The Trump Administration is destroying USAID, the leading American agency providing assistance and humanitarian response internationally. By virtue of America’s size, USAID is the biggest international development agency in the world and provides a disproportionate share of humanitarian assistance to respond to wars, disasters, droughts, and famine.
But who, specifically, is doing this work?
Peter Marocco.
Marocco is the currently head of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the US State Department, which oversees aid programs at the State Department and USAID. Apparently, he’s been laying these plans for months, working on the Trump Administration transition. 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, but is too busy to actually lead the agency. He might be intimidated by Marocco, who is known to be a jerk and no 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” and hundreds of contracts and consultants have been fired. The payments system has been shut down, bills gone unpaid.
The effects on the ground were immediate: health clinics closed, medical care terminated, schools closed, food assistance stalled with food sitting warehouses. Thousands of projects are on hold or terminated, hundreds of thousands of people affected. Horrible consequences. One USAID staffer has 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.
It’s no exaggeration to say that poor people in poor countries are dying today because of the Trump aid freeze. The 90-day freeze could easily kill more than 100,000 people. Likely more. For comparison purposes: Slobodan Milošević was brought to a UN war crimes tribunal for a genocide that killed about 30,000 people. Peter Marocco is trying to kill many more people, orders of magnitude more.
Given the size of USAID and the critical, life-saving value of USAID programs, Peter Marocco is now an historically-significant villain. He is personally responsible for hundreds — soon to be thousands — of deaths, illness, and misery. The moral burden that he carries is already large and will only grow over time. None of this was necessary or justified. He could have continued USAID programs and carried out reforms in an orderly manner. But he chose to vandalize and destroy and kill people.
Not too much is known about Marocco and he’s careful about public statements and media. He’s a minor figure among right-wing circles. He’s associated with a few right-wing organizations and seems to favor a kind of Christian nationalisms. 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; Marocco himself seems to favor Hungarian-style autocracy. They are homophobic, conspiracy-minded.
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 (sometime 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. The other evidence is his own declarations that have emerged from 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 thinks that aid is pursuing unethical, possibly illegal purposes. He seems to think Trump’s preferences should be taken as law, and any deviance seen as criminal and subversive. He is deeply suspicious that money is being wasted or fraud committed. Although USAID has many oversight, monitoring, and audit processes, he is insisting 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. 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.
He is prone to rage and vindictive actions. He claims to be doing a 90-day review of aid, but has already cancelled hundreds of contracts and stopped virtually all work; only small streams of work related to emergency assistance has continued although even that has been spotty and poorly supported. The review process is not well defined or explained — although some detail has emerged.
Meanwhile, people are dying and public servants are paralyzed trying to figure out what to do; whether and how to do their jobs.
The courts have been involved as numerous cases have been brought to try to bring the madness under some kind of control.
[to be updated with new information as it comes in….]
