Ari Daniel, Why Dean Karlan, chief economist of USAID, resigned on Tuesday, NPR, February 26, 2025. From the article:
We're watching psychological warfare against a workforce that has been committed to furthering the lives of other people. This was a career choice they made to help others even if they disagreed about how to improve USAID.
If you want to reform foreign aid, this isn't the way to do it. This approach is going to radically increase the cost of all future foreign aid. That's because if you want to work with anybody in the future and you tell them, "No, no, no, this time we're here. We're not going to fold on you," how are you going to convince them of that? When you can't trust someone, it makes you reluctant to make agreements with them. And that means doing less good with more money to have the same positive impact as we were having before.
There's a lot of good that USAID has done across the board in terms of health, education, helping farmers, and helping people in crisis.
Now, there are people who are going to be radically worse off and sick and not educated in the same way because of what's happened. Literally taking people who are in hospitals and stopping treatments because the money is not there.
And not just that — people are going to die. A lot of people.
So we now have a million million tragedies that could have been avoided.
There's more at the link.
H/t Tyler Cowen.
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On the carnage at USAID, Zach MontagueMichael Crowley and Adam Liptak, Chief Justice Allows U.S. to Continue Freeze on Foreign Aid Payments, NYTimes, Feb. 27, 2025. From the article:
In another aggressive move on Wednesday to carry out the president’s directive, lawyers for the Trump administration said that it was ending nearly 10,000 U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department contracts and grants.
The pair of administration actions stunned diplomats and aid workers already reeling from mass firings at U.S.A.I.D., which funds food, health, development and democracy programs abroad, and which the Trump administration has systematically dismantled. A former senior U.S.A.I.D. official said the cuts account for about 90 percent of the agency’s work and tens of billions of dollars in spending.
The cuts deal “a catastrophic blow to USAID’s implementing partners and the populations they serve, likely bankrupting many, and shuttering lifesaving and important programs forever,” a group of agency workers and partners said in a fact sheet distributed Wednesday night.
That's one passage from a much longer article.
