My father grew up in Berlin during World War II — picture shelling, scarcity, chaos, terror, death. The American boss of one of my grandmother’s friends — a complete stranger to my father and grandmother — used to send them care packages from Chicago during the war. Who knows why.
Sometimes, these packages contained luxuries like chocolate for my 7-year-old father and stockings for my grandmother. Other times, they contained cooking lard, which my father said kept his mother and him alive. Dad never forgot this man, whom he met after my father and grandmother settled in Chicago. I remember being 4 or 5 years old and accompanying my father to visit him in a nursing home. Dad wanted to pay his respects to the man whose generosity had saved him and my grandmother from starvation.
Until late January 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development used to provide this same kind of lifesaving aid and development assistance in about 130 countries. Working through a vast network of implementing partners, subcontractors, and grantees, it connected babies to emergency feeding in Sudan; it built treatment centers and trained health workers to fight tuberculosis in Ethiopia; it supported women to open microbusinesses in the Dominican Republic; and it helped rural communities access clean water in Ecuador.
Doing this work for six decades has built the kind of trust and goodwill necessary to conduct medical research and experimentation in the fields of HIV, cancer, malaria, cholera, and malnutrition treatment worldwide.
Many of USAID’s activities foster resiliency, not dependency. Development assistance includes activities to advance democracy-building and human rights, which make developing countries such as Moldova, Armenia and Bosnia attractive to private sector investment. Currently, 11 out of the United States’ top 15 trading partners used to be recipients of U.S. foreign assistance. These trading partners, like South Korea, in turn partner with USAID to provide humanitarian and development assistance in other countries pivotal to the U.S.’s geostrategic interests. But a slew of executive orders canceling contracts, imposing a freeze on foreign aid, and furloughing thousands of USAID contractors and direct hires eviscerated all that hard-earned trust and goodwill.
Until February, I was a USAID institutional support contractor, hired as the strategic communications adviser to the Democracy Delivers initiative, set up by former USAID Administrator Samantha Power. I had been so damn lucky to get my job. It took four rounds of interviews over three months and another three months waiting for a security clearance for me to land my dream role. My colleagues had several years of experience in government, the foreign service, the military, and/or campaign politics. Everyone had advanced degrees, mostly in international relations or regional studies, from elite universities and spoke multiple languages. I felt like the street mutt in a family of pedigree show dogs — a former actor/waiter/teacher/writer/humanitarian aid volunteer with a master’s in creative writing, not international relations. Certainly not a Ph.D.
In his book “Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC,” theologian Fred Buechner posits that we find our true vocation where our deep gladness meets the world’s great need. I am grateful that I have found my true vocation in mission-driven organizations — first in education in conflict/post-conflict zones, and later for humanitarian aid organizations — for close to 20 years. Hearing and reading maligning of USAID is a sucker punch. I won’t rehash facts versus fiction because research by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shows countering disinformation with fact-checking seldom has the desired effect.
Instead, I want to tell you what the last two months have been like for me and probably for a lot of folks who work for USAID. During the weeks between the 2024 president election and Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, a sense of foreboding cast a long, dark shadow over the agency. We speculated whether remote work would continue, and several of my teammates suggested I move to D.C. so I could remain employed, but I didn’t trust the new administration not to fire me for my political views. Attending open office hours held by senior leadership, I wondered what colleagues’ questions such as, “The President has immunity, but that immunity does not extend to us. What happens if we are asked to do something illegal?” pertained to. We waited to see who would be named the new USAID administrator as Trump’s transition team descended on Washington, not recognizing an early warning sign. Why name a new administrator when there was no intention of keeping USAID intact?
Inauguration Day set the tone for the new administration: punitive and devoid of empathy. Eliminating pathways for legal migration at the southern border made me think of my late father. He and my grandmother had immigrated to the U.S. after WWII on board the USAT General Henry Taylor, a military transport ship, with support from the International Refugee Organization, a precursor to today’s United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I used to work for organizations providing support to migrants and asylum-seekers at the U.S.–Mexico and the Mexico–Guatemala borders. Closing the CBP One app put already vulnerable people at more risk for trafficking, sexual assault and extortion.
By early evening on Inauguration Day, Trump had rescinded remote work. No one on my team knew if this applied to contractors or only direct hires. I would turn 58 in a few weeks, and I didn’t have enough money saved to retire, nor did I want to. What if I couldn’t find a job? I didn’t want to dismantle my life in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but I changed my yearly lease to a monthly one just in case.
An hour or so later came the hiring freeze, and we learned that the Department of Government Efficiency would submit a plan to reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce within 90 days. My skin felt like a million ants were crawling on the underside of it. I called my best friend on the Democracy Delivers team, and we speculated how many weeks of employment we had left as DOGE conducted its evaluations of programs. We assumed that USAID programming would continue through the evaluation process. How naïve we were.
By the blue light of my computer screen, I read about another executive order freezing foreign aid. A carousel of students’ faces from Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine spun in my mind. USAID directly or indirectly funded gender equality, religious tolerance, and English-language education projects in Iraq. When Israel allowed aid caravans into Gaza, USAID paid for food, medicine, water and hygiene products. It helped rebuild Ukraine’s power grid every time Russia’s drones bombed it. Millions of people were going to suffer a lot more than they already were because of an election they couldn’t vote in.
On Tuesday, Jan. 21, I worked on a positioning paper justifying the necessity of the Democracy Delivers initiative so the new administration wouldn’t get rid of it. At that point, I didn’t realize the president was determined to gut the agency and kill almost all of its programming. I reframed Democracy Delivers as a tool to further “America First” rhetoric, rather than an approach to prioritize democratizing countries for development assistance.
Across the agency, other communications practitioners were doing the same for their projects. On Wednesday, an email urging me to report colleagues disguising diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or face disciplinary actions plopped in my inbox. I had been editing the Democracy Delivers webpages to remove words like “inclusive” and “sustainable” and replacing them with “market-led” and “self-reliant.”
On Friday, the Treasury froze congressionally approved payments to USAID. By 5 p.m. D.C. time, thousands of contractors including me received a stop-work order. I called my cousin who works for a subcontractor of the National Institutes of Health to see if she had received one, too.
“I just yelled at my aging, cancer-surviving mother,” she said. “I am so mad. I don’t understand how she voted for Trump. Where does she think her cancer treatments come from?”
USAID funds the clinical trials and research that lead to new treatments. Trials and research had been put on hold, possibly obliterating the usefulness of incomplete data. In the near future, someone just like me would probably lose someone just like my aunt because the richest man in the world spent $260 million to get Donald Trump elected.
The following Monday, I was furloughed. Numb, I completed the workday, ran to my pharmacy to refill prescriptions, ordered extra sets of contacts, and made an appointment to get my teeth cleaned before my health insurance expired. I functioned on autopilot for two days before an overwhelming sadness kicked in.
My role as the strategic communications adviser had been newly created, so there had been no blue print on how to do it. In those first 90 days of probation, there were more than a few times of curling over my desk with a burning stomach. The learning curve was steep — how USAID worked, navigating the politics between the State Department and USAID, getting past gatekeepers so I could do my job, learning the geopolitics of each of the 10 countries in my portfolio, and figuring out how to be additive to the partner governments without having a pool of resources from which to implement projects. I threw a lot of spaghetti against the wall, but after 10 months of hard work, I finally felt confident in my role, and now it was over.
On Feb. 26, the U.S. government ended nearly 10,000 USAID and State Department contracts and grants — about 90% of the agency’s work. The gutting of USAID has destroyed the entire development sector. I know more people who are out of work now than during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are countless implementing partners, subcontractors, nonprofits, and grantees here and abroad who rely on USAID for sizable chunks of their operating budgets. One of my former employers lost 40% of its operating budget for 2025. Other organizations have already spent congressionally approved money obligated to them, and now Trump is refusing to pay them for past work and is terminating contracts.
Like Humpty Dumpty, the development sector will not be easy to put back together again. Many development organizations won’t financially survive; institutional knowledge will be lost as people change careers; and everyone will have less trust in the U.S. government to keep its promises.
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Learning English at night school, earning a degree from Northwestern University, and volunteering throughout his life, my father embodied the self-reliance, personal determination, and commitment to service underpinning the American cultural character. Because USAID is the agency that unites our humanitarian values and our national interests, it exemplifies our American identity. After WWII and until Trump took office in 2016, every U.S. president used his inaugural address to champion foreign aid because it reflected our ideals of decency and generosity.
By eviscerating USAID, Trump and Elon Musk are redefining what it means to be American. Musk thinks empathy is ruining Western civilization. We need to ask ourselves if we want to be seen as small-hearted or generous. Do we want to be known as a nation that cares about those in need? A nation that does the right thing because it is the right thing? Or do we want to be known as a transactional country, willing to betray our long-standing allies, inflict intense suffering on the world’s most vulnerable, and embrace those who trample human rights? Who are we as Americans?
Having worked in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine, Alex Poppe writes about fierce and funny women rebuilding their lives in the wake of violence. She is the award-winning author of four works of literary fiction. Her newest book, “Breakfast Wine,” a memoir-in-essay about her near 10 years in Iraq, will be published by Apprentice House Press on June 10.
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