This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We continue to look at how the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development are likely to cause enormous human suffering, leading to increased death and disability, accelerated disease spread, political instability and heightened threats to U.S. national security. That’s according to internal USAID memos.
One leaked memo has a chart for different program areas and the expected global case increase over one year if programs are permanently halted. For malaria, an additional 12.5 million to 17.9 million cases, with up to 166,000 additional deaths each year. For tuberculosis, a 28 to 32% increase in estimated incidence globally. For Ebola, worst-case scenario, more than 28,000 cases. Polio, an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year over the next decade. The memo also projects 1 million children will lose treatment for severe acute malnutrition each year. It was written by USAID’s Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health Nicholas Enrich. Over the weekend, Enrich was placed on administrative leave.
For more, we’re joined by Brett Murphy, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at ProPublica, where his new piece on this is headlined “Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths from Closing Agency.” Over the weekend, he also had a piece headlined “The Trump Administration Said These Aid Programs Saved Lives. It Canceled Them Anyway.”
Welcome back, Brett, to Democracy Now! So, just lay out what you found, where these memos come from, how they got circulated, and also the fact that the person who wrote them was laid off. Not to mention a few weeks ago the inspector general at USAID who put out a report was also laid off, or should we say fired?
BRETT MURPHY: Sure. So, most of the agency at this point has been put on administrative leave there. It’s a skeleton staff there. And it’s important to note where, you know, this is all coming from. For the past several weeks, the administration had said it’s conducting this review of all of its programs at USAID. During this review, they effectively paused, halted almost everything that the agency had been funding. During that time, they said there was this waiver — they kept saying there was a waiver for lifesaving programs. This caused confusion around the world, because nobody knew if they qualified; if they did qualify, how to apply. So there was all this confusion, both internally and around the world, about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention a lot of the international staff was told to get back to the United States.
BRETT MURPHY: Exactly. And nobody was able to communicate with the contractors and the aid organizations who are doing this work, so they didn’t know if they could qualify for this waiver. And at the same time, nobody was receiving money. So, for work they had already done, they weren’t getting reimbursed. For new work, they weren’t getting paid. Lots of confusion.
And then, at the agency, this bureau, global health, was trying to put forth programs that they thought qualified for this waiver, and they were making the case for each one of these individual programs, all the ones you just enumerated. Enrich and others were saying that lives depended on these. And this is not low-level staffers. These are the seniormost authorities on global health in the government saying, unequivocally, “We are trying to implement the administration’s own policy. The administration is saying publicly there should be a lifesaving waiver for these programs. Let us do it. We want to apply the waiver.” They were not allowed to apply the waiver. Time and again, they detailed in these memos different instances in which they wanted to conduct a review, put forth the program and then get funding reinstated for those programs, but they weren’t allowed to.
In one of the incidents we reported on, there was a DOGE adviser who wrote to the global health bureau and said, “We heard you guys are conducting a review. You should not be doing that. That’s getting in the way of the terminations. We want to terminate the programs.” Another official, another political appointee at the agency, said the same thing. He said, “We want to be draconian with how we’re approaching these reviews.” They want to err towards termination and not review. This is in stark contrast with what the administration has been saying, which is, “We want to conduct a careful, case-by-case review of each one of these programs, and then, if they don’t align with the Trump administration’s policy, we want to cut the programs.” The evidence has been that they’re doing the opposite, that they’re cutting these en masse instead. That’s what these memos detailed.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I remember when Elon Musk was in the White House in the Oval Office standing next to President Trump, and he said, for example, “Yeah, we cut Ebola, but then we restored it right away.” But that’s not what the experts are saying, the people involved with the programs.
BRETT MURPHY: I talked to a doctor in Uganda who’s doing Ebola contamination. He told me, “We received a termination notice last week telling us to immediately cease all of our programs.” They are one of very few clinics who are doing that work in Uganda. And he said, “We have had to close up shop. Hopefully, the administrative health in Uganda will take it over.” But for them to say that they reinstated Ebola programs is categorically wrong, because we’ve talked to the mission directors, who said that “We cannot do the work, and our work is Ebola.”
AMY GOODMAN: And why this matters? For example, with Ebola, why it matters to the people who are suffering from it there, and why it matters to people in the United States?
BRETT MURPHY: The work they do — and people will remember, I think, some of these terms from the COVID era, like contact tracing, screening at airports. This is the work that they do. They figure out: This is how you contain an outbreak, something as deadly as Ebola, which has something like a 50% fatality rate. Around the country, they contain the spread of a disease like that, so it doesn’t make its way to an airport, so it doesn’t make its way stateside. That’s the type of work that they do. It’s literally lifesaving work.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about tuberculosis.
BRETT MURPHY: Same with TB. TB is a respiratory illness, just like COVID is. And it doesn’t get talked about quite as much as HIV or Ebola, but we’ve been speaking with doctors and longtime aid groups who have been in Africa, who said this is their real concern. If we are cutting TB work, the outbreaks could be enormous, on a scale that they haven’t seen in decades. This is sort of, you know, one of the tent poles of USAID, has been TB containment in Africa, and they’re extremely worried about it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what happened to Nicholas Enrich, who wrote these memos, and how the administration has responded now that this information has gotten out, and they’ve been warned hundreds of thousands of people will die, as President Trump mocks transgender mice, which wasn’t even true — that’s become sort of the symbol of USAID — and also the inspector general before him.
BRETT MURPHY: They’ve erected certain examples like this throughout. They did it before, as you were mentioning, with the condoms in Gaza. Your other guest made the point that the administration has the purview to look at certain programs and decide whether or not they align with the policy. That’s just not what they’ve been doing. It’s just not what’s been happening. They cut everything at once. And now they’re actually in the process of reversing some of those terminations. They seem to be unsure of what they cut. They’ve been soliciting information from their own contract officers from aid organizations, asking if their program got cut. So, they seem to be reversing.
We did another story a couple days ago about — they went after programs inside of the Inspector General’s Office, which USAID does not have control over. The IG’s Office is independent. It has to be. So, just as an example of kind of what has been described as a haphazard and kind of chaotic process, they cut the cellphone service of inspector general officials throughout the agency, including the ones based overseas — Haiti, in Ukraine. For 24 hours, nobody had cellphone service, because they cut the contract with AT&T over an office that they do not have control over.
So, people have been making the case to me for weeks now that this is the opposite of a careful review. And they’ve been saying in court, “This is a careful review. We’re allowed to do a careful review.” Everyone at the agency and everyone who’s had their programs cut says, “Obviously, it’s not a careful review, because they’re making mistakes.” And they’re overturning their own terminations, and they seem unclear of it now. So, this is — they just cut everything at once, and now they’re going backward.
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s very difficult to get back in touch, especially with their own workers, because when they fire them, they cut off their email, and so then they don’t know how to reach them.
BRETT MURPHY: These people on administrative leave across the agency have had their access to the systems completely cut off. So, we’re talking about most of the workforce at this agency, the ones who would be doing the work of, like, helping these programs get back online. They’re not able to work right now. They’re not working. They’re effectively dismissed. So there’s really nobody to help these programs get back online and approve the payments that they need.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about one particular man. As part of the Trump administration’s push to cut U.S. foreign aid, DOGE announced Tuesday it had cut the staff for the Inter-American Foundation from 48 workers to one, the agency’s newly installed head, Trump loyalist Peter Marocco, acting deputy administrator for USAID. Marocco was reportedly part of a closed-door meeting Wednesday with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and told them the administration may bring criminal referrals against workers at USAID over allegations of misuse of foreign assistance. Also Wednesday, staff at the U.S. African Development Foundation reportedly blocked DOGE staffers from entering their office, where Trump is also trying to install Peter Marocco to gut the agency. So, Brett, you have reported on Peter Marocco in a story headlined “Trump Official Destroying USAID Secretly Met with Christian Nationalists Abroad in Defiance of U.S. Policy.” As we begin to wrap up, lay out what you found.
BRETT MURPHY: This was back in 2018, previous Trump administration. Peter Marocco was at the State Department. He had done short stints at multiple agencies — DOD, USAID, Commerce and State. He was over there on a diplomatic mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina, left the reservation without talking to the ambassador, met with Serb separatists inside of Bosnia-Herzegovina, including the president, Milorad Dodik. At the time, Dodik was under U.S. sanctions by the Trump administration for trying to undermine the peace agreements that we very carefully drew up in the ’90s after the genocide —
AMY GOODMAN: At the Dayton Accords.
BRETT MURPHY: At the Dayton Accords, yes. He was — Milorad Dodik had been accused of undermining these. He has said publicly he is anti-American, anti-West, and he’s pro-Russian, and he wants a Serb nationalist state, Christian nationalist state. And this very much undermines U.S. policy. And that’s what got Marocco in hot water back in 2018. He has since been the one behind —
AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t he basically fired at that point?
BRETT MURPHY: He left the agency. We don’t exactly know the circumstances under which he left the State Department. But from there, he went to USAID. He finished the last administration at AID, and he ran into problems there, as well. So, a lot of the people said that his treatment of the agency now is reflective of what he had tried to do back then. He was trying to do reviews all the time, reviews of every single program that he didn’t think aligned with his own version of foreign policy, or what he thought Trump’s version of foreign policy should be. He wanted to cut things. And now he’s cutting things.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Brett Murphy, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at ProPublica. We’ll link to your articles on USAID.
Coming up, we speak to an anthropologist who says the humanitarian-industrial complex should be dismantled, but not by a billionaire-backed administration with no plan beyond abandonment. Back in 20 seconds.
