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. 

Transcript

0:00

Maryam Muhammad told us about her 7-year-old son who died. Here she is holding some of his favorite clothes. Babagana had been a happy kid who loved biking, but he had sickle cell disease, and one night in February he developed a fever. The next morning, Maryam rushed him to the US funded clinic where he had been getting care before. When they got there, it was closed. The clinic had received a stop work order from the US government the week before. Maryam, who is a widow says she didn't have money to go to the government hospital. Her son died later that day.

Raheel Khan: 0:45

That was NPR sharing the tragic story of Babagana who died because the U-S-A-I-D clinic that provided his treatment was shut down. His and Mariam's story is a reminder that foreign aid isn't some abstract policy concept in Washington. It's real lives, depending on that aid to survive. And when it was suddenly terminated people like Mariam and Babagana are the ones who paid the price. And their story is just one among hundreds of thousands. By May, researchers estimated more than 330,000 people had died because of what happened on a single weekend in February, 2025. A weekend when the richest man in the world decided his new hobby wasn't rockets or cars, it was wrecking the US Agency for International Development. And he honestly seemed pretty pleased with himself. Here's Musk.

1:38

As, as we dug into U Us A-U-S-A-I-D it became apparent that what we have here is, is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms. Um, and so at, at the point at which you, you don't merely, 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 just a ball of worms, it, it's, it is hopeless. Um, and USID is a ball of worms.

Raheel Khan: 2:02

hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Khannecting the Dots. What you just heard isn't just callous, it's built on lies. A ball of worms cooked up from fraud, fake reviews, conspiracy theories that somehow became government policy. So today I want to tell you the real story because this isn't just about cutting foreign aid. About completely changing the playbook on how the United States wield its influence around the world. Let's start with what was actually destroyed. Because U-S-A-I-D wasn't just some random government agency. It was created in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy as America's Cold war weapon. Kennedy had seen firsthand traveling through Asia and Latin America, how poverty left countries vulnerable to Soviet influence. So instead of only sending troops or weapons, he decided America would help countries develop, build their economies, their institutions, their capacity to govern themselves. The idea was simple, prosperous democracies don't turn to communism. And for 60 years that strategy worked. U-S-A-I-D became America's primary tool of soft power, preventing conflicts, building alliances, and creating markets for US goods. Here's what that looked like. From 2001 to 2021. U-S-A-I-D programs helped prevent an estimated 91.8 million deaths, including over 30 million children under the age of five. When disasters struck, U-S-A-I-D was often first on the ground. When food aid was shipped overseas, much of it came from American farmers, stabilizing families abroad while supporting jobs here at home. This wasn't charity. It was strategic investment in stability and prosperity, and for decades it worked. Now, let's be clear. U-S-A-I-D was not perfect. No government agency ever is. Just weeks before Doge targeted them. PBS NewsHour aired in investigations showing serious flaws.

4:11

It's actually a fewer, less than 10% of our foreign assistance, uh, dollars. Uh, flowing through USAID is actually reaching those communities. Walter Ks with a group called Unlock Aid formed in 2021 to draw attention to a system in which a relative handful of private companies called implementing partners are awarded most contracts by U-S-A-I-D. One of the best things that, uh, government can do is to move away from measuring success in terms of outputs. How much money do we spend on a particular problem and moving toward an orientation of, uh, results. A lot of people will be shocked to hear that that's not the case. Well, it's true about 98% of, uh, USAID grants. Uh, pay for activities, uh, and not results, and the results are not flattering. According to the Agency's own Inspector General's office, which studied U-S-A-I-D awards for three years, 2017 to 2019, uh, 43% of them failed to achieve, uh, about half of the intended results. But in spite of that, they still got paid in full almost every time and sometimes more.

Raheel Khan: 5:19

Those were real problems, but here's what Doge never told you. Solutions were already in motion. When Samantha Power took over as administrator in 2021, she pledged to shift funding to locally led efforts. 25% by 2025, 50% by 2030. Progress was slow, only 10% by early 2025, but the direction was right and some programs were already showing results. In parts of Africa, livestock Markets. U-S-A-I-D helped start, were now self-sustaining. Local irrigation projects were bringing consistent water to farmers. In Central America. 1800 direct grants gave people reasons to stay. As one former administrator put it."As a direct consequence of that investment, the migration from those countries has gone down considerably." Not a wall, not deportations. Real results beyond food and health. Building communities, creating long-term opportunities, reducing migration, and even turning conflict zones into places of growth. In Columbia, for example, one project turned former gorilla fighters into eco-tourism guides. Tourism surged violence fell, and former combat zones became travel destinations. And it wasn't just Columbia. In Malawi, former poachers became conservationists with plans to grow the tourism economy. These weren't one-offs. They were part of a broader shift. Programs that were working, scaling, and proving that smart development could solve real problems. The very kinds of reforms PBS had found were needed, results-based funding, local partnerships, sustainable development. And then in a single weekend, it was all fed into the wood chipper. So why go after U-S-A-I-D? Project 2025 had already targeted 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 Washington Post, Elon Musk didn't mention U-S-A-I-D once on social media until December 10th, 2024. The world's richest man had apparently never heard of the agency that distributed half of all US Foreign Aid. What changed? A man named Mike Benz. Benz had been building conspiracy theories about U-S-A-I-D since 2022. He worked in Trump's first administration. Before that, he was an alt-right influencer promoting white identity politics and antisemitic conspiracy theories. For years, Benz had been claiming that U-S-A-I-D was behind everything. Mass censorship of Americans, rigging elections abroad, overthrowing governments, the 2019 Trump impeachment. He even tied them to starting the COVID Pandemic. Then on December 3rd, 2024, Benz appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast to promote his theories. Take a listen. Now if you listen to Benz, he sounds persuasive. He rattles off real programs, names real groups, and strings together facts that are technically true, but he twists the framing, stretches the details, and suddenly routine development work looks like CIA tradecraft, a hidden plot, hiding in plain sight. That's the playbook. Take something ordinary, strip it of context, and sell it as proof of a grand conspiracy. Here's the reality. U-S-A-I-D did fund programs to train journalists to spot misinformation, support civic groups, and secure elections from cyber attacks. They were meant to strengthen democracies, but to people already primed to distrust those efforts, it was easy to recast them as manipulation. And that framing, not audits, not evidence, is what Musk and Trump ran with. Only a week later, Musk started sharing Benzs' commentary, calling U-S-A-I-D, a"Viper's Nest of Radical Left Marxists, who hate America","a criminal organization", and saying"Time for it to die". And just like that one Rogan appearance, re wrote decades of bipartisan foreign policy. As I've shown in previous episodes where Trump goes, the entire Republican party follows no questions asked. Many of the Republicans now attacking U-S-A-I-D had praised the agency before. Senator Joni Ernst had even sought additional funding back in 2022. And Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, he had praised the work of U-S-A-I-D for over a decade, and in 2019 actually said."Anyone who suggests that cutting foreign aid will balance our budget is misleading you. Foreign aid constitutes less than 1% of our budget". But with Trump as his boss, he's singing a whole new tune. On March 10th, 2025, Rubio announced that after a"thorough review" of 6,500 U-S-A-I-D programs, 83% would be terminated. Thorough review? Rubio, loved U-S-A-I-D. That must have been really comprehensive, right? Not even close. NPR interviewed six officials who had direct knowledge of the process. Every single one said the same thing. The review was surface level. Staff didn't look at effectiveness. They ran keyword searches. If a program description included words like gender, family planning, climate, or equality, it landed on the chopping block. According to one of the officials."Nobody looked at the effectiveness of the programs. It was just a question of political alignment". And the wasteful programs the White House gave as examples, misleading at best, fabricated at worst. Here's Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt at the podium. There was just one problem. Three of the four examples weren't even funded by U-S-A-I-D. They were state department projects, and the one that was. A rounding error in a$40 billion budget. But worse yet, those examples weren't even what they were made out to be. According to factcheck.org, the Serbia project promoted workplace inclusion training in a country where L-G-T-L-G-B-T-Q people faced serious discrimination. The Ireland musical was a cultural event with the American and Irish artists. The Columbia Opera was a university performance with the Bogota Philharmonic. The Peru comic book was actually an education project tackling anti-gay prejudice, and it won awards. Not exactly their frivolous projects, the Trump administration made them out to be. But while they were fabricating examples of fraud, real fraud was being caught and prosecuted. On June 12th, 2025 months after U-S-A-I-D was gutted, the Department of Justice announced that A-U-S-A-I-D contracting officer named Roderick Watson had pleaded guilty to a decade long bribery scheme. Over a million dollars in bribes more than$550 million in contracts steered to companies paying him off. This was real fraud, real corruption. And it was caught not by Doge, but by USAID's own inspector General, working with the FBI. The system designed to catch fraud was actually catching fraud. And that same inspector general, he tried to speak up about the sham reviews that Trump administration was airing and was fired the next day. By March, 2025, U-S-A-I-D was effectively dead. Nearly 10,000 employees replaced an administrative leave. Only 294 were allowed to stay. A 97% reduction. The fallout at home was Swift. Uc. Davis permanently lost agricultural research labs that have been running since 1996. John Hopkins announced plans to cut 2000 jobs after losing$800 million in funding, and American farmers were left with 66,000 tons of food aid sitting in storage. Food meant to feed millions. They're on track to lose 500,000 tons total. These losses aren't hitting bureaucrats. They're cutting American jobs. Packaging, shipping, farming. Doge cut nearly 20,000 of them with up to 200,000 at risk across the supply chain. Abroad, the human cost was devastating. Sure, some life saving HIV treatment continued prevention and new enrollments stopped, and even patients already on medication faced dangerous delays and disruptions. Major clinics shuttered over 30 clinical trials of malaria, tb. Cholera and cervical cancer were halted. By May, 2025. Boston University researchers estimated at least 300,000 deaths due to the cuts. A Lancet projection warned to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five, if the shutdown holds. When Secretary Rubio testified to Congress in May, here's what he said. NPR published Babagana's story just a week later. And they didn't stop there. In July, 2025, Congress passed the rescission package, clawing back another$8 billion in U-S-A-I-D and foreign aid funding that had already been approved, pushing those worst case scenarios closer to reality. Remarkably PEPFAR, the largest global h hiv aids program was spared, so its lifesaving core treatment pipeline is slowly resuming, but clinics and prevention initiatives are still struggling to reopen and reach full capacity after months of disruption. This wasn a reform. It was a shutdown with collateral damage at home and overseas. So all of this raises a real question. If the cost was so high, why eliminate U-S-A-I-D in the first place? Trump made it clear he wasn't interested in discipline or reform. He wanted demolition. He said the foreign aid establishment was"run by a bunch of radical lunatics", while also complained about giving"billions of dollars to countries that hate us." Even Project 2025, the conservative playbook had set its sites in U-S-A-I-D calling it woke for the promotion of abortion, policies to mitigate climate change, and acknowledgement of gender identities. But they wanted to reform it, bring it to Heel. Trump didn't want reform, he wanted it gone, and it wasn't just U-S-A-I-D. His administration has systematically dismantled the very tools of American soft power, voice of America, radio Free Europe, radio, Liberty, the Fulbright program. Institutions that for decades helped the world hear us, trust us and work with us. And as Joseph Nye, the scholar who coined the term, wrote"Trump's the first president to reject the idea that soft power has any value in foreign policy". Why target soft power? Because it proves government can work, that public institutions can reduce conflict, expand opportunity, and build legitimacy without coercion. For an ideology that needs government to look broken, those successes are a problem. So their plan wasn't reform what failed, but de-legitimize what works. Smear the mission as woke. Sideline watchdogs who found real fraud. Redirect public capacity toward private winners. Because this administration doesn't believe in helping the poor, addressing climate change, or building international cooperation. They believe in coercion, threats, and dominance. And to make that worldview stick, they need to convince people that institutions like U-S-A-I-D, the very face of American soft power didn't work. If diplomacy and development look broken. The only answers left are force abroad and a strong man at home. And the consequences are already visible. American farmers are losing export markets. anti-American sentiment is growing as we abandon people who depended on our help. Chinese and Russian influence is expanding to fill the vacuum. That's the real agenda, not to persuade, not to build trust, but to prove that only force matters. Where Teddy Roosevelt believed in speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Trump's playbook is the opposite. Stomp loudly and beat people with that stick. What happened to U-S-A-I-D wasn't reform, it wasn't efficiency. It was dismantling institutions that proved America could lead without force, and the cost wasn't abstract. It was Babagana. It was Mariam Mohammad. It was millions of people suddenly cut off from medicine, food, and hope. It was American farmers losing export markets and tens of thousands of US jobs in packaging, shipping, agriculture, and research gone. But here's the part that matters. It doesn't have to stay this way. U-S-A-I-D was created by executive order in 1961. It can be recreated in 2029. The expertise exists, the need hasn't disappeared. What we'll have to rebuild is trust. Trust in America's word, trust, in our ability to show up when it matters. That trust took decades to earn and it was destroyed in one weekend. America hasn't always been a force for good. Far from it. But when we abandon the field entirely, we leave it to others whose agendas may be far worse for both us and the world. Thanks for listening to Khannecting the Dots. I know this episode was a lot, but these stories matter and if it helped you see the bigger picture and what the loss of U-S-A-I-D means, I hope you'll share it with someone else. Conversations like this are how we push back against the alternative facts that keep getting thrown our way. In a future episode, we'll look at another Doge target, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and as new crisis unfold, I'll take the time to cover them too. Because connecting dots doesn't mean ignoring what's right in front of us. Until next time, stay curious, stay critical, and stay connected.