After calling it a ball of worms with no apple left, the Trump administration hit the U.S. Agency for International Development with a wrecking ball. Has it strayed from its original purpose? Andrew Natsios can offer some perspective. He spent five years as USAID administrator during the George W. Bush administration. Now a professor and director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A & M, he joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin And you have been speaking out, I think, and writing about what is going on at U.S. aid. And even as a Republican former administrator, this doesn’t look too good to you, does it?
Andrew Natsios Well, I’m outraged by it. What Musk has said is boldfaced lie. There is an obsession with accountability at USAID. What he does is he brings these young kids in in their early 20s who are techies. I don’t even know if some of them have been outside the country. They certainly don’t know anything about development. And the aid procurement system is very complex; unless you’ve been trained in it, you don’t even know what you’re reading. Okay. When he says it’s a ball of worms, it is not a ball of worms. It’s a complex system to get thousands of [non-governmental organizations], women’s groups, farmers groups, businesses around the world and in the U.S. Last year, through a thing called the Global Development Alliance, which I developed in 2001 — been around now for 24 years through Democrat and Republican administrations — and it takes money from corporations and matches it with USAID money. We don’t give them any money. They don’t give us any money. We jointly fund aid programs in the developing world. I’ll give you an example. We had a coffee program that’s very famous in Rwanda. Coffee, before we started, it was the worst coffee in Africa, was Rwandan coffee. $3 a pound. It’s $12 a pound now, the last time I looked. And who are we doing this with? Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee. Okay. They’re funding 75% of it. They’re not doing this for charity. They’re doing this because they want high quality of coffee. It increased coffee farmers’ income by 450%, 50,000 farmers, and their incomes dramatically rose. Kagame, the president of Rwanda, talks about it all the time, doesn’t mention it as an aid project. Those kinds of public private alliances amount now to $6 billion a year from corporate America. Corporations aren’t running around saying USAID is a can of worms and all this rhetoric from Musk. He’s doing that and the [Office of Management and Budget] is doing it because they want to save money in the budget. Now, I happen to think the federal budget deficit is catastrophic for our economy. Both Trump and Biden are responsible for it. It’s not just Biden. Trump had $1 trillion budget deficit before COVID in his first term.
Tom Temin Sure.
Andrew Natsios They’re going to fix it. The problem is it’s because of the entitlement programs. They’re not cutting the entitlement programs or reforming it. They’re cutting the rest of the federal government, which is nuts, in my view.
Tom Temin And a small piece of the overall spend anyway, if you really look at the numbers. But getting back to USAID, is there any evidence at all, is there any germ of truth in that it might have strayed from its mission in some of the grants that it’s made for parades and cultural affairs and this kind of thing?
Andrew Natsios Sure. We transfer our cultural wars in the U.S. to our aid program. And USAID does it because both parties do it. I’m a conservative Republican. I’m not a moderate. They’ll tell you I was the most conservative administrator in the history of the agency. But the career people helped me do what I need to do because I was strengthening the agency, not weakening it. Okay. When the conservatives take over and the Republicans take over, they move USAID right of center. When the Democrats take over, they move it to the left of center. And the career people, if you trust them and treat them respectfully, which this administration is most definitely not doing, they will help you do it as long as they think — and they’ll tell you, “if you do this, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble. This is illegal. This is legal. Don’t do this here. Do this here.” I followed their advice and it avoided me getting into trouble everywhere. So I have great respect for the career people. I might add, I’ve run seven institutions in the last 45 years. The career staff at USAID, Foreign Service, are the most competent managers and the smartest people I worked with. And again, I’m not a liberal. Okay. These insults are outrageous. And how does he know what’s going on? He was there for two weeks and he’s an expert in USAID? Give me a break. It’s not the hugest federal agency, but it’s the most complex.
Tom Temin We are speaking with Andrew Natsios. He is former USAID administrator, now executive professor at Texas A&M. And relate how you went about dealing with the staff. You got there after the Clinton administration. And so you had eight years of a Democrat on leaning a little a bit left. Well, more than a little bit left. But it was what constituted the left in the Clinton years, and came in. What is a good approach for someone coming in like that in dealing with that standing staff that you want to help you get the new agenda done?
Andrew Natsios Well, number one, I had worked there before, under Bush 41, the elder Bush. So I knew at a lower level what it was like. I also had a lot of friends and I knew who I could trust. They referred to the USAID career staff as a bunch of Marxists. A lot of the career staff are missionary kids. They’re brought up in the developing world to missionary parents. They’re Christians. They don’t run around saying that. But I know what they are and they go to church, but very quietly. But they speak the local language. They know the local culture. So Tom Stall was a missionary kid brought up in Iraq. We sent him in as the mission director. He spoke perfect Iraqi Arabic, like an Iraqi would speak it. He knew every village in the country. We had a mission director in Pakistan who was brought up in Pakistan to a missionary family. He was mission director in Pakistan and Mongolia, wrote books about it. He’s the president of a Christian college now in Pakistan, and he’s retired. But they don’t run around talking about those people; I’m sure you can find a radical leftist somewhere who’s out to lunch. But I mean, it’s a big, complex agency. Of course, you’re going to find that. The joke in USAID, with the career service is whenever we elect a Democrat, the agency gets screwed because they can’t run the agency properly. Whenever the Republicans, they always send people over who know how to run a federal agency and get it to do what we need to do. So actually, it’s a standing joke that they always do better under [Republicans] except right now, under Trump. The first Trump administration, Mark Green was the administrator and he’s one of the best administrators of the agency has had in 40 years, 50 years. He was very able and the career peoples followed him.
Tom Temin Well, now we have a situation where people were locked out of the building and given leave and the foreign-based staff told to come home in 30 days. If there’s a legal challenge to all this and if there’s an injunction, it could be after that all happens. What’s your sense of the effect this will have on, I guess, America’s standing, on our ability to provide aid? And what are some of the consequences here that you see?
Andrew Natsios I can say it’s paralyzing, which it clearly is. But let me give you several examples. I have been educating students at Georgetown University first and now at the Bush school at Texas A&M for the last 18 years. Okay. All of my students have been fired or laid off. One of them is in the middle of a civil war on a DART team, a disaster assistance response team. He said, I don’t know if I can get home. They just told me I was fired. He’s being shot at, for heaven’s sake. Representing the United States, saving people’s lives. He’s been there seven years and they just told him he’s fired. For what reason? It’s ridiculous. And it’s putting the people at risk and it’s putting him in risk. And he’s a little bit demoralized, I would say. You’re in the middle of a civil war, putting your life at risk. And you have to put up with this crap in Washington. Give me a break. I am just appalled by it. Absolutely appalled. But if they want to change USAID — and they should, they need to appoint a competent manager like Mark Green — you do it very quietly. I had every single program when I took over at USAID reviewed one-by-one — took a couple of months — by a senior officer. And we ended, I don’t know, 60 or 70 different projects and programs which were out to lunch. I’ll give you one example. They were trying to improve the self-image of prostitutes in Brazil. I said, number one, why are we in Brazil? It’s a relatively wealthy country. Two, poor women go into prostitution not as a career choice. Usually they are kidnaped as sex traffickers, and you don’t make them feel better about it. They’ll never feel better about it. This is a ridiculous project. I said, Who designed this? It actually wasn’t a career person. It’s one of the Clinton people designed it and the career people rolled their eyes and they said “they told us to do it. So we did it.” And I canceled it immediately. And I said, What does the evaluation show? Did their self-image improve? And they said, no, it was an abysmal failure. And we told them it would be when they started it. But who got blamed for it? The career people did.
Tom Temin Sure.
Andrew Natsios So this is the kind of thing they need to remove. But I did this very quietly. No one even knew it was going on. And the career people helped me because they used to call these projects “dogs.” It’s not a compliment.
Tom Temin And in your career, you have personally seen civil war, the ravages it causes and the famines that it causes from Asia to across the world, really.
Andrew Natsios Yes.
Tom Temin And if that’s the essential goal here, for USAID, is to prevent humanitarian disaster through civil war and famine and sometimes they’re related. Then what should happen next?
Andrew Natsios Well, the first thing in Africa, they’re always related. North Korea, there is no civil war going on. I actually wrote a book about the North Korean famine when I was in the NGO, and I work for the largest Christian NGO, World Vision, in the world. It has 30,000 employees, they’re in 100 company countries, $2.8 billion, 80% of it private money. I was vice president for five years during the Clinton administration. So I know this from the perspective of the NGOs, from USAID’s. And I was a military officer. I was a lieutenant colonel in the Reserves. I served in the first Gulf War. And I know it from when I was a diplomat, after I left USAID, as envoy to Sudan for President Bush. So I know all of the disciplines. USAID is an essential part of the foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. Government, which in my view is one of the most important founding functions of the federal government. The states can’t do diplomacy and development and the military. Those are functions of the federal government. Now what should happen in terms of USAID? The disaster assistance account — because I teach a course, it’s called Great Famines, War and Humanitarian Assistance. I’ve been teaching it for, as I said, 18 years now. I would say just in the last few years, we placed 32 people. All of them have been laid off, 32 people in the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance. It’s the largest bureau in USAID, $8 or $9 billion. There’s no leadership now. They need to put a senior person in charge of that bureau because it’s paralyzing all of these aid programs. Now, this is the most disturbing thing. After the Ethiopian famine in 1985, we established — “we,” before I was even there, I joined USAID in 89 — we established, the agency, established a thing called FEWS: Famine Early Warning System. You take aerial photographs of famine-prone areas continuously during the planting and harvest season. And if the color of the ground is the wrong color for that particular week, it means if it’s brown, when it should be green, it means the crop is failed. You then send a team on the ground to make sure that’s the case, because it’s not always the case. And you can tell by the prices in the markets whether a famine is coming. We have predicted every single famine with the exception of the North Korean famine, because we weren’t filming North Korea. It didn’t cover that. It covered only Africa. When I got to USAID, I extended it all over the world. Alex de Waal, one of the prominent famine experts in the world, he’s a scholar at Tufts, a friend of mine. he wrote a book called Mass Starvation. He tracked the number of deaths in the last 150 years from famine. He showed a precipitous decline since the mid 1980s, since FEWS was invented. It’s an American system. The U.N. uses it. The International Committee of the Red Cross uses it. The NGOs use it. Governments in the third world use it. It’s a giant mapping system. It says different colors. If it’s yellow distress, if it’s green, no problem. If it’s red, it means there’s a famine about to start. If it’s very maroon red, it means people are dying in large numbers. We can predict this. You know what they won’t do? They won’t grant a waiver to continue FEWS. I said, ask them to do it. It’s like we have this huge car to save people’s lives and there’s no steering wheel. The steering wheel is the FEWS system. It tells us where to send the food. We don’t know where to send the food now because they shut the whole system down and fired everybody in the office. By the way, these people are technical experts. That’s all they do, is food insecurity. That’s not an ideological issue. It’s not a religious issue or a cultural issue. It is a human issue. Do you want people to starve to death? My great uncle starved during the Nazi occupation of Greece. So I have a, I have to say, a very, very intense dedication to avoid having this again. We don’t need famines. You know what happens when there’s a famine? People start moving en masse. The more food insecurity, the more food stress, the more population movements. And guess where they want to come? Europe and the United States. People say, well, people are coming from Mexico. People are not coming from Mexico into the United States anymore. They’re coming from the developing world across the globe. We had 70,000 Chinese crossed the border. Chinese. They fly to Central America, and then they walk up through the Darien Gap in Panama. Why? Well, because they’re not going to starve to death in the United States. They want to work, most of them. Okay. So this whole thing, of course, it has something to do with our national interest. It affects the the crisis in the border. There’s one other thing I want to mention about our aid programs and how they protect our vital national interests.
Tom Temin I’m guessing you’re going to mention the health programs of USAID.
Andrew Natsios The second biggest program in aid is our health programs. We’ve saved 25 million people’s lives who had HIV/AIDS. Because we have a huge program, massive; President Bush started it, actually, and President Obama continued, and so did President Trump under the first term. Those programs are all at risk now. Our whole apparatus is collapsing around the world for these health clinics that we run. Now, those health clinics have a highly sophisticated system of disease reporting in 90 countries. If we see a new disease we’ve never seen before or a thing like Ebola, the new strain of Ebola that’s popping up in Uganda. We have a global supply chain, a very complex, huge system. We can order vaccines to go in and vaccinate everybody in Uganda, so this will not turn into a pandemic. Do you want Ebola across our border? The notion that you can stop diseases at our border is delusional. It’s a fantasy. Did we stop COVID at our border? No, we did not. And you know why? We didn’t know what was going on in China? Because there’s no USAID mission there. Now, I’m not, I would never suggest we have a USAID mission — the Chinese would arrest all our people. The Chinese, by the way, and Russians have been trying to undermine our programs in the developing world, particularly Africa, for a very long time now. The Russians have a disinformation campaign attacking us. You know that Medvedev, who is the prime minister in Russia. He issued a tweet last Sunday complimenting Musk for destroying USAID. “We’ve been trying to do it for years. We’re so glad you did it.” So we are now helping our enemies. Does that make any sense? And I have to tell you, anybody who thinks Vladimir Putin is a friend of the United States doesn’t know what’s going on. I just edited a book of essays called Russia Under Putin: Fragile State and Revisionist Power. And Vladimir Putin will not like the book.
Tom Temin All right. And I’m sure the current staff won’t like this interview at the administration.
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