for them at home. This project aimed to create more of these opportunities while also engaging indigenous and rural youth in quality work that solved pressing local problems—the kind of work that people are often most excited to stay and do.
This project was personally very important to me because it integrated the various strands of my professional work over the past two decades and put them to use in a region where I had been involved since I was a teen. I spoke the language fluently, I had personal ties to the region, and after over a decade of work in other regions of the world, this project finally brought me back to the region I most wanted to work in. We had a very talented and collaborative group of colleagues, both in Boston and Guatemala, we had goals that we were all genuinely passionate about, and we enjoyed working together. In many ways, it was a dream project for me.
This dream project came to an abrupt halt shortly after January 20. Nine days after inauguration, the Trump Administration issued Stop Work orders on our project, which took effect immediately. What happened next was something that left us all reeling. From one day to the next, our calendar went quiet. All meetings were cancelled. The university administration seemed quick to comply with all the orders coming from above, even though the legality of the orders was in question. We were all told that any expenses we incurred were unlikely to be reimbursed during this time. We didn't even know if our salaries were going to be paid, there was that much uncertainty. These orders came at an unfortunate time because our Boston-based team was just preparing to spend a week with our Guatemalan counterparts to participate in our bi-annual workshops. One of my postdocs was actually already on the plane to Guatemala when the orders were announced and ended up stranded there for a week, as we didn't even have authorization to spend the money required to change her flight to bring her back sooner. Soon after this debacle, we received a heavily redacted and edited version of our cooperative agreement in which all mention of "inclusive" or "gender" or "indigenous" had been removed and replaced with other words. This was because of an executive order mandating elimination of language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
These actions did more than just stop work. At this point, my team had spent four years meeting several times a week with Guatemalan colleagues with whom we had formed very deep professional relationships. Because the Stop Work orders stated that all work had to cease immediately, we were instructed to drop contact, cancel meetings, and avoid any engagement that could be perceived as working. There was no all-team close-out meeting, no let’s-meet-on-our-own-time-to-process-this meeting, no official letters sent out to partners and collaborators expressing our regrets that this was all ending like this. This felt like a gut-punch, and such a cold way to end five years of close, collaborative work. In early February, the award was completely terminated, without any of the usual required close-out processes. Contracts that we had with service providers with whom we had been working for three or four years were summarily cancelled; folks with pending invoices were told that maybe they weren't going to get their invoices paid.
Almost immediately, the award termination began to affect members of our team financially. Three of my colleagues on the award based in Boston lost their jobs, and I heard a dozen or so of our Guatemalan colleagues also lost their jobs with only four days’ notice. The award had been paying 60 percent of my salary and 100 percent of the salary of some members of my team. When the funding was abruptly stopped, I had to quickly figure out how to shrink my team. I had to make the very difficult choice of letting go of my existing postdoc, which would have required her to leave the U.S. and return to her home country, or rescind an offer I had just made to a new postdoc to join my group. The recipient of the job offer was in a special position; he was uniquely qualified for the role and was just re-entering academia after a long medical leave, putting him in a pivotal moment in his career. Joining my group would have been life-changing for him, but with great sadness, I decided to drop the offer, as I wanted to keep my postdoc on board even though I wasn’t even sure the money for that role would last either. Making the phone call rescinding the offer was the hardest thing I have had to do in my current role.
Following the abrupt close of the project, I felt a lot of conflicting feelings swirling together: shock, grief, anger, frustration, and a deep sense of the injustice, illegality, and hypocrisy of ending a program like ours, as well as so many other programs at USAID and elsewhere throughout the federal government that were being "DOGEd" at the same time, on the pretense of efficiency and savings. When our project was terminated in February, it was the second quarter of the fourth year of what would have been a five-year project. This was the phase of the project where results from our work were starting to solidify and we were planning ways to replicate our work at other universities in the region. We were also in the process of starting to compile data and results for publication so our learning could be shared. Now, none of that learning will be published and none of that data will be shared. Ending a project 80 percent of the way through implementation is the opposite of efficient. It's like yanking a batch of test cookies out of the oven when they're only 80 percent baked and throwing away the recipe. In our case, the hypocrisy was particularly glaring because the administration was producing a lot of rhetoric about reducing immigration from Central American countries and was spending millions of dollars to deport immigrants to El Salvador, all while cutting programs like ours and the others sponsored by USAID in Guatemala which were working to address the root causes of why many people need to leave their home for the U.S. in the first place. What they did was so deeply wasteful and counterproductive to the goals they ostensibly cared about. Experiencing all this firsthand in late January and early February, while most of the country seemed to still just be going about life as usual, was both maddening and demoralizing, especially in the context of [Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget] Russel Vought's prior comments about wanting to put federal employees working in agencies like USAID "in trauma." My work, my sector, my colleagues, my own team—we were all targeted by this administration with the stated intent to cause us harm.
Conclusion
Have you or someone close to you been harmed by the actions of the Trump administration? Have tariffs affected your business? Has someone you know been taken by ICE? Has the government shutdown threatened your finances? Has some other action affected your livelihood in a way not reported by the news? We want to hear your story. If you are willing to share, please reach out to ryan7664discord@gmail.com or ryj.50 on Signal. Authors may choose to remain anonymous.
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