By 2026, the agency was a shell of its former self. Most of its contracts were terminated and thousands of employees fired as the administration moved to wind down the agency's operations. A recent study published in The Lancet medical journal predicts that the USAID cuts, in concert with reductions from other western nations, could result in the deaths of 9.4 million people around the world by 2030 and increase the spread of malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis.
Step one: praise the boss, effusively, as a hero. (A sample post from Rubio's X account: "Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before.") Step two: explain that whatever unprecedented thing the President has just done-capturing the head of state of another country in the middle of the night, promising to take control of Greenland -is, in fact, entirely normal.
Elon Musk, a billionaire who decimated the United States federal workforce using the Department of Government Efficiency, is not remembered fondly by the most powerful woman in Washington: Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and the gatekeeper to President Donald Trump. In several on-the-record interviews with Vanity Fair's Chris Whipple conducted over the past year, Wiles, who had corralled the notoriously backstabby Trump political operation into coherence and discipline, described Musk as a "complete solo actor"
Earlier this year, Donald Trump appointed a 28-year-old Doge alumnus, Jeremy Lewin, to oversee his administration's approach to global aid. Lewin's primary task has been to gut the US's aid funding. In an interview with the New York Times, Lewin argued that the traditional approach, which he termed the global humanitarian complex, didn't help poor countries progress beyond aid, instead keeping them dependent. The system, he continued, has demonstrably failed.
