AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that he is now the acting director of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Rubio said that the agency needs to align with an America First foreign policy agenda.
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MARCO RUBIO: We owe the American people the assurances that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest.
CHANG: Earlier today, billionaire Elon Musk said the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was in the process of shutting down USAID with approval from President Trump. NPR global health correspondent Fatma Tanis joins us now. Hi, Fatma.
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so tell us exactly what Rubio's announcement means for the agency.
TANIS: Well, Secretary Rubio said that he's been frustrated with USAID since he was in Congress, that the agency has an attitude that is, quote, "independent of national interests." Now, for people who work for USAID, it's been a very chaotic couple of weeks. You know, first came Trump's order freezing all foreign aid, then a stop work order for all programs including humanitarian assistance, distribution of medicine, vaccines.
Now, at first, the administration said that it would be conducting a review of all of these programs and then deciding which ones they wanted to keep running. But today, Rubio said that the agency has not been cooperating. So there are still a lot of questions about what this announcement will mean for those programs and for agency staff.
CHANG: Yeah. OK, so, what are you hearing from sources inside the agency?
TANIS: Well, people are worried, depressed, shocked. I've been speaking to people inside the agency and also contractors. They don't want to give their names because they're afraid of losing their jobs. And they've all said that they were working hard to adhere to the stop work order and the aid freeze, but that there's been very little guidance from administration officials.
And I also spoke with a senior official at USAID who requested anonymity because they're not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency. And this person told me that people are willing to work with the administration on reforms, but what the administration is doing is not how you reform an agency, this person said. It's - they said it's a hatchet job instead. And now thousands of employees have been laid off. People have been locked out of their computer systems. The agency website and social media accounts have been gone with no explanation. So USAID as we knew it doesn't exist right now.
CHANG: I mean, it's been so sudden. Did anyone see this coming? Like, why do they think it's even happening?
TANIS: Well, people told me they're shocked at the scale and the speed in which this has all happened, even though there were some signs during President Trump's first term that the agency was being politicized. I spoke with Susan Reichle. She's a former senior USAID official, and she said it started happening in April 2020.
SUSAN REICHLE: There was a small group that all of a sudden were attacking USAID's work on gender, for example, working with democracy, human rights and governance.
TANIS: Now, Reichle and other USAID officials also told me that the agency is an easy target for the administration because its programs operate overseas, and Americans are less familiar with it than other federal agencies.
CHANG: I mean, Fatma, is the Trump administration even allowed to do this - I mean, legally - without congressional approval?
TANIS: So legal experts say the administration does have some leeway with taking the functions of USAID, delegating them to the State Department, for example. I spoke with Tess Bridgeman. She's the former White House counsel under President Obama. But she says what's happening here with USAID goes far beyond that and definitely needs approval from Congress.
TESS BRIDGEMAN: We should be concerned that this is an effort by the Trump administration to unilaterally remake the federal government without congressional authorization.
TANIS: She says if this is what's happening with USAID, the question is, which federal agency is going to be next?
CHANG: That is NPR's Fatma Tanis. Thank you so much, Fatma.
TANIS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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