Quotes
If the stop-work order remains in place, ... we will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so.”
We need to correct the impression that the waiver was self-executing by virtue of the announcement,
said Marcia Wong, the former deputy assistant administrator of USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau A chaotic, unexplained and abrupt pause with no guidance has left all our partners around the world high and dry and America looking like a severely unreliable actor to do business with, ... There’s nothing that was left untouched.”
a USAID official told ProPublica, The previously announced 90-day pause and review of U.S. foreign aid is already paying dividends to our country and our people,
These are people who have been living in a war zone for three years this month,
the head of one of the organizations said, The waiver for humanitarian assistance has been a farce,
another USAID official said I’ve been an infectious disease doctor for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything that scares me as much as this,
said Dr. Jennifer Furin, a Harvard Medical School physician who received a stop-work order for a program designing treatment plans for people with the most drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis The pause on all foreign assistance means a complete halt,
a top adviser wrote in an internal memo to staff Like a Russian nesting doll of fuck-ups,
said Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran some of USAID’s largest programs under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden The agency’s front office and DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices,
he wrote to colleagues, referring to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk One of my tasks was summarizing how many people had been directly saved by our health programs every week,
Any other activities not specifically mentioned in this guidance may not be resumed without express approval,
The kind of catch-22 that all organizations are in is if we advance the work by trying to understand and interpret what is meant, then we could be facing the risk of financial outlay of millions of dollars that wouldn't be reimbursed,
People are scared, and whenever people are scared, they are on the side of being conservative, keeping their head down,
says a former USAID executive Foreign aid is one of the tools in your toolkit, and by destroying that toolkit, you're making America less safe, and you're also not achieving the goal of peace,
says Susan Reichle, a former senior executive at USAID If there was a process through which all of these programs could be reviewed, I think that everyone would be rolling up their sleeves to have the programs reviewed,
says one former senior USAID official The government has the prerogative to conduct a review of spending and programs against their priorities,
says an executive of a major aid organization I wish [current USAID leadership] would either make a more blanket statement, or that they empower their teams to interpret this, so that, say, a project in Nepal gets to hear from the mission in Nepal that this is what you should do and this is what you can't do,
says the aid-organization head There's real reform needed in the sector,
says the official at the NGO Those kids have to be fed every three to four hours with therapeutic feeding products in order to reverse the effects of malnutrition, prevent long-term harm, and basically keep them alive,
says an official at the NGO
