343-How Foreign Aid Works And Why It Matters With Clifford Brown

We break down what USAID actually is, what it has done around the world, and why foreign aid is designed to shape events overseas without turning everything into a military problem. We also react to the fallout of abrupt cuts, the myths people repeat about “waste”, and the hard truth that some programs work while others fail for predictable reasons.

• Clifford Brown’s career shift from commercial law to foreign assistance work 
• A plain-English definition of USAID and why it was created in 1961 
• Foreign aid as US soft power between diplomacy and war 
• Real-world examples across agriculture, trade, environment, and global health 
• Why Americans overestimate foreign aid spending and what “under 1%” implies 
• What a stop work order breaks in practice: staffing, shipping, customs, supply chains 
• Oversight and auditing claims versus the “criminal organization” narrative 
• Programs that can be futile: crop substitution and democracy promotion without local buy-in 
• Africa field stories: corruption incentives, borders drawn without local logic, and regional security spillovers 
• A bigger philosophical question: whether the nation-state model concentrates too much power 

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Transcript

Why USAID Became A Flashpoint

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Get this started. Welcome everyone to politically high tech with your host Elias. I have a new guest here, and we're going to talk about something that's very important. And you've heard this before, especially in the past, last year to be particular, USAID, especially, you know, the current president. He's done massive cuts of virtually eliminating it. Probably a little dramatic, but we have an expert here that's going to debunk whatever dramatic claims I make here, or correct me, I'm fine with it. I don't care. I'm just a host bringing this conversation to you. That's all I am. Just a guy shouting at the mic, giving my opinions. That's all I am to you, alright? So before we do the little introduction, I mean, audience, listeners, viewers, in your head, don't embarrass yourself in the comments unless you think you're arrogant, you think you're better than God. Put down the chat what you think USAID really means. Do you know what it is? TikTok, intercricket sounds. Well, we're gonna learn about it. Um, if you're shy, this benefits you. Don't answer it. But yeah, we're gonna learn about that because for me it was foreign aid that was helping mostly underprivileged nations. That's my understanding of it. But we're gonna have a much much more enriched understanding of what the USA ID is. And Trump gutted it last year. Yep, that's how far back it goes. And why is this not such a good thing? Or for some of you who disagree, why is it such a good thing if you want to be a contrarian? Why do you think USA ID is a waste of money? And then for those of you who are proponents, why is it such a good thing? That's something to think about, okay? That's your little comment section activity if you want to do that. So let me introduce the guest here. Alright, and he's very, very, you know, he's very involved with the USA ID, okay? Look, he gave up his great career, okay, as a partner. That's a big deal. And Beverly Hill's commercial law firm, his dream home over the ocean in Pursue, who has become nearly three decades' journey of foreign a, both as a legal advisor and then a senior manager. He has he has done work in multiple nations, you know, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Kazakhstan, and Guinea. And he has first hand view of dilemmas that USAID lawyers had to deal with. Okay, and the difficulties persuade farms to grow. Oh goodness. I shoot, I would have struggled with that. Coco said of Coca. Owdah. You persuaded that me, I would have been frustrated if I would have knocked the guy out. Up in a bureaucratic ray dance, I require you to start new programs to provide a lightning, an enlightening overview of the world of what is international foreign aid. As he put it, at a time when spirituality is at all-time low in human history, foreign aid, and reflects our quote-unquote better angels, the tragedy of USAID sudden destruction will impact the entire world for years. So, basically, background, he has a lot, he has a hike of a lot of knowledge. So if I was you, instead of just challenging and disagreeing with him just because you can keyboard warriors, listen, okay? He has a lot of experience. He is he's dealt with it firsthand. At least give a listen. Give it a try. If you have skepticism, fine. But don't be so obnoxious about it. Don't dismiss his 27 plus year of experience, all right? I know some of you just, oh, you're wrong. You're this. Listen, a lot of you don't experience you got as just shouting at Radit, okay? That's not very valuable. Anyways, let's welcome Clifford Brown, okay? Clifford H. Brown, okay? And what do you want the listeners and the viewers to know about you before we get started?

Clifford Brown’s Path To Aid Work

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Well, first of all, thank you, Elias. I uh I look forward to the conversation. I uh I'm 77, I've been married twice, I got five kids. I live in Maryland. That's a little bit of it. I grew up in Washington State, and I followed a girlfriend to Los Angeles years ago and went to law school and got a job as a commercial lawyer there. They bought me off every year. I wasn't really thrilled with the kind of work I was doing. I felt like I sometimes was a mental prostitute. I had to sell my mind to think about somebody else's problem. But I did get involved in a very big case toward the end of my career. It was a big commercial bankruptcy, and I was representing the employees that got hammered by the by the bankruptcy. It was Continental Airlines when they went bankrupt in 1984. And that case just consumed me for about three years, and it kept me in the business longer than I probably otherwise would have stayed in it. But when that case ended, I had time on my hands. I mean, I was so much of it was in Houston. I was flying back and forth to Houston. I did 31 trips one year. And when it was over, I was I had my feet on the desk and I was looking at a at the Wall Street Journal, and I saw an ad. They wanted attorneys that had another language. And I thought, that sounds interesting. I I had I spoke Spanish because I spent a year down there in Latin America right after college. I had won a fellowship to travel in Latin America. And I lived with my cousin's future father-in-law in Chile, Valparaíso, Chile, during the time of Salvador Allende. And I was there nine months and enrolled in a business school for a while. Anyway, when I was using Spanish, and when you learn another language and you use it daily and you really get into it, it's almost like you grew another soul. And it's an experience I just can't get enough of. I've been doing it ever since, trying to study other languages. But when that job opportunity presented itself, I flew back to DC. I interviewed with the guys in, they were in the State Department then. It's a separate agency, but at the time they were co-located. And I saw a big map on the wall, and they had little red pins all over the world. And I said, Where are the what are those pins? He says, That's where our attorneys are. And something in me changed. I said, I gotta get this job. So that's the very short version. I I wrote a book describing a much longer tale called Dilettante, because after I got in the agency, I was dabbling in thousands of different subjects. But we can get into that later as to what, you know, why that was true. You say did so many different things. And it was uh, you know, I won't say that I did it for humanitarian reasons. I did it because I thought it was going to be fun, and it was. It was great fun. There were some very dangerous moments also. My wife got kidnapped at one point. I have friends that got killed in in the course of their work. And a lot of people got very sick in the places we had to live. But you said only live only works and or worked in very poor places, third world countries. So, you know, the living conditions sometimes could be quite challenging. But at the same time, it was a colonial existence. You know, we had when I got to Nairobi, we had a housekeeper, living housekeeper, and a cook and a driver and a gardener, and you know, we had all the local holidays and the American holidays and home leave and RR, and I didn't have to think about the work when I came home at night. So we did a lot of traveling and everywhere we lived, and uh it was fun and that it was adventurous, never boring. The downside was I never put down roots. That's that's what I look back upon with some regret now. I don't have the roots that a lot of people do. If you stay in one place for your whole career, then you you have a system, a support system at what level I find myself now, even though I'm I'm near Washington, D.C., a lot of retired USA people are around here. But you know, it's not the same as if if I had been working it all that time.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

No, yeah. I mean, poof. I'm sure we get to a lot of things with that. Yeah. I was gonna say this before we continue the conversation. I think we need to defy what is defined was USAID, because last year it was such a buzzword, because the media was talking about it, how Trump gutted it. Can you give us just a basic, like a definition for dummies kind of style of USAID?

What USAID Actually Stands For

SPEAKER_01 8:51

I will. It was originally, people just called it AID, and that was a cute pun. It what it stood for was the Agency for International Development. And what they what they could and they did that up deliberately because obviously they can fold it into the word foreign aid, and and it, but that's not what the AIDS stood for. It was an acronym, Agency for International Development. And basically in 1961, John Kennedy decided that that we needed an agency that could deliver. Well, I like to say that what AID did was everything that we wanted to do to influence events overseas that didn't require a military response and was not something that just diplomats were going to accomplish by having meetings and writing cables. So originally w what they focused on was competing with the Soviet Union because we wanted to deliver assistance to countries that were attracted to communism, and we wanted to provide some alternative. So we had we had programs in in Africa and Latin America that were basically that we would negotiate with the host government, the local government, as to what it, what what do you think we could do here that would be useful for you? And I want to get one thing out of the way right away. Foreign aid, a lot of Americans thought foreign aid was a much bigger part of our budget than it ever was. It was always way below 1%. One year there were two airplanes that crashed in the United States. B-1 bomber went down in Dakota and one went down in Texas. Those two planes together exceeded all of the foreign aid that we gave to Sub-Saharan Africa that year, by far. It was a foreign aid is a drop, a drop in the bucket compared to the efforts that we we, the money we spend on the military. And it brings benefits to the U.S. But I'll get into that later. At first it was to compete with communism, but then all kinds of things popped up afterwards. Then they got concerned about Congress got worried about population growth. People thought the world was going to have too many people, they couldn't feed them, so we got involved in family planning programs in a lot of different places. Then they got worried about food production. We got involved in funding a lot of the research that created the Green Revolution that that dramatically increased food production with new strains of rice and corn. And that has, we I saw one statistic recently that every two weeks we make back in the form of profits by our own companies that sell seeds and fertilizer. We make back in two weeks all of the money we spent in the decade of the 1970s on the Green Revolution. That's just one example, but there's hundreds of others like that. Later on, when the Soviet Union broke apart, then they came to us and said, Would you send people over there to teach them how to run a private economy? So we needed to train accountants and lawyers. We needed to help the legislators write commercial codes so that they could have a local stock market and change their laws and teach people about modern accounting and about capital markets. We created entire business down in Central America. We brought in a company once in Honduras to teach farmers how to grow onions up in the mountains, and we sent a container over to Miami just to see if it was something that we could sell in the U.S. at a time when we didn't have onions being harvested here. And ten years later, half a million people were earning their living growing onions. And then we did that with snow peas in Guatemala. We did it with strawberries in Guatemala. We did it with melons, with cantaloupes, with shrimp farms, with flowers. Many, many businesses were created by AID that employed lots of people who might otherwise think about coming north. So we were, in a sense, you know, it was an anti-immigration program by basically building up the economies down there. But at the same time, it was trade with the U.S. So there were jobs here that were created at the same time. I could go on and on. When environmentalists in Central America are here wanted to, were concerned about biodiversity in Central America, it was AIDS got the call. It said, what are you going to do about that? The animals can't run north and south because they're bumping into roads and borders and other things. And so we got the governments together to negotiate a system of contiguous national parks that runs from Mexico all the way down to Panama. That was something they wanted us to do. When they were concerned about poaching in game parks in Africa. So they got we got involved in training game wardens and bringing some equipment there to better monitor combat poaching of elephants and rhinoceroses and whatnot. When Ebola broke out in Africa, it was AID. We got the job to go down there and provide protective suits and other equipment to the people so they could bury the bodies without spreading the virus elsewhere. Malaria work, HIV AIDS work, tuberculosis work. And of course, we buy a lot of food from our farmers because there's a big food support, you know, farmer support program. And then AID got the job of

What Foreign Aid Really Does

SPEAKER_01 14:10

what are you going to do with all this food? And so when there was a famine or a disaster somewhere, and most of the press is about our humanitarian work and our disaster response, which no longer exists. We just don't have the part of the agency that used to do that. But we did so many other things, and that's why I called my first book Dilettante, because as a lawyer, I was I would get involved in whatever it was that management had a problem with that they didn't have a standard answer to. And and I specialized in foreign aid law, which was, you know, outside the agency, it's totally useless. I couldn't do it, it wouldn't be used anywhere else. But for me, it was a privilege to be able to be part of that effort, to, to, to work on whatever the task was, and it it spanned the whole spectrum of human activity, as I say, between military and between pure diplomacy. And there's no denying that there are things that need to be influenced overseas, but we don't have that tool anymore. We've got our embassies, and they can write cables and they can have all the meetings they want, but they're not going to bring contractors or grantees to the table, and they're not going to do the kinds of things that we did. And of course, most of the things you want to influence overseas are inappropriate for a military response. There's only so much the military can do. So we did everything in between. We don't do it anymore.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Oh, yeah, for sure. So you already answered my question. Foreign aid work, you could great provide specific examples that it works. So you already said I was about to say it does it even increase our influence, our positive influence. It says it's, you know, military response, military response. Just like, you know, we're having Iran, Venezuela, probably Cuba next, uh, based on what's going on. I don't know. You already answered that question all really well. So I'm not gonna, I'm definitely not gonna ask that because you already answered too many good examples and very succinct and clear, too, believe it or not. So we skipped that one. So

The Fallout From Abrupt Cuts

SPEAKER_00 16:15

now let's get to the most probably emotional part. What was your reaction when Trump just gutted the whole thing because he thinks it was a waste, it was spreading wokeness and whatever other narrative he had.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

I was outraged, uh, totally outraged. He said that we were a criminal organization. I gave up two-thirds of my income to join the agency. Many of the people in the agency were former Peace Corps volunteers. They were very inspired, very dedicated, very humanitarian people. They were not in business to steal from the U.S. government, and even if they had been, that would have been impossible because there were so many eyeballs. We didn't dream up our programs by ourselves. What we did was what Congress asked us to do, what the White House asked us to do. Everything we did was approved by the Office of Management of Budget, by the Congressional Committees in both houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate had their foreign relations committees, their foreign appropriations committees. We had the White House, the OMB, the Congress, we had the GAO watching us, we had our own auditors, we had external auditors, and every single project we did had to have its own evaluation built into the budget so that it would get evaluated and audited. And we had 60 years worth of evaluations and data in collected in the Center for Development Information and CDIE, they call it, Center for Development Information and Evaluation. Musk came in in a matter of two weeks and basically sent, they sent out a stop work order worldwide that included everything, even the life-saving stuff that they claimed later. They lied about it and said, we are continuing the life-saving stuff. That's total bullshit. They stopped everything, and the contractors and the grantees let the people go. Okay, then they tried to figure out later, well, geez, Marco Rubio issued an exception. He said you can keep the life-saving stuff alive. Well, it had already ended, and the people were gone. The commodities that were being shipped, nobody was there to clear them out of customs. It was a train wreck, big, big time train wreck. And there's a group out of Boston that's that's tracking the number of deaths that our programs would have prevented. And it's getting, it's north of 700,000 now. This is this was manslaughter on a big, big scale. And it was done for reasons of political showmanship. And they they just wanted to appeal to the base of the MAGA folks who may have thought that you know we were spending far more than we did, who didn't appreciate what we were doing, and they didn't understand anything about it. They came in and they were they were blown away when they went down through the list and started talking to the career staff and realized one guy in one of the meetings he said, geez, I thought all you did was finance abortions. And we never came close to that. We might have finded organizations who talked about it, but we certainly didn't touch it. But anyway, they didn't understand the first thing about USAID. And they fired everybody, except for a very small skeleton staff. They left 12 people for the entire continent of Africa, and that was just until the summer when even they were let go, too. But, you know, you can't keep life-saving programs alive in Africa with 12 people spread across a continent that's way bigger than the entire South American continent is. It was absurd what they did, frankly. And my reaction was to finish my stories. I the first book I mentioned got me into Africa in 1989, but I had a lot more stories to tell. And so I wrapped them up in a book called Inside Usaid, an Odyssey of Foreign Assistance, and that's available now. You can find it on Amazon and other places. If you Google Clifford Brown, though, you're going to be looking at a black trumpet player. He had my name. So that's why I'm now trying to use my middle initial in it. But I have a website, CliffordH Brown.com, and you can find the books there. That was my first reaction to try and set the record straight. However, there's a better book out there, and it might be rare for you to be interviewing an author who starts talking about somebody else's book, but I only recently finished it. It's called Into the Wood Chipper. And it was written by a guy who happened to be in Canada on a ski vacation when they announced the stop work order. And he was, he was not in Washington, D.C. Well, there were some payments that went out the door after that stop work order was issued. And Musk and his crew got pissed off about it and said, look, these civil servant people, they're they're conspiring to get around the executive order. So these payments are already going out the door. The problem was those payments had already been approved by everybody in USAID, and they were over at Treasury in their system. And yeah, they went out the door, and a lot of the contractors kept getting some of the money that was owed to them, but it wasn't AID that was doing it. Anyway, Aid over, the Doge boys overreacted and fired everybody at the top. And this guy comes back and he finds himself, he was a mid-level guy in the health, in the Global Health Bureau, and then it it was, then he was told, you're in charge of the whole health program now. His name is Nicholas Enric. So he he soon realized that they were asking him to dig his own grave and dig the agency's grave. So he kept very, very detailed records of what was going on during those first weeks, right after the stop work order was issued, when they realized, oh, we better do something to try and keep the life-saving stuff alive. And he he wrote a book that's a real indictment of what was going on at that point. They finally Decided that as far as life-saving, what they meant was the infectious disease programs only. And then only if you could prove that somebody was going to die within the next 30 days. Like if you order medicine and it isn't going to come until day 32, well, that's obviously not going to stop anybody from dying in the next 30 days. So that doesn't count. So no, you can't buy that medicine. If it was feeding refugees in Sudan, no, that's somebody else's problem. We're not going to worry about that. That's not us saving lives. That should be the World Health Organization or somebody else. So they didn't do that. If it was child survival programs that would keep premature infants alive, sorry, that's not good enough. If it would help mothers who had hemorrhage during childbirth, sorry, that doesn't count. So all kinds of things that were saving lives, they just threw out immediately. And there is a small number of programs that they tried to revive, and they're over with the State Department now. But as I say, that those are only the infectious disease programs and most of the life-saving work. And of course, none of the other stuff I mentioned that was stuff we did because we we felt it was going to benefit the U.S. None of that's going on anymore. So that book is a better story about what happened right after the. I wasn't in the agency when the when the stop work order. I had retired originally in 2009. So I told my stories in in my own book. But that one tells the story of the of what happened right after the stop work order went out.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

I appreciate your own plug-in and the other person's plug-in. That's all out on this podcast for sure. Alissa, you you want the people to know the truth, and you know, just selling some well advertising, free ad, I'm going to call it in quotes, of someone else's work that has some, you know, a more, I'll say firsthand account, if you will, of the reconstruction of it. I mean, sure, I'm all for it. As long as it's relevant, then you know, that's not a big, that's not a big thing. If you want to talk about Easter Bunny and all that other stuff, I say, excuse me, excuse me. We're not talking about the Easter bunny. And that's not a lot of my podcast because I don't believe in that craziness. But anyways, so it's fine that you plug in someone else's work because it's relevant to what we were talking about. And that's all that's all I really care about. Where it goes, I have no control of that. You know, and yeah, I mean, I just thought it was very reckless how it's done. It was done quick, abrupt, and you and I'm not surprised what you have said that it will cause. I could imagine the logistics

Inside The Stop Work Order Chaos

SPEAKER_00 24:35

and the impact of that. Uh-oh, we gotta to stop because you know, president, especially at the stat doge, which that was a disaster. To no one's surprised who has a brain. Um, it was so quick and abrupt, and they say they could have cut lots of savings. They didn't really do much, they didn't add more to the debt. What a disaster. I mean, this is not me having Trump derangement syndrome. You can put that in the comments all you want, but these are statistics. I was hoping they would succeed, but obviously they did not because the kind of leadership they got, and Elon Musk is very erratic. He's a smart man, don't get me wrong. But some of his tendencies get very erratic and he overpromised and definitely underdeliver came to Doge. I'm not, you know, and Doge was a big part of that as well, trying to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. But I think the USAID would improve our world, our our standing and world stage. And it definitely influenced because we are helping underprivileged people with certain rather the motivation is selfish, you know, promote America's image, whatever, that doesn't matter to me. But it was doing some good. You know, the it was doing, you know, it was doing good. And I just said, look, as long as it's helping people with life-saving diseases, I'm all for it. But if it's dumb stuff like, I don't know, yeah, I don't know if you could um debunk this right away. If it's something like promoting wokeism

When Aid Efforts Waste Money

SPEAKER_00 26:05

and I think they over said like you said abortions, that wasn't really a thing.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

No, I can I can talk to you about a couple of areas that I thought it was sometimes kind of a hopeless quest. One was to persuade farmers not to grow coca, for instance, in uh in Latin America. We had a I was uh the deputy director in Colombia when we were doing Plan Columbia, which was at the time the third biggest uh aid program in the world, uh following Israel and Egypt, which they get their own checks. But we were spending a huge amount of money. A lot of it was going to the State Department and the and the mill group to kind of spray coca fields. They would bring in spray planes and till the coca. Coca, there's there's uh several words in Spanish that get confused, but we were teaching farmers how to grow cacao, which is the big large bean that they make chocolate out of. And in lieu of coca, which is a plant, a bushy plant that they can make cocaine out of. So, you know, that was pretty hopeless to try and get farmers to. I mean, we did train a lot of farmers to grow, grow chocolate, chocolate plants, but the cacao. But and there was a demand for it in some communities, particularly when the women in a community decided that, you know, the the criminal elements here are just too much and it's ruining our our our civic life, and they wanted their men to get out of the coca business and and and get into something that was legal and legitimate, so they wouldn't have so many problems with with lawlessness in general. So I won't say it it never worked at all, but basically it was never gonna be profitable for as pro nearly as profitable for those farmers as the coca is. Because when the coca dealers come in, they'll tell the farmers, listen, you don't have to buy the seeds or the fertilizer or the tools, we'll give it to you, and then we'll show up later and buy it from you, so you don't even have to market it. So, and you're gonna make far more money dealing with us. And and even if we do enter a community that's got effective law enforcement, those farmers, if they really want to make money, they'll just march off to the other side of the mountain or they'll go into Venezuela or Brazil or somewhere else, and the jungle is too big to prevent that from happening. So that the 30 years after I was there, Colombia is still the biggest cocaine producer in the world. And the same thing happened in Peru and in Bolivia. And I know it's going on now in Afghanistan and some of the countries over Pakistan where we had anti-poppy growing programs to teach those pop farmers not to not to grow the raw product for heroin. So that was, I think there were there were legitimate concerns that that money was a futile effort and a waste of money. It wasn't the biggest part of our budget by any means, but but it was there was a lot of money spent on it. And another one that sometimes was a waste was when we were promoting democracy. Now that's fine if the government wants it, you know. But if you try to do that in a place like Nicaragua, which is run by a guy named Daniel Ortega now, they don't want it. And, you know, you can spend all kinds of money trying to promote free speech and effective elections and training legislators and training judges and whatnot. But if they don't want it, forget it. It's not going to work. And in Russia, we we had spent quite a bit doing that, and they didn't appreciate it, and they kicked us out. So, you know, when we were trying to sell democracy to places who didn't weren't interested in it, then that was that was a waste of money. And I get into that and I'm talking about I you know I talk about that, and I'm trying to sugarcoat it, that there were places, but you know, that's not to say that there wasn't a lot of pressure on our agency to do it. As I said before, we didn't invent these programs. We were told to do this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

So you say you're directed by Congress to do these programs. I'm sure if you would have had your own, you know, your own discretion and leadership, maybe you would have just said, no, we're not going to do this, but we'll continue this, you know. I'm sure there'll be changes, but you know, yeah, you're directed by Congress because that's what's allocated for. Look, once someone's paying you to do something, so you know, you're the service provider and they're the customer. That's why they, you know, you have some interesting things like um trying to spread democracy in places that are not too receptive for democracy. They are fine with whatever government that they have. Yeah. So I'm not surprised that was a thing. I was just about to ask you about that, but I'm happy that you beat me to it. I said, was there anything trying to promote democracy in the U.S., but there were countries that rejected it. I'm not interested in a country that accepted it. That's that's not too interesting to me. You know what? I think we have time. I think you said

Africa Stories And Hard Realities

SPEAKER_00 31:05

on the before we record about your stories in Africa. Feel free to share them, you know, to the viewers.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

I lived in Nairobi for three and a half years, but my job was regional, so I traveled all up and down the the uh the east side of Africa and got over to Kinshasa when it was still Zaire. Now it's called the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And I got to some very beautiful places. Kampala, Uganda, believe it or not, was uh one of the prettiest places I had ever seen. The Brits had very good taste when they chose sites for their colonies, way better than the French on the other side of the continent. But, you know, we lived uh I went there when my kids were young. They enrolled in the International School of Kenya, and we were able to, when I wasn't traveling, we we would get down, sometimes we'd drive down to Mombasa, sometimes we took the train, and we I learned a scuba dive down in the Indian Ocean in Mombasa, and I studied Swahili when I was there. One Christmas we drove from Nairobi over to Kampala and visited some friends of ours because Foreign Service people are always moving around, so quite often you get friends, you make friends with people in one post, and then they get assigned to the country next door. You know, the life in Nairobi was for me, it was very colonial. Although toward the end of my tour, there were a lot of unemployed soldiers from some civil wars that had ended. There was one in Somalia that ended. There was a civil war in Sudan that had ended, and then there were some rebels that had been fighting in the eastern part of Zaire. And Rwanda, this was before Rwanda exploded, and they had the big massacres when the Tutsis, the Hutus and the Tutsis went after each other. Kigali, Rwanda was another very pretty city when I visited, very clean, and they were speaking French then. Nowadays, they they decided they were going to switch to English in the government. There's a lot I could tell you about. We were working on the anti-apartheid movement, supporting the NGOs in South Africa that were fighting to end apartheid. That's where the whites, the minority white society was ruling a country that was predominantly black Africans. And it succeeded. And that possibly is some of the motive that Elon Musk may have had, some of the grudge that he displayed against USAID. I doubt that he's ever really visited a USAID project, but he did grow up in South Africa as a white person when we were supporting the black civil society that was fighting to end the apartheid system, and they succeeded. And I'm personal friends with the guy that was the mission director who met Nelson Mandela when he got out of jail. And I'm just speculating that maybe that's why he didn't think much of USAID, but he was quite happy to feed it into the woodchipper. Those are his words. That he on Monday he bragged that he had spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. And he meant all of it. He didn't mean all except the life-saving stuff. He meant all of it and he was quite happy he had done it. But, you know, I can't get into all the travels and other things I did. I was on the road probably 30% of the time when I was there. I got to Madagascar. There's more countries I went to than I didn't go to. And when you include, I started my career in Africa and then I ended it on the other side. I was the mission director by then. I had moved into management. And I was the mission director in Guinea and Sierra Leone. And that was a fascinating contrast between, you know, the Africa on the east side is they're they're more reserved, they're not as colorful on the west side. They're they just, I don't know. Um I I apologize to any Kenyans who are listening to this, if any, but the on the west side, they're they seem more colorful and more more outgoing and friendly, and it they're just more reserved over on the eastern side. So that was a study in contrast. But I got to Liberia, to uh Ghana, to Bamako in Bali, to Dakar in Senegal, Freetown. Uh we were responsible. My my mission was responsible for Freetown and Guinea. The the enduring fact that I've come away with from my time over there is that there again, it involves the drug business. If a single Cessna flies over from Brazil and lands in, say, Guinea-Bissau, that one little airplane has more value on it in terms of illegal drugs. They're going to sell up into Europe. They can that that the value of what they've got on board that plane exceeds the entire national budget for the military and the police combined. So it's not a surprise that they bought off many of the senior-level law enforcement and military folks in the small countries in West Africa, and there's a lot of them. The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Freetown, Sierra Leone, Liberia, that's the whole western side of Africa is dominated by bribery and and corruption derived from the drug trade. But the problem isn't teaching the farmers to grow something. The problem is up north and cutting the demand. So if there wasn't such a big demand for it up in Europe, you wouldn't have that problem. But it's a pretty lawless area, frankly. And also the borders there don't make any sense because they were they were just drawn by Europeans with no reference to the tribal differences and whatnot. So there's the corruption is just uh understood and accepted by that of those societies that it's uh it's a shame.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

Yeah, that is a that is a shame indeed. It will take some understanding and communication. Maybe I'll strain some of that up, but and that's why I think, yep, that's why the borders are not well respected. Just like you said, to destroy it, just no, this is what we think it's best. You tribal idiots, yeah, deal with it. Yeah, take it or leave it. Uh yeah. So that's yeah, I'm not trying to laugh about it, it's but sad. Maybe some of those maybe so those conflicts would have been prevented. Not all, but definitely some. Yeah. So now let me put on the s skeptical

The Biggest Misconceptions About Aid

SPEAKER_00 37:50

lens. I'm sure some people were skeptical. I still believe in the narrative that, you know, you said is a complete waste of money, or people just don't understand what the heck it is. How do you address those people who don't understand what you said is? What's the common misconception?

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Well, you know, foreign aid, it's it's a fairly new historical phenomenon. I mean, it's it it until there you can find a few examples of it that predate the the 20th century. But the biggest example, there was there was a famine in the 1920s when we saved a lot of lives in Soviet Russia. But after World War II, we helped rebuild Europe and we also helped rebuild Japan, and the whole world is safer and more prosperous because of what we did. That was foreign aid, big-time foreign aid in both Europe and Japan, and it helped us because it made the whole world a safer, richer, more developed place. What people don't get about foreign aid is that we do it, as I said before, to influence events overseas. And if you think that the events overseas don't impact us, then you're living under a rock. I mean, you know, the epidemics don't respect national borders. You need to affect events overseas, and you you benefit when you enhance the level of the life, the living standards in your neighbors, because every religion in the world will tell you that the giver benefits as much as the recipient. And there's a reason for that. There was an old Chinese philosopher named Menchis once who said that he thinks there's some goodness in everyone. And his evidence was that there are very few adults, if any, that if they see a child sitting on the edge of a well and that child is about to fall in, they don't have a natural urge to run over there and try and save that child. Well, in a way, foreign aid is a reflection of that same urge. And it's better for everyone that we act on that urge and not fight it. So the idea that we're just wasting our money is nonsense. It's not a waste to help your neighbors. And, you know, this country was founded on an ideal that all people were created, all men, it said all men, but they mean they should but should have meant all people are created equal. It doesn't say unless you were born over there, you know. I'm not suggesting we throw open the borders, but the idea that we're wasting our money by helping our neighbors is spiritually in the stone age, as far as I'm concerned. We are helping ourselves when we help our neighbors.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

I mean, the way I see it, that's diplomatic power, right? Because, you know, set off the hard military power that sadly we're over-relying on, and the the impact is not so great, especially Iran. Iran's the chief of example so far. Yeah. I don't know if you said would probably you said would have made a difference there, maybe not, but it would it's better than this military response, at least in my opinion. I think it was unnecessary, but that's just my opinion. I'm sure we're gonna get people to come and say, oh, you don't know are trying to prevent the nuclear weapons, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Well, there are other ways to save money. The what the tragedy of USAID's destruction was not only did the U.S. lose its main mechanism to affect events overseas, other than military or pure diplomacy, as I said, but it's also just a tragedy that all these dedicated people had lost their careers. There's tens of thousands of people that are that had been very high-spirited, very, very committed to this work, and they're all on the street. I mean, they're looking for work now, and there aren't jobs in that area anymore. Of course, there are other donors that foreign aid, the impulse that I mentioned, is still out there, and but it's it's in the private sector. There are private charities that are still active, and there's other donors from other countries that are still active. But we had the biggest, biggest impact. We had the most people overseas, and we just don't have them anymore. So I hope that, you know, when this administration passes from the scene, if and when that happens, that we can revive the agency because it's it did a lot of good for us and them. It wasn't just generosity, it was self-interest in many cases.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

Oh, yeah, for sure. Everything, you know, this is why I told a lot of you listener viewers, if you think everything's just generosity, you're pretty naive. I wish I had that mentality, but uh that's been shattered since I want to say as young as nine or ten years old. I see how people work, you know, I started picking that up. So there's something for something, and I'd seen that in traction a while, transactional. I know that probably made me a little more cynical sometimes. Yeah, you you you're not wrong there. I'm not gonna defend that. But hey, I mean, it it helped me gain a better understanding of how humans function. Like I said, I think it I think it was a it was uh definitely a positive. I disagree with that. Sure, we could definitely do some cuts on the military. I think all that middle people contract, that's a big waste right there. That we could have said, could have made tremendous economic savings, but that's not gonna happen. At least not anytime soon. That's not gonna happen. That's where I can see some fraud and waste. I'm not against military. Military has its uses, but I just think the middle people and the budget's a bit too bloated, in my opinion. That's just my opinion of that. And you you said the US and you said was was a crumb, like a bread crumb, but part of the big budget. Like like military is like a big chunk of it for sure. And then all yeah, and yeah, and We just cut something that was so we just cut breadcrumbs at best. Not a not half of a bread or or one third of a bread. We just cut breadcrumbs. That's what sh that's all Doge did. We just shaved the surface. That's the most we ever did. And now and of course, iron and and to no one's surprise, the debt

Legal Claims And Hidden Costs

SPEAKER_00 44:20

just continues to skyrocket at this rate.

SPEAKER_01 44:24

As a former commercial bankruptcy lawyer, we created a lot of claims against the U.S. government. Those claims are gonna get paid at some point. But but when you when you roll back, if you if you have a big program, if you really are serious about ending it, you need to do it in an orderly fashion. But just to issue a stop work order and say, everybody's done, do nothing for the next they didn't even say how long their review was going to take. They might have said, put everything on hold for 30 days, 40 days, 45, 90 days. They didn't say any, they gave no time frame at all. They said stop work. So of course the contractors and the grantees, they had to let everybody go. They couldn't just say, okay, stay on the payroll. We might be able to pay you a month from now or two months from now. They they let them go. And those they're out there on the street. So the claims are out there. And then the commodities, of course, that just got lost or didn't get cleared through customs and they got destroyed. Vendors who didn't get paid, those claims are working their way through the court system and they'll get paid. But, you know, it might eventually save some money if we never start doing it again. But in the meantime, what it did was bump up the claims dramatically.

SPEAKER_00 45:39

So I mean, companies were so in trouble with tariffs. They won their case. Yeah, Dow U.S., you know, of course the contractors on them, yep. I mean, go through, I mean, fight in the courts. It's gonna be a long tease battle, but I think you got your I think you have a good case, I would say. Yeah. So that abrupt stop, that just disrupted, that just caused so much, uh, it caused a domino effect of disruption.

SPEAKER_01 46:04

I

Rethinking Borders And Nation-States

SPEAKER_01 46:05

mentioned to you before we started recording that I have a bit of a following in Africa now, partly because I talk about the border issues and how illogical they're work. But I in my old age I've come to the conclusion now that the nation-state, the very concept of a nation-state is has it's simply a habit now that the world is does not really seriously examine as a habit. When the U.S. was first breaking away from Britain, Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense. And in there he said, monarchy has just become a habit. There's nothing, there was nothing divine about the rights of kings and monarchs. It's just a habit the world got used to. Well, I feel that way about national borders themselves. And I cite this example. One man started the war in Ukraine. One man. One man, maybe two if you count Israel, but one man started the war in Iran. And one man may start a war in Taiwan at some point. And the reason one man in each such example is able to do that is because of these large national borders that surround a very large economy. And that enables a very large military that only exists, well, they've got a military, so we got to have one too. But when you have that much of an economy supporting that big of a military that is controlled and responsive to a single person in a world with almost with over 9 billion, well, getting up to 9 billion, the idea that three guys have that kind of power is insane to me. And I think we need to re-examine the whole concept of the nation-state, and I'm not the first person to say it, although I can understand why some people might ask what I've been smoking. Angela Merkel made the same comment. The nation-state itself needs to be re-examined. If we had a system more like Switzerland, where every little canton in Switzerland, believe it or not, each canton can decide if you can become a Swiss citizen or they make their own rules. The whole country doesn't make it. It's a rule for Swiss citizenship. Each canton does. Then you wouldn't have these gigantic militaries that could be directed in a certain direction. And maybe you wouldn't even need foreign aid at that point because people could go to where the jobs are, and the the income disparities would even out. But that's that's a different discussion and much longer than you have time to have time. That's for I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. Oh no, I was just gonna say, you know what, that's gonna be, you know, if you're interested in return, we could talk about the nations, the concept of nation, why is an obsolete idea and what is a potential replacement? I mean, not too long ago, which this episode is gonna be released a little after this one, about why one world government is a good idea. So I I I don't know that, you know, I'm willing to you know to entertain these ideas because let's just say, you know, change is gonna happen one way or another. I don't I don't know if it's good change or bad change. So that that sometime will tell, for sure. Time will tell, and impacts will definitely show itself at this at some point. But people are afraid of that. Oh, for sure. A nation state and one world government. Uh so we'll we'll

Listener Challenges And Closing Requests

SPEAKER_00 49:35

see. We'll see. People in the comments, what do you think of the nation state? You think it's uh obsolete idea or it's a fine and dandy idea? You always have their opinions. So put it in the comments, put it in the comments if you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, and I want to hear a good reason. I don't want to hear Clifford's stupid. That's not an argument. And I reject that argument. I'll ignore that, and people ignore that too. Or or Elias is insane for entertaining these ideas. No, we should talk about them. No, no. Just because you think it's crazy, that's your problem. No, let's talk about it. We're grown up, right? Or unless you're mentally a child, then get out of this podcast. I don't want kids. Even mentally, even though you could be physically 30 years old, but if your mind is like a five-year-old, I don't want you either. Out, out. This is not for you. This is an adult podcast. This is not a safe space. So I'm gonna entertain ideas that the left likes or the right likes or the center likes or nobody likes, or some that most people like, which is rare. This is not a safe space, and I don't want it to be a safe space. No, I don't believe in safe spaces. I would say that even more than the so-called MAGA people. That's an oh man's safe space. Oh, please, you got your safe space. That Katie Miller's podcast, for example, is a good safe space for MAGA. Then for the left, you got Sateo. Come on, give me a break. You got your safe spaces, all right? This is not a safe space. I'm a centrist. If you convince me that your idea is good, I'm willing to entertain it and even accept it. And I'm just gonna give you a personal example. I was skeptical of Zoramandani, but so far he's doing better than I thought. And this is coming from a moderate. He's I know he's DSA, he's definitely leans to the left, but some of the things that he's doing, he's doing better than I thought. That's my pressure. I was very skeptical of him too. I was a little concerned. But you know what? So far he's not so bad. I know I know you people got your opinions. You can put him down in the comment section too. You think Zoran is great, or you think he's evil. Comment section activity right there. That's another thing you do right there. Um, so express your opinions, express them. Um, that's what I'm gonna say about that. Before I wrap this up, is there anything else you want to add before I um end this?

SPEAKER_01 51:51

No, I've enjoyed our our talk. I'd be happy to return. There's a there's a lot of other subjects I could get, could have gotten into sex and body, sex trafficking in Africa, body parts trafficking, bride kidnapping in Central Asia. I was exposed to a lot of pretty pretty strange and weird phenomenon in my days in USAID. It was uh uh 27 years, and it's it you can't I can't summarize it in one hour. So to carry the conversation further, I'd be happy to be a guest. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 52:26

Oh, yeah, no, no problem. Yeah, that was just more just a USAID, because I think people need to be educated on that. Um because like I said, I only had like a basic surface level understanding of it. I'm happy I got a better understanding of it, and I hope you did too, listeners and viewers. I really hope you did as well. I hope you got something out of it. Uh you know, that's all I'm gonna say. So, what's my call of action? Check out Mr. Clifford H. Brown. You know, I'm gonna put the link for his website and all his social medias. And, you know, for those who only have a link in, those are pure professionals. Well, if you have all your social medias, I consider you a risky professional because you might get into spaces where some people have low common denominator think you know, it's gonna bash you just because they're having a bad day, nothing else, just because they're having a bad day, and they heard something that they just simply didn't like, and that's and that's where it ends in logic. Oh, who's because I didn't like it? Oh, challenge it on its logic, challenge, use evidence, be a grown-up, stop being a big baby, okay? Like I said, I'm here for challenges. I'm not, I don't want yes people either, because that's boring. All right. So again, check his website, and I'm gonna put the link to the other button into the wood chipper. That that link of the book is gonna go there as well. But of course, Clifford Brown gets on the top because he's the guest. That one's just some other guy. He just gets second billing at best, okay? And that's gonna be there. And of course, my stuff will be in the bottom because you already know me and all that, and I'm confident that you touched some of the free stuff that I got right there. So now let's really wrap this up. Um, rate this podcast. If you put one to four stars, give one specific way this podcast can improve. Not just Elias is great or Elias is a dumb dumb. That doesn't help. Empty compliments and insults don't help. If one specific way this podcast can improve. If it's a five-star, what should I keep doing? Or you could bend the rules a little bit. I saw I think you did great here, but you can improve on that. You know, I could be I can be flexible there too. Give specific, specific and accurate criticisms, I'm receptive to it as well, okay? I have thick skin both figuratively and literally. So, you know, I don't get offended easily. Trust me, I got I got name called and all that, and I just I mean, I just brush it off because at the end of the day, it's just someone, it's just someone in the internet. I go out there and touch grass, I don't even think about it. It's as easy as that, people, okay? And I'm sure the older generations, they they already been mastered that because this development came in much later. Me, I wasn't transitioning from a kid to a teenager. So I was last touch grass, and then teenager up, the computers took over, and then now we got smartphones. What are we gonna have next? Holograms, flying cars, whatever the heck. Well, who the heck knows? Or we definitely have more robots in our house. I mean, but even though they've been a hilarious fail, but the cleaning made one of them. It was so that robot just caused so much chaos. We are not ready for that. So we are progressing, but just you know, slower and some things. AI is evolving fast. That's one thing LC is evolving fast, but not robotics. Robotics is gonna take some time, I'm for sure. So again, just give a rating. And you you could I normally used to say just only do an Apple Podcast, do it in Spotify as well. I'm more open to that now. And then you of course follow me on BuzzRout and you YouTube and Facebook, and then I'm gonna hope I'm gonna create the Instagram page probably by the end of this year. It's only for short form content only. No long form content is going there. And I I'm gonna treat, I'm gonna do the same thing with Facebook as well, it's gonna be for posts and short form content, okay? So that's all I got for you. So whenever you listen and completed this episode, you have a blessed day, afternoon, or night.