Panelists join to discuss the takedown of USAID
Elon Musk is targeting federal agencies, slashing workforces, and crippling programs that support millions of people around the world. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic join to discuss how Musk and President Donald Trump are carrying out plans to purge thousands of employees from the federal government.
This week the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. “USAID has the thought leadership, the technical ability, to run aid programs at a large scale that nobody else has,” Anne Applebaum said last night. Removing the agency “means probably the collapse of food-aid programs across Africa, probably the collapse of aid to help refugees. USAID runs vaccination programs for children all over the world; it will mean children will not get polio vaccines.”
The takedown of USAID may also have an effect on the ongoing war in Ukraine, Applebaum explained. The agency has a role in restarting the Ukrainian energy grid, as well as in helping provide seeds and technology to Ukrainian farmers. “USAID thinks not only in terms of humanitarian aid, it also thinks more broadly about economics,” she continued. “Ukraine plays a big role in world food production; they want Ukrainian farmers to be back working.”
With Musk leading the takedown of USAID, “it’s a test case for ‘Can agencies just be abolished without Congress having any say?’ but it’s also a test case in cruelty,” Applebaum said. “Are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just on the president’s whim?”
Meanwhile, pushback among Democrats has been limited. “Democratic strategists are warning [the party] not to make this their issue because Democrats have to be saying ‘We’re making your lives better, voters,’” Michael Scherer said last night. “If they’re seen as the party of defending a bureaucracy both [that] people don’t know about [and] that helps people very far away, they’re way off their message of eggs and butter.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Eugene Daniels, the chief Playbook and White House correspondent for Politico; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; and Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Watch the full episode here.
