We need to talk about Pete Marocco
The Trump Administration is destroying USAID, the leading American agency providing international assistance and humanitarian response. The damage has been immediate and vast. The entire chain has been shut down, from the top. Thousands of staff fired with little warning. Programs shut down virtually overnight. Websites gone dark. Consultants and contractors unpaid. Front-line organizations providing life-saving medicine, food, health clinics, schools, maternity care shut down with no payment. Tens of thousands of local staff, non-profits, volunteers abandoned with nothing but questions and unsigned emails.
By virtue of America’s size, USAID is the biggest international development agency in the world and is especially crticial to the humanitarian system to respond to wars, disasters, droughts, and famine.
But who, specifically, is doing this work to destroy USAID? There’s an answer:
Peter Marocco.
Who is Pete Marocco?
Marocco is the currently head of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the US State Department, which oversees aid programs at both the State Department and USAID. On February 3, he was also named Deputy USAID Administrator, giving him direct control over the agency he wants to destroy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is serving as Acting Administrator of USAID, but is too busy or disinterested to actually lead the agency. So, he has effectively delegated everything to Marocco. And Marocco is ending USAID. Rubio might be intimidated by Marocco, who is known to be a jerk and does not respect lines of authority.
USAID spends close to $40 billion annually, but since Trump was inaugurated in January, most USAID staff have been fired or put on “administrative leave.” Thousands of contracts have been terminated and consultants have been fired. The payments system has been shut down, bills gone unpaid. USAID expenditures have been effectively zero since late January.
It’s no exaggeration to say that poor people in poor countries are dying today because of the Trump aid freeze. For the few staff left at USAID, it has been nightmarish trying to keep aid flowing. One USAID staffer testified that she was unable to keep a program running that helps mothers of newborns suffering severe bleeding. Here’s a partial list of project cancellations with clear, awful consequences: HIV, polio, malaria, maternal care, severely malnourished children.. The 90-day freeze could easily kill more than 100,000 people. Other sources indicate the death toll will be be multiples higher, more likely in the millions of deaths if aid is not restored quickly. One model estimates about 20,000 people with HIV have already died, including about 2000 children.
While there have been other people involved, this is largely the work of Pete Marocco. This death toll puts Pete Marocco in a class of historic mass murders. He is personally responsible for most of what has happened, and much of the death and human misery that will come. For comparison purposes: Slobodan Milošević was brought to a UN war crimes tribunal for a genocide that killed about 30,000 people. Peter Marocco will kill many more people, orders of magnitude more.
USAID provides critical, life-saving aid. Cutting staff and funding to deliver that aid makes Pete Marocco responsible for the consequences. The money is there, the systems in place, the aid was being delivered. The Secretary of State gave his approval to exempt life-saving aid from the funding freeze. And yet, it stopped. This is a huge moral burden of deaths, illness, and misery. None of this was necessary or justified.
Who is Peter Marocco?
Not too much is known about Marocco. He’s careful about public statements and media. Until now, he’s been a minor figure in right-wing circles. He’s an election denier and was part of the January 6 riot in the Capitol building, although he wasn’t charged and it’s not confirmed. His wife worked for the Hungarian embassy and is quite a piece of work. She also worked at USAID before she was pushed out for being horrible and homophobic. Marocco himself seems to favor Hungarian-style autocracy and has traveled to Hungary and made a point to meet with a delegation recently.
In the first Trump Administration he bounced around several jobs, making a mess and pissing off people for asserting authority inappropriately and holding secret meetings with controversial foreign actors. “Marocco left a bitter trail at the Pentagon and in Foggy Bottom, dogged by criticism that he created a toxic work environment by undermining and mistreating career staffers.” (Wikipedia does a decent job of describing). Eventually he landed at USAID’s new Conflict Prevention and Stabilization office (sometimes known as Office of Transition Initiatives).
As far as anyone can tell, he’s a terrible manager, incompetent leader, confused thinker, and a generally over-controlling and abusive boss. The best evidence is a “dissent memo” that staff who worked with him sent to advise senior management that he was screwing up royally. That eventually got him fired — or pushed out — under vague circumstances.
Other evidence of his malignant personality and management are his own declarations which have been filed in litigation against his actions.
The picture that emerges is a manager on a mission to reform or destroy USAID, it’s not clear that he knows or cares about the difference. He presumes to speak for President Trump and the American people.
However, he does not seem to recognize any obligations under Congress or the law. He is impounding funds Congress appropriated and which were authorized. He speaks vaguely about aligning foreign aid with “national interest”, but has not defined this or provided a clear pathway and process for review and reform.
He seems to think that USAID and other aid agencies are pursuing unethical, possibly illegal purposes. In a closed-door meeting with Congress he said USAID is “corrupt” and intimated that he is considering making criminal referrals to the justice department.
He says bizarre things. For example, in the same meeting he claimed that the administration is exploring the question “is foreign aid constitutional.” He made wild claims about PEPFAR and and USAID and fraud.
He seems to think Trump’s preferences should be taken as law, and any deviance is insubordination and criminal. He is deeply suspicious that money is being wasted or fraud committed, which leads him to bizarre, abusive, micro-managing behavior. Although USAID has many oversight, monitoring, and audit processes, he insists on starting anew and imposing onerous, painstaking review and accountability. Previously, at USAID he demanded to sign-off any expense over $10,000 in an office spending $150 million a year.
He is very heavy-handed, treats career staff suspiciously and is obsessed with hierarchical order and compliance. At the same time, his guidance and instruction is vague and contradictory, leaving staff and programs guessing at what he means and how to comply. The stories of USAID staff trying desperately to keep life-saving aid flowing are heart-breaking and Kafka-esque. Secretary Rubio announced that the foreign aid freeze should exempt life-saving aid. But Marocco failed to implement this exemption and only a tiny trickle of funds have flowed for life-saving aid.
The whole pretense of the aid freeze was that Marocco would conduct a review of aid programs, and he pretended there would be a 90-day process. But that was clearly a lie, as he subsequently cancelled 90% of USAID’s contracts, about 10,000 of them, after about one month. There has been no information on what process was used for the review or how determinations were made. Marocco claims each contract was reviewed individually and terminations approved by Secretary Rubio. Very obviously, he didn’t actually review them; it would have been logistically impossible. Secretary Rubio was traveling at the time.
I have no doubt that he hates USAID staff, but did he mean to abandon them in dangerous situations, to impose cruel and disruptive demands on them and their families? Probably. In any case, he clearly doesn’t care and has barely adjusted his course now that the reality is clear. The courts have slowed his roll, but roll he still does.
Defying judges, lying, losing at the Supreme Court
Marocco failed to comply with a judge’s order to pay USAID contractors for for work already completed. The judge repeated the order three times, and Marocco balked. So, finally, the case went to the Supreme Court and Marocco lost, which is a pretty big black eye for the Trump Administration.
He’s also, arguably, insubordinate to Secretary Rubio who insisted that life-saving aid continue. It hasn’t and Marocco cancelled thousands of contracts for that aid and fired hundreds of staff who implement it. He’s not even trying. He has annoyed Congress, including members of the President’s party.
If anyone were paying attention, it might be a good idea to remove this guy from office. He’s generating a lot of bad press and losing precedent-setting cases at the Supreme Court. He’s creating a terrible mess and killing people.
[to be updated with new information as it comes in….]
ENDS//
