https://theprogressnetwork.org/usaid-funding-accomplishments/
"President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order to halt all foreign aid
funding has turned into a fight over the future of the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), throwing programs such as those that provide
HIV medication or famine assistance into disarray.
While Elon Musk has declared that the agency is a “criminal organization” that
has reached its time to “die,” as he wrote on X, Trump seems likely to try to
fold it into the State Department, mimicking what the United Kingdom, Canada,
and Australia have done in their own governments. The US last tried to do the
same in the 1990s, an attempt led by a Republican-held Senate and
then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, under President Bill Clinton.
Either option—closing or subsuming the agency—would require Congressional
approval, although such legal requirements have not slowed down Trump on
anything else yet. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was appointed
USAID’s acting administrator, another legally dubious move.
Meanwhile, disruption to the agency has been building throughout the week,
culminating with an announcement on the USAID government website that as of
tomorrow, all direct hire personnel “will be placed on administrative leave
globally,” with certain exceptions for mission-critical functions and
leadership. Sixty senior leaders, as well as hundreds of independent
contractors, had already been placed on administrative leave earlier in the
week.
The agency has been gutted down to its walls: the odd, disrespectful decision
to remove plaques honoring murdered USAID workers has infuriated many
(including one former USAID director, a Republican), and even decorative photos
have been taken down.
The capricious and chaotic manner of the shutdown is both a serious legal issue
and literally threatens lives abroad. Those in the international aid world are
worried that programs that have already closed up shop due to the funding
freeze will never open back up again, even if funding resumes, and
representatives of aid programs currently exempted from the freeze under
Secretary Rubio’s “life-saving humanitarian assistance” waiver say that the
money isn’t actually flowing or that they can’t apply for the waiver in the
first place, because no one at the agency is responding."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
