A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss - The New York Times - "Former U.S.A.I.D. workers who have done informal surveys estimate that less than half have found full-time work, with many making less than before. An estimated third are unemployed. Others are in part-time work... Others acknowledged that there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion it managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure... U.S.A.I.D. workers who once thought of themselves as ambassadors for American “soft power” said they worried about the trust in the United States that was lost overseas"
Even before USAID got dismantled, the US was hated around the world. Looks like it was a very poor return on investment.
The fact that so many have not managed to find a new job suggests that they aren't very good workers
Robert Sterling on X - "I feel terrible for anyone who loses their job. I’m not trying to kick anyone while they’re down. But these USAID and NGO workers are the least sympathetic unemployed people I’ve ever seen. EVERY person in this story was making well into six figures:
USAID employee: $175,000
USAID contractor: $127,000
USAID-funded NGO employee: $272,000(!)
USAID advisor at the DOD: $195,000
USAID contractor: $200,000
There were 16,000 employees at USAID, and the New York Times was only able to interview one making less than $175k. Worldwide, there were an estimated 280,000 contractors. ALL of these people were getting paid from our tax dollars. Many were making 2-4x the wage of the average American taxpayer ($65-70k per year). Yes, USAID did some good work, especially during the Cold War. And, yes, many of the agency’s employees were hard-working Americans, with good intentions and love for their country. Again, we should take no joy in seeing thousands of people lose their livelihoods—this is not a case of justifiable schadenfreude. But it’s not sustainable for an agency with so little accountability to manage tens of billions of dollars per year, enriching tens of thousands of NGO-industrial-complex managers living in the DC/Maryland/Virginia metroplex in the process. Even the NYT acknowledges that “there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion [USAID] managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure.” Every last dollar that went to these highly paid employees was funded by an American taxpayer, the vast majority of whom make far less money than the people laid off from USAID. We have the right to demand accountability, and we have the right to expect that these funds will be spent in our interest, not theirs. USAID and its thousands of employees, contractors, and NGO beneficiaries ignored that principle, and they eventually paid the price with their careers. I wish them all nothing but the best, but I won’t mourn that they will no longer be making $200k per year on the backs of American workers."
Fugitive Caesar on X - "personally I find this hilarious that Democrats spent the past 50+ years deindustrializing America, sending factories overseas, flooding blue-collar and white-collar jobs with 150 million foreigners, regulating business to death... and now they need to find jobs in this economy."
Razib Khan ๐งฌ ✍️ on X - "one thing that annoys me a bit is how the media focuses on gov. and media layoffs like tragedies in a way that they don't do with other sectors nearly to the same extent. losing your job and finding another one is pretty common for americans"
David Armano on X - "I was laid off in 2020 during the height of the pandemic in June, right around the time when our cities began to burn. It was terrible. I don’t wish that on anyone and it altered my career. I was 49. there’s little sympathy for private sector layoffs like what you see here"
Left wingers don't care about private sector layoffs because they hate the private sector
SightBringer on X - "⚡ The woman in that photo is being used as a political prop by the NYT and she probably doesn't even know it. The framing wants you to feel outrage at the cruelty of the cuts. But the actual data point buried in the story is devastating to the narrative it's trying to build. 272k for a senior VP at a USAID-funded nonprofit is not a real salary. It's a subsidy. That job existed inside a closed loop: taxpayer money flows to USAID, USAID funds NGOs, NGOs hire professionals at inflated rates, those professionals build lives around compensation that was never stress-tested against the open market. The entire salary was a function of proximity to the spigot. Not output. Not value creation. Not demand for her specific skills. The $19/hour number isn't the system being cruel. It's the system being honest for the first time. The market is saying: without the government funding stream, your skills at 57 command 39k. That's the real price. The 272k was the fiction. And here's what nobody in that thread will say: there are tens of thousands of people in the DC metro area alone sitting in exactly this position right now. Government-adjacent professionals whose entire compensation structure was built on a funding model that is being unwound. Not by AI, not by automation, but by simple political reallocation. And the market is going to reprice every single one of them. The deeper pattern is that an entire class of professional jobs in America were never real market jobs. They were artifacts of institutional spending that created its own employment ecosystem. Government, corporate middle management, DEI departments, compliance layers, consulting firms that exist to service other consulting firms. The whole structure was a series of jobs that existed because the money existed, not because the work needed doing at that price. That structure is now being compressed from multiple directions simultaneously. AI from one side. Spending cuts from another. Corporate efficiency mandates from a third. And the professional class that built its identity, its mortgages, its kids' tuitions, its retirement plans around those salaries is about to discover what the open market actually thinks they're worth. That's the repricing. This woman is just the first photo to go viral."
Clearly the problem was they weren't paid enough, which is why they're struggling now
Aakash Gupta on X - "A "senior VP" at a "nonprofit" was pulling $272K a year. Every dollar of it was yours. Sheryl Cowan's salary came from a federal appropriation, routed through USAID, laundered through a DC-area 501(c)(3) so nobody had to call it what it was. Roughly nine out of every ten USAID dollars in FY2024 never left the DC beltway. Samantha Power, the USAID administrator herself, called the industry the "industrial aid complex." The scale of what was inside that wrapper: Chemonics took a $9.5 billion USAID contract to manage health supply chains and, per Senator Ernst's office, overbilled the agency by up to $270 million while the project produced 31 indictments for illegally reselling taxpayer-funded supplies. $800 million flowed through Johns Hopkins alone. DAI, FHI 360, RTI International, Creative Associates: a network of "nonprofits" and contractors that collectively employed 20,000 Americans, almost all in Arlington, Bethesda, and Falls Church, almost all paid with money you earned. That's why Sheryl can't ladder down to a $150K role now. There is no $150K role. Every rung of her career collapsed in the same quarter because every rung was on the same payroll. Chemonics furloughed 750 US staff, roughly 70% of its American workforce. DAI cut 380. FHI 360 eliminated 483. RTI laid off 370. The USAIDstopwork tracker counted 19,187 American jobs gone. She can't step down to $180K because those jobs were federal money too. She can't take $120K because every former program director is applying for it. The reference network collapses with the paycheck network because the references were on the same grants. $272K was federal money with a nonprofit logo on the check. The "private sector" in a 30-mile radius of the Capitol was an accounting fiction, and the 20,000 people finding out right now what it really was are the same people who spent a decade calling it private."
David P Deavel on X - "So, what you're saying is that a person who is paid six-figures by a government agency is not worth more than a small fraction of that in the rest of the world? I'm stunned."
VoxDawg - Pattern Recognizer on X - "Pro Tip: If your NGO has to close its doors when the government stops funneling taxpayer dollars to you, then you were NOT a "Non-governmental organization""
Jamazel on X - "I don’t seem to remember the Times doing a sympathy piece on all of those people who lost their jobs when the government shut down the economy because of a virus that has a 99.99% survival rate. Also, that photo is not of Sheryl Cowan."
mjsb on X - "West Virginia coal miners would like to help by suggesting she "learn to code""
Brittany Hughes on X - "So we’re to believe she was good enough to be worth $272,000 a year and somehow couldn’t find another commensurate job elsewhere? For a whole year? Or maybe, like many taxpayer-funded positions, she just wasn’t worth $272,000 in the first place."
Tee Baille on X - "Most of the higher level USAID people I have had the displeasure of meeting while working overseas (almost 30 year career) are not only incompetent, but abusive, insulting and completely useless."
TexasSIMRP-edu on X - "I can speak to that regarding some USAID folks in Africa. They were useless."
Thread by @iliketeslas on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I’m in South America , and a friend who worked with USAID in different projects for 15 years just told me “everything DOGE found about the waste is true” we really lived a life of kings with USAID’s money ๐ Everyone around the world knew about the US government corruption except the Americans If democrats were concerned about the people whos funds were cut by canceling USAID.. shouldn’t they be trying to reactivate a way to send aid in a transparent way instead of just saying “Elon bad” ? The hypocrisy ๐คท๐ป♂️"
Libs of TikTok on X - "BREAKING: USAID official and 3 company executives plead guilty in fraud and bribery scheme involving at least 14 contracts worth over $550 million USAID Official Roderick Watson took bribes, was showered with lavish gifts— including cash, laptops, thousands of dollars in tickets to a suite at an NBA game, a country club wedding, downpayments on two residential mortgages, cell phones, and jobs for relatives. In exchange for the bribe payments, Watson influenced the award of contracts by manipulating the procurement process at USAID. Watson faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. Imagine how much more fraud there is…"
This won't stop left wingers from continuing to post their fake news memes about how DOGE hasn't charged anyone with fraud, therefore it was all a scam. They think things can happen instantly, which is why they claim Trump didn't send the National Guard in on January 6th because he was the one who incited the insurrection
Director on USAID Project Arrested for Nine-Year Fraud Scheme | Office of Inspector General - "Ruth Chisina Mufute of Zimbabwe is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and four counts of wire fraud"
District of Maryland | Former USAID Employee Pleads Guilty to CARES Act Fraud | United States Department of Justice - "Simeon Bakare, 55, of Waldorf, Maryland, pled guilty to wire-fraud charges in connection with the scheme"
District of Columbia | Former Contractor of USAID-Funded Program Extradited to the United States, Convicted and Sentenced for Conspiracy to Obtain Grant Money Through Fraud | United States Department of Justice - "Stephen Paul Edmund Sutton, 53, a United Kingdom citizen, pleaded guilty and was sentenced today for his participation in a fraud scheme, perpetrated when he was employed by a contracting firm that implemented a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded (USAID) power distribution program (PDP) in Pakistan"
Office of Public Affairs | USAID Official and Three Corporate Executives Plead Guilty to Decade-Long Bribery Scheme Involving Over $550 Million in Contracts; Two Companies Admit Criminal Liability for Bribery Scheme and Securities Fraud | United States Department of Justice - "Four men, including a government contracting officer for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and three owners and presidents of companies, have pleaded guilty for their roles in a decade-long bribery scheme involving at least 14 prime contracts worth over $550 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars.
Roderick Watson, 57, of Woodstock, Maryland, who worked as a USAID contracting officer, pleaded guilty to bribery of a public official; Walter Barnes, 46, of Potomac, Maryland, who was the owner and president of PM Consulting Group LLC doing business as Vistant (Vistant), a certified small business under the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) 8(a) contracting program, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery of a public official and securities fraud; Darryl Britt, 64, of Myakka City, Florida, who was the owner and president of Apprio, Inc. (Apprio), a certified small business under the SBA 8(a) contracting program, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery of a public official; and Paul Young, 62, of Columbia, Maryland, who was the president of a subcontractor to Vistant and Apprio, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery of a public official."
Meme - DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican: "Screen-capped for posterity. This individual claims to be a PhD student in economics at @GeorgeMasonU . They are not even hiding their motives. I read the essay; it presents little in the way of specifics. As of this writing, it has received 16 likes. In their view, cutting USAID justifies firebombing Teslas and issuing daily threats against public figures. In their view, deporting an MS-13 immigrant is a reason to start a civil war. (And that incident is most of the author's premise for the essay.) Maybe I'm naive, but I don't want believe some of our neighbors are so innately consumed by malice that they would kill us for wanting to preserve this nation. And yet, their actions, and increasingly, their words say otherwise. Pray for this nation."
Nicholas Decker @captgouda24: "The ultimate source of political power is, and always will be, violence. If the present administration should continue on its course, there is no choice but war. I say this out of sorrow - when must we kill them?"
More proof that the right incites violence
Nicholas Kristof on X - "The @washingtonpost reports on how the chaos around the closure of USAID led to breakdowns in supply lines, resulting in kids dying of malaria: https://t.co/s85AJKw0CG @SecRubio says US aid cuts haven't killed anyone; in fact, they kill kids at a rate estimated at 88 per hour."
Some dude on X - "In 1950 before white people started pumping their nations with foreign aid there were about 180 million sub Saharan Africans and they desperately needed our help. 75 years later there are 1.2 billion sub Saharan Africans and they desperately need our help."
dikgaj on X - "There are a few countries trying to be different. But the mechanism of aid is always to sustain dependence and recycling of aid back to source after allowing a part to go into nepo elite corrupt pockets who help in retaining indirect say in the country."
Weird how the US gets denounced as an evil genocidal country all the time, but it turns out they're supposedly providing so much life-saving aid and it's an evil genocidal country to remove it. If they get slammed no matter what they do, why not save some money?
Defiant L’s on X - "Sen. John Kennedy: "You're getting rid of $5.5 million to lesbian, gay biseuxal transgender queer and intersex advocacy in Uganda. I can't believe we're arguing about this!""
Shane Goldmacher on X - "NEWS: The DNC took out a $15 million loan in October, the latest sign of financial distress for the official arm of the Democratic Party. The party ended the month with $18.3 million in the bank — $15 million of which came from the loan."
DC_Draino on X - "Trump cutoff USAID funding and suddenly the DNC is going bankrupt. Hmm."
PBS News on X - "When USAID shut down, more than 80% of its programs were canceled. In an attempt to keep the most cost-effective and life-saving projects up and running, two laid-off agency employees created a website called Project Resource Optimization to match donors with threatened programs. So far, they've helped keep nearly 80 projects running in 30 countries. @AliRogin sat down with founders Caitlin Tulloch and Rob Rosenbaum for more."
The Dank Knight ๐ฆ on X - "PBS accidentally showing how programs continued fine without billions of taxpayer dollars. Proving USAID was just an activist money laundering scheme for Democrats to spread their woke degenerate cancer."
USAID Being Removed has KILLED at least 600,000 people. : r/DoomerCircleJerk - "Imagine if the U.S. actually had that level of soft power fielded, China would probably have a lot less influence in Africa. That or 600,000 shitty indie game devs have committed suicide."
"If US AID being removed killed that many people then aren’t they admitting the U.S. has saved hundreds of millions of people and thus the most benevolent and helping nation in the history of humanity"
"Nope, their argument then becomes that those people wouldn't need to be saved if the US hadn't crushed them due to capitalism or racism or blah blah."
"That’s right. They are always shifting goalposts and never giving credit for legitimate works."
Left wingers just hate the US and the West and despise them even while demanding they spend endless resources on the rest of the world. But then, they also claim "billionaires" are evil for not giving away all of their money, which supposedly would keep people from dying (even if they don't spout that delusional line about it saving the world). Foreign aid given by the West has remarkably poor ROI, even if you count "soft power"
Hutch on X - "Trump’s decision to end USAID has already led to 400,000 children killed. I’m having some angry thoughts about all the Killer Kamala rhetoric from a certain set of single issue voters who decided that their emotions were more important than actual outcomes."
John Fruz on X - "I hate Trump, but this is some of the most retarded "evidence" I've seen. It's a random mathematical model. It's not even purporting to track excess deaths, much less actually have specific cases."
Daniel Friedman on X - "There are places that are entirely dependent on international aid, and the populations there are exploding but if the aid spigot from one country is cut off, hundreds of thousands of children supposedly die in a matter of months of malnutrition and preventable disease. These countries have been aid dependent for decades and have no internal capacity to feed or care for their people. With the population of Africa exploding as the population of the West declines, we're heading toward a world where half the population will be places that depend on aid. We can't take care of them all."
John Magilligan on X - "Don’t be surprised when China swoops in and picks up our slack. They’re forming relationships while we’re cutting children off from necessary aid. This is the century of humiliation for the USA"
Daniel Friedman on X - "The fucked up thing is, USAID was so captured by progressives that the organization wasn’t using the “soft power” it was creating to spread American values; it was promulgating academic Marxism, race resentment and third-worldism."
Thread by @BalazsOrban_HU on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "❌️ Hungarians don’t need a 'Norwegian USAID'. We’ve seen this playbook before: money, ideology, loyal NGOs — and a foreign agenda wrapped in the language of “democracy.”
And yet, here we go again: another €20 million in foreign funding, courtesy of the Norway Fund, once again handed to a Soros-backed liberal organization to distribute in ๐ญ๐บHungary — just as Norway insisted last time, rejecting even neutral candidates like the Hungarian Red Cross. If Norway truly wants to support Hungarian society, it should invest in what people actually need. Promoting woke ideology through foreign-funded gender campaigns targeting children, for example, is not one of them. But this isn’t about supporting civil society. Out of approx. 60,000 Hungarian NGOs, Norway opted to channel the money through a group with clear links to George Soros — a pattern repeated across multiple European states. It’s about directing funds to loyal ideological networks — the very same strategy once used by #USAID around the world, where funding meant influence, and influence meant pressure on sovereign governments. The Norwegian version follows the same script: across multiple European countries, including Hungary, organisations tied to George Soros have repeatedly been chosen to manage the disbursement of these funds. These groups serve as ideological foot soldiers in a global liberal network, often the very same ones attacking ๐ญ๐บ #Hungary’s child protection laws, migration policy, and national sovereignty under the banner of “progress.” Call it “civil society” or “democracy promotion” — but in practice, it’s foreign-funded activism pushing the global liberal network’s agenda."
Charlie’s Voice Rising on X - "๐จWOW… Mike Benz just dropped a wild bombshell on Joe Rogan’s podcast. During the Obama years, USAID pushed $1.2 BILLION through Cayman Island accounts, pretending it was “aid for Pakistan”… …but the cash actually funded ZunZuneo — a Cuban Twitter-clone built to spark rent-a-riots and topple governments around the world. You can’t make this up."
The SCIF on X - "USAID was funding BOTH the WUHAN Lab gain-of-function research & SMARTMATIC Election Systems. Do you think it was a coincidence that "covid" came out right around the 2020 election? Coincidentally, the same left-wing billionaires, NGOs, and USAID also funded the 'NO KINGS' protest, aka, the color revolutions across America. This means that USAID was simultaneously funding BOTH the election-rigging technology that would steal the 2020 election WHILE manufacturing and releasing a WEAPONIZED VIRUS that would distract the world from the theft of said election while depopulating the planet at the same time. It's all connected. Everything is out in the open and face-up on the table... I don't even know what to say anymore. You can't be this naive anymore. We can't live under this fraud and tyranny anymore. Americans are suffering, and everyone else is robbing you blind getting filthy rich."
Rubio defends USAID closure after Hurricane Melissa response success - "Those worried about shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were wrong, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who touted the agency’s record in delivering support in the wake of Hurricane Melissa that ravaged the Caribbean in October. Although USAID historically functioned as an independent agency to deliver aid to impoverished countries and development assistance, the State Department announced in March that it would absorb remaining operations and functions in an effort to streamline operations to deliver foreign assistance amid concerns that USAID did not advance U.S. core interests. The move resulted in cuts for thousands of USAID employees. Critics including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said that upending the agency would "lead to millions of preventable deaths," while a group of House Democrats wrote a letter to President Donald Trump in February as USAID cuts got underway that changes would lead to increased maternal and child mortality. But Rubio now claims those skeptics’ fears were unfounded. "Alarmists in politics and the media forecasted that the closure of USAID would result in catastrophe. Now, nearly a year later, they’ve been proven wrong," Rubio said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "The State Department has realigned foreign assistance with the interests of the American people, streamlined disaster response capabilities, and leveraged the ingenuity of American companies to save lives." Specifically, Rubio pointed to the assistance the State Department provided in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, which hit Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane and was the strongest to strike Kingston since the island started tracking its storms 174 years ago. The State Department deployed a regional disaster assistance response team (DART) and activated U.S.-based urban search and rescue (USAR) teams to support response efforts in the region as part of recovery efforts. Likewise, the State Department assisted in administering food and other resources to those in need, using predesignated supplies housed in 12 different warehouses across the region. Ultimately, the State Department coordinated with the United Nations World Food Program to distribute 5,000 family food packs to families in Jamaica, and provided nearly $37 million in assistance to those hit by the storm. "This new era of foreign assistance eliminates extreme ideological projects that previous administrations forced the American people to subsidize, cuts out the wasteful NGO industrial complex, and puts the American people first," Rubio said. The Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank, evaluated the State Department's response to Hurricane Melissa looking at key performance indicators including speed, logistics, funding, and interagency coordination, and concluded that the U.S. "delivered a textbook surge of humanitarian aid in the wake of a natural disaster of historic magnitude."... The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targeted USAID in its push to eliminate wasteful spending during a review earlier in 2025. The agency attracted scrutiny for a series of funding choices, including allocating $1.5 million for a program that sought to "advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities" and a $70,000 program for a "DEI musical" in Ireland... the State Department is undergoing its own transformation. In addition to absorbing USAID, the State Department has undergone a massive overhaul as part of the largest restructuring for the agency since the Cold War. Additionally, it rolled out an America First Global Health Strategy in September to deliver health aid worldwide by working directly with recipient country’s governments instead of through non-governmental organizations and other aid programs."
AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance - The New York Times
Left wingers keep complaining about the US putting its nose in other countries' business, yet they keep screeching about USAID cuts, of course
Of course, left wingers always chant "correlation isn't causation" when they hate the results
Joseph Guarino ๐ฒ๐๐ณ️๐๐๐ฆ๐ฅ on X - "Fun fact: dismantling USAID was a goal of both Project 2025 and the DSA platform."
So was it still evil?
