In February, the Trump administration announced cuts to more than 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance around the world. In July, the agency’s remaining programs were brought under the control of the State Department. Thousands of USAID staff and contractors working in the US and around the world have been fired or laid off, including Portlander Leah Petit. A global health professional for nearly 20 years, Petit was a senior program advisor at USAID’s Office of HIV/AIDS when she lost her job in late January. Her projects focused on strengthening local health systems in Africa and Asia to sustain long-term HIV prevention, monitoring and treatment efforts.
In August, Petit embarked on a new career when she launched “Global Development Interrupted,” a podcast she hosts and produces featuring former USAID workers who help dispel misconceptions about the agency’s work overseas and how it has benefited Americans here. Established nearly 65 years ago, USAID has delivered lifesaving humanitarian assistance and medicines, mobilized to halt the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola, expanded access to clean drinking water and sanitation, along with countless other relief and development programs. Petit joins us to share more details about her podcast and what’s at stake when the US reverses its leadership on international aid, including the millions of lives that are expected to be lost with the dismantling of USAID.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In February, the Trump administration announced cuts to more than 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance around the world. Thousands of USAID staff and contractors have been fired or laid off, including Portlander Leah Petit. She’s worked on global health initiatives for nearly 20 years and was doing work for USAID’s Office of HIV/AIDS when her contract was abruptly canceled in late January.
A few months ago, Petit started a new podcast. It’s called “Global Development Interrupted.” It features other former USAID workers who talk about the work they did overseas and what it means that that work has been canceled. Petit joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Leah Petit: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Miller: You ask your guests to tell you about their personal journeys and upbringings that led them to careers in international aid, so I thought I would turn the tables. What’s yours? How did you end up doing this work?
Petit: Well, it’s always difficult when you have to answer your own questions.
Miller: Yeah, I would never do it. [Laughter]
Petit: But I have been thinking about this. The journey for me: I grew up in Eugene, Oregon. Both of my parents were teachers, and I always grew up being told that the community that you create is what keeps you strong, resilient, safe and stable. And when I started thinking about “OK, what do I want to do in a career?” I started looking at health, specifically in international development, because I realized health in particular was such an underpinning into how people move, work, survive in the world.
So I thought “well, I want to do something in international development, I want to do health.” And so I went into the Peace Corps. And that’s where I learned that, yes, this is exactly where I should be. Because there is so much that I have been taught that I can help bring to other places, in strong partnership, to help them become resilient, strong communities that will, in the long term, affect my community in the United States.
Miller: Zooming way forward to the January and February of this year, you’ve pointed out that you and your colleagues didn’t just lose your jobs, you were vilified. Elon Musk said that you worked for a criminal organization. What has it been like emotionally to deal with that, not just the loss of the job, but being told very publicly that you were evil, in a sense?
Petit: It’s traumatic. I mean, I worked with incredibly brilliant, creative, wonderful human beings that woke up every day thinking about, how am I going to represent the United States? How am I going to create a better, safer, stable, healthier world for Americans and for the United States? And I’m being told that that was villainous, that we were evil people. It traumatized the workforce. People are very upset about it. And that’s one of the reasons why I started the podcast.
Miller: Do you think that that messaging was successful? Have you heard from people who believed what Elon Musk said?
Petit: Oh, it was very successful. When it first started, I heard from colleagues who had people on Facebook that they knew from high school message them and say, “we’re very glad you lost your job.” It did work. And I think it also worked in part because people don’t know what the United States Agency for International Development is, or what it did. So we were an easy target, and I think also a test case for how the administration wanted to start taking apart other institutions within the government.
Miller: First go after something the money is largely spent overseas, and if that works, then you can focus more on domestic spending?
Petit: Yeah, without thinking about the long-term consequences. What I’m seeing is a lot of short-term decisions without thinking about, what are the outcomes in the long term?
Miller: I want to play an excerpt from one of your episodes. We’re going to hear Cathy Nguyen, who worked on HIV/AIDS and other programs. Let’s have a listen to part of what she said.
Cathy Nguyen [recording]: Secretary Rubio said that nobody is dying because of cuts in USAID, but we already know that people literally are dying. That’s a lie, and we have direct stories about that. So I think about that because those stories, it’s just a handful of people. But USAID in particular served more than a million people in different capacities in a variety of diseases, things that are as big as HIV, and diseases that are as common as malaria and diarrhea. Diarrhea is the biggest killer of children. So I don’t know how they’re surviving.
Miller: How do you think about the global effects of the end of this work? It’s a huge question, but you’ve been talking to a lot of people who had been doing this work and doing it no longer, at least no longer through this federal agency. What are the effects of that loss?
Petit: I mean, just pick an issue.
Miller: Let’s stick with HIV/AIDS, as an example.
Petit: There was a recent study done by The Lancet that shows that by 2030, because of the dismantling of USAID, we’re going to see a loss of 14 million lives and 4.6 million lives will be children. And that’s just with the dismantling of USAID. So there’s a consequence, right? That’s a huge loss of life.
There’s also a loss of investment in those countries. USAID has been around since 1961. We invested heavily in these different countries and it has paid off. An example that Cathy also talks about in her interview is the Ebola crisis of 2014. That reached our borders, Ebola came to Texas. And immediately, USAID put in a lot of investment in those different countries into the workforce, into the surveillance systems, into the health systems, governance systems, so that people were trained so that when Ebola happened again – and it did in 2024 – it wouldn’t reach our borders. That global panic that we saw in 2014 around Ebola stopped because we invested in systems to ensure that it wouldn’t come back to us.
Miller: You’re getting to another piece here which is important. The arguments in favor of dismantling USAID, it wasn’t only pure vilification. There was also the line from the administration that broadly, the work done by people like you and USAID staff, it didn’t fit squarely in U.S. interests. It was not America First. What’s your response to that?
Petit: Well, I think that’s a lie. When you look at the mission statement about USAID, it is to work in partnership to end extreme poverty and to promote democracies across the world, while pursuing U.S. security and prosperity. It was built on the idea of how can we create a more stable, healthy, happier place in the world where United States citizens will thrive?
And I think about my last interview with Jeremy Williammee, who was the director of governance and democracy in El Salvador. And he talked a lot about the programs that they were putting in place around migration. Yes, we can take people, we can deport them and we can be incredibly cruel about it. But we can also look at it as a complex issue. And so, for example, in El Salvador, he talks about how they have one of the worst workforce opportunities for their populations. Part of the USAID programming was, how do we create communities that are safe, stable and economically prosperous so people stay in their community?
They also looked at programs for short-term, temporary visas. If people are going to go to the United States, well, let’s think about why they’re doing it? Usually it’s the economic pull. So let’s create the short-term, temporary visas and ensure that they go and they fill a work need that is needed, usually by small or mid-sized U.S. organizations, so that they can expand their business for a short period of time. Because what they also discovered was that people want to return home. But often, it is such a treacherous journey from their country to the United States that they don’t want to do that risk more than once. So how can we fit that need? We fit that need. We created this temporary visa work program.
Miller: I’ve heard that at this point it’s not just the U.S. that’s retreating from the kind of work that you and many others did, that other countries now are following suit, following the American lead. Have you seen that? Is there a wider turn away from this kind of international aid and development that’s not about sort of quid pro quo resource extraction or business deals?
Petit: One of the things that I think foreign assistance gets a bad rap for is that we just put in a bunch of money and we don’t think about the long term, what’s going to happen in those countries. And what I was doing, before I was fired, was I was working on sustainability. We all knew that, specifically for PEPFAR, funding was going to end. It was brought in because of a crisis. So now, how are we going to leave in a way that set countries up for success? That was my entire focus – how do I work with local organizations, local governments, to ensure there were systems in place that people would be receiving their treatment, that we’d be doing prevention programs, ensuring that people were staying alive, while that funding started to be pulled away? But instead, we saw just immediate redaction – and people died.
Miller: That’s because of the U.S. pullout. But I guess I’m wondering if you’re going to see more, if you’re already seeing more “foreign aid,” along the sort of the Chinese model … “We’ll come to your country, we’ll help you build roads, but we expect a piece of the action.”
Petit: So that was already happening with them. What we did was we ceded the space, so they’ll probably get to do more of that. And when that happens too, that usually creates a dependency on those countries. Because now a lot of the GDP – for example, in Angola, 40% of their GDP is focused on just repaying back a lot of the loans that are put in place. So it’s only going to make it worse for many of those countries being able to invest in their own systems.
Miller: I want to listen to another part from one of the interviews you’ve done. One of the points that’s come up in the interviews is that a lot of this work is not done by Americans, it’s your partners in those countries themselves. This is Lauren Murphy who worked with children orphaned by HIV and AIDS.
Lauren Murphy [recording]: We hired tens of thousands of what we refer to as FSN, foreign service nationals, so folks from the country that understand the country way better than I ever could. And working for the U.S. government in some countries really was a risk for them. The people that I worked with in Africa, they had built their careers providing services with USAID. And now, they are all out of work. I just feel like they dedicated their lives to this work and then we betrayed them. It’s this deep pain and this deep shame that I have every day, thinking about our FSNs and our implementing partners that we worked with.
Miller: Can you describe the networks that you helped build in your work?
Petit: Sure. So with foreign service nationals specifically, those are people that worked in the USAID missions in each of those countries. You wouldn’t come to Portland and just hire someone somewhere and say, “OK, design a program that’s going to be specific for residents of Portland.” We hired people from those countries that understood the language, understood cultural nuances, understood the government so that they could create programs and strategies that would be the most effective for the communities in which we wanted to work. So what Lauren is talking about there is our USAID colleagues that were citizens of that country, that we then abandoned by the loss of that job.
And the consequences of that vary for each of the countries which USAID was in. For some of those foreign service nationals, it puts them at greater risk. Now, they might be blacklisted because they worked for USAID. There aren’t the safety nets that we still have in this country that those individuals don’t have. So they go into immediate bankruptcy and they have a loss of their income to a level that we don’t see here in the United States.
But I think the other important part of this is that foreign service nationals that worked for USAID, they also become leaders in their country. A lot of them go into government. So we were also building talent, investing in talent for these countries to become stronger, stable, democratic places.
Miller: Let’s say that the next president is more interested in the work that USAID did. How much of the human and/or even just logistical or physical networks that have been dismantled can be rebuilt?
Petit: This is the big question and it comes across in every single episode – the dismantling of trust, the dismantling of the partnerships at every level when we pulled out with USAID funding. So at this point, people are reorganizing and rethinking, how do we ensure that this doesn’t happen again? And that is a conversation that is not being had with the U.S. government.
Miller: How do we futureproof ourselves, make it so we don’t have to even worry about the U.S. anymore because we don’t want to be burned twice? So let’s figure out our future that doesn’t involve the U.S.?
Petit: Exactly. How do we not get burned by the United States government again? Those conversations are being had and we’re not at the table, which puts us at an extreme loss. So if another administration were to come in and start thinking about how we would even want to rebuild, it’s a very difficult one to have, because the Trump administration has decimated the trust that so many individuals have with the American government.
And it was always tenuous. I think often about an experience I had in Cameroon as a Peace Corps volunteer. I was there for two years and I went to this bank, and there was a bank teller there that was always nice and courteous to me. And then in 2008, Barack Obama won the election. And he turned to me when I went in and he said, “I now like you, because we see change, we see hope in America, and I am interested, and I don’t think that you’re going to be negative or hurt my country.” And I didn’t know anything about how that man felt about me as an American under the Bush administration and as a white person, until Barack Obama came along, and he said, “now I have a different point of view of you.”
That was in the good times. So now think about the Trump administration coming in, cutting off aid. The anger that must be felt across the globe where they are seeing their colleagues, their families, their friends dying because they can’t receive food, can’t receive medication, can’t receive basic needs that was once there – that’s going to last for decades.
Miller: Leah, thanks very much.
Petit: Thank you.
Miller: Leah Petit is the host of the “Global Development Interrupted” podcast. She started that after her work as a contractor working directly with USAID was abruptly cancelled in January.
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