AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Trump administration is systematically dismantling the main way that the U.S. distributes foreign aid - through the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The administration froze nearly all foreign aid spending. Then came layoffs and a shutdown of the USAID website. Though today, a federal judge temporarily stopped the Trump administration from putting over 2,000 employees on administrative leave. Few countries are more reliant onUSAID and American aid than Haiti. What has that long-term reliance meant for the country, and what happens if the aid suddenly stops? We'll put those questions to Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He's written a book about Haitian development titled "Aid State." Welcome.
JAKE JOHNSTON: Thanks for having me.
CHANG: So very briefly, how much aid does Haiti get from the U.S. and what is it for exactly?
JOHNSTON: Yeah. So there's a number of different ways to measure this, and through USAID specifically, it's about $400 million a year.
CHANG: OK.
JOHNSTON: And the way that money is divided up, you know, is generally in sectors - a significant portion in health, some in agriculture, quite a bit in this big bucket called governance. And then quite a bit of it also is distributed to multilateral organizations like the U.N.
CHANG: OK. So USAID is not directly administering every single program that this funding supports. This money does get funneled to other organizations, maybe other subcontractors, if you will.
JOHNSTON: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think this is an important thing to understand about how USAID works, right? Over the last number of decades, it was increasingly reliant on contractors and grantees to actually implement its programs. In recent decades, that's actually included a number of for-profit development companies that are, overall, the largest recipients of USAID funding. And so these are the actors that actually receive the money from USAID and then implement the programs on the ground.
CHANG: OK. And these programs on the ground, I mean, they're for what sounds like very important things - agriculture, governance, public health. But you argue that this aid, and I'm going to use your words here, quote, "circumvented the democratic process, eroded sovereignty, undermined local businesses and government and served more as a benefit to U.S. special interest groups than to the local population." You clearly have criticisms of how this aid has been doled out and used in the past. Give me concrete examples here.
JOHNSTON: Yeah, I think, I mean, there are many that we could talk about with Haiti's history specifically. There was the USAID effort to eradicate the Creole pig, a local indigenous species that people in rural Haiti were extremely reliant on, and this was a USAID-financed program in the '80s.
CHANG: And why?
JOHNSTON: Well, ostensibly for health reasons, and they were going to replace them with imported pigs from America, right? But they were not, of course, adapted to the land and didn't last. And so you had rural families - right? - with their savings tied up in these animals - evaporated, right? - gone overnight, right? And so we can say, oh, wait - people are hungry; we want to provide aid. And in fact, this is a big subsidy to U.S. agricultural producers, right? We take surplus agricultural goods from the U.S., and we give them to poor countries like Haiti. And this solves a big need. Now, the problem is, over the long run, what that has done to Haitian agriculture is totally undermine it. And so over time, that has pushed Haitian farmers off of their land and eventually to the shores of the United States.
CHANG: But on balance, do you believe that USAID does more good or more harm in Haiti?
JOHNSTON: I think the way you have to look at USAID is that, first, it's not monolithic. It's not one thing. And so there are parts of USAID that should justifiably be shut down, scrapped, greatly reformed. And there are also really critical things that USAID does today that is supporting lives, right? And so ending that overnight is going to have a deadly impact.
CHANG: And talk more about that deadly impact. What does the current aid pause mean for Haiti in the near future?
JOHNSTON: This is likely to have the greatest impact in the health sector. The health sector is extremely reliant on foreign financing. And so this is a real challenge, right? How do you unwind that dependence without having such an impact on the ground?
CHANG: Then how much do you agree with how President Trump's team has been characterizing USAID? Like, a recent White House statement claimed the agency, quote, "funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous and, in many cases, malicious pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats," end quote. It sounds like you do see some truth in that statement, that characterization.
JOHNSTON: Sure. I think it goes in a very different direction than how it's been portrayed, right? I mean, rather than funding pet projects around DEI or climate, I mean, they're funding pet projects of largely the farm belt and agricultural producers. I think the bigger question here is looking at what actually would be a reform to USAID to actually deliver effective assistance. And so the rhetoric might have some elements of truth to it, but are the changes that are being made actually going to change that dynamic? And I think it's really unlikely given what we've seen so far.
CHANG: Jake Johnston is the director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Thank you very much for joining us today.
JOHNSTON: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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