The Trump administration is canceling 83% of programs at the US Agency for International Development and intends to fold the remaining programs into the State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday.
Former USAID employees, who have been impacted by the administration’s drastic cuts, say the situation has been handled in a haphazard way that will likely have harmful impacts to millions around the world.
“I think that when we’re talking about life-saving aid programs, saying we’re going to cut 83% of USAID’s program, we are going to put lives in jeopardy. There’s no way that is not going to harm millions of people’s lives,” Linden Yee, former USAID employee, told CNN.
Yee also noted that aid programs are not just a one-way street, and the US has received foreign aid from other nations, including from Canada and Mexico during the devastating fires in California. “So when the time comes, America will also need to ask for foreign aid, and we do not want to be the country that cut everyone else’s life saving programs,” Yee said.
In justifying the massive cuts, Rubio claimed the contracts impacted in some cases “harmed” US national interest.
“The 5,200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” he claimed without providing details on the canceled contracts.
Asked by CNN if they could recall a time where their work at USAID “harmed US national interest,” both Yee and Benjamin Thompson, a fellow former USAID employee, said they could not.
“The underlying assumption to Rubio’s statement is that these programs are full of what they’re referring to as ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ If that were actually the case, if that were their genuine intention, they would’ve gone about this in a very different way. They would’ve worked with existing personnel, they would have worked with the inspector general to review our programs, our funding streams,” Thompson said.
Yee and Thompson described their termenation as abrupt.
Yee said her contract was terminated with only five minutes of notice. She said she was not able to give notice to partners she worked closely with and left some work matters half finished. “It is not the way we would have wanted to go about closing these programs down,” she added.
Thompson said he was only given a short amount of time to gather his things from his office and that there were security personnel in the building. “It was very clearly meant to intimidate, to threaten, which just seemed wildly out of place and inappropriate,” he said.
CNN’s Jennifer Hansler and Kit Maher contributed to this report.