The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump unleashed an angry, unhinged rant on Thursday about the U.S. Agency for International Development. He claimed billions of dollars had been stolen there, and that much of the money has gone to the pro-Democrat media, which he described as a huge scandal. But only a few hours later, CNN posted video of Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly praising USAID in the past, and describing foreign aid as very much in America’s national interests.
All this raises the question: What position will Rubio as secretary of state be put in if Trump and Elon Musk continue their effort to destroy USAID? What will the fallout be for America’s place in the world? And what will the global humanitarian consequences be? Today, we’re talking about all of this with Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior official during the Obama and Biden administrations. Jeremy, thanks so much for coming on.
Jeremy Konyndyk: My pleasure, Greg.
Sargent: On Truth Social, Trump raged about USAID, saying, “Looks like billions of dollars have been stolen at USAID and other agencies, much of it going to the fake news media as a “payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats.” He claimed millions of dollars went to Politico. The whole thing is a ridiculous invention. What’s really going on is many government agencies have paid for many media subscriptions, and this is a fairly common occurrence under all kinds of different administrations. This has nothing whatsoever to do with helping Democrats. But critically, Jeremy, Elon Musk elevated this nonsense. Elon has said Trump has given him permission to shut down USAID. A lot of funding has already been halted. Can you walk us through what the consequences of that have already been in the world?
Konyndyk: Yeah, absolutely. Really, starting there, this is a concerted disinformation campaign driven by Elon Musk with a lot of amplification from the president of the United States. So you have the world’s richest man and the world’s powerful man who for whatever reason have decided to just launch a pretty senseless vendetta against what had always been a behind-the-scenes, under-the-radar aid agency. And that has very real, very damaging consequences both for people across the world and for America’s standing in the world.
One of the things that was disrupted, Science magazine reported yesterday, was an eight-country phase one trial for an HIV vaccine that was about to start. So you can think about how transformative it would be for the world to finally—decades into this HIV pandemic—to have a vaccine. Well, the trials to prove a potential vaccine now will not be happening because of this aid freeze. The number of lives that could be saved if that vaccine were demonstrated to be effective is an incalculable impact, and not just for the world but also for the HIV epidemic here in the U.S. potentially.
Still on the HIV front, the U.S. right now, through our 20-year global HIV initiative called PEPFAR, supports about 20 million people around the world on antiretroviral treatments to keep their virus suppressed, enable them to both live a normal and productive life and not transmit the virus. So a second risk here on the HIV front is if this spending freeze continues, all of that is disrupted right now. We are turning people away from U.S.–funded HIV clinics when they come to get their next allocation of drugs. Your virus can resurge if you are off those drugs for under a month. If this goes on for really even a few more weeks, we start seeing resurgent HIV infections and potentially turn the tide in the wrong direction of the global HIV epidemic.
On the humanitarian front, there’s a famine and a genocide going on in Darfur today, right now, and U.S.–funded health clinics that are providing safe motherhood, that are feeding children, that are treating children rather from malnutrition are on the cusp of shutting down. That’s going to kill a lot of people instantly. If a kid is taken off malnutrition treatment, they die. Full on, they die. There are so many more cases. The USAID works in a hundred countries. Every country you’ve got some story like that.
Sargent: It’s just unbelievable what’s happening. It’s almost impossible to wrap one’s head around it. I want to switch to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, for a sec. CNN, a few hours after Donald Trump erupted on Truth Social, aired a striking segment showing Rubio talking about USAID. Listen to some of the footage that they aired of Rubio praising the agency and foreign aid more generally.
Marco Rubio (audio voiceover): We don’t have to give foreign aid. We do so because it furthers our national interest. That’s why we give foreign aid. Now, obviously there’s a component of foreign aid that that’s humanitarian in scope, and that’s important too... I promise you, it’s a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism, anti-American terrorism if the United States of America was the reason why they’re even alive today.... Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to a balance is lying to you. Foreign aid is less than 1 percent of our budget. That’s just not true.
Sargent: As CNN puts it, Rubio was, for years, a staunch supporter of USAID’s mission while in the U.S. Senate. CNN also found statements from Rubio in which he urged then-President Biden to increase USAID’s budget to counter Chinese Communist Party influence around the world. Jeremy, this has been a bipartisan position for a long time, hasn’t it?
Konyndyk: It absolutely has. So I’m now out of government. I’m the president of an NGO called Refugees International. As it happens, we don’t take U.S. government money, which is why I can have conversations like this one. But I served extensively at senior levels in USAID in multiple roles. I talked to Congress all the time, and I talked to Republicans all the time. And I and many of my colleagues worked really well with Republicans. I traveled with Republican members of Congress to disaster response zones. I would brief them and work with them on the Ebola response. And even though I was and am a Democrat and they were Republicans, there was a shared goal here. It’s good for everybody if we defeat Ebola. It’s good for everybody if we can get people vaccinated against Covid.
So despite the partisan differences on other things, there was always a lot of common cause around the mission of USAID. One of the things I find so frustrating now, and really disheartening and disappointing, is I know some of these members and I know their staff. They know me, and they know a lot of people like me. And they know the reality of what USAID is, and they know it’s nothing like what Elon Musk is describing. And a few of them have acknowledged that, but very, very few.
Sargent: It’s really striking. It shows what Trump has done to this party with their eager complicity. Rubio has now temporarily been put in charge of USAID, and he recently said the mission isn’t to end it. Jeremy, we don’t know precisely what Trump and Musk will do with USAID, but it seems to me that on the most basic level, they want to fundamentally wreck its core function. Is that going to be compatible with Rubio’s ultimate stance, do you think? What position does that put Rubio in, and how badly does it complicate his ability to function as secretary of state?
Konyndyk: You have to look at their actions more than their words at this point. When I was a young person, and it’d be in gym class learning basketball or soccer or something, the gym coach would say, If you’re guarding your man, you don’t watch where his shoulders are going, you watch where his hips are going. That’s where you know where he’s going. So I think what we’re seeing from Rubio are the head fakes. Whether he means those as head fakes or not, I don’t know. But we’ve got to watch where their hips are going, and that is what’s happening out of the state budget office, which is really driving this, along with Elon.
What they’re doing is they are trying to close all of the overseas missions of USAID, pull back all of the staff from all of those missions, fire all of the staff from USAID in Washington. Just today, what’s started coming out through some of the channels that I’m part of is, of the about 4,000 U.S. direct hire employees and then thousands more national employees of the different missions overseas, they plan to retain not quite 300 people. Just a fraction of a fraction of the workforce of USAID—and fire all the contractors who were probably half the workforce as well.
That’s a total destruction of USAID and its mission. It’s totally incompatible with what Secretary Rubio is talking about. It’s totally incompatible with the budget level of about $45 billion of resources that USAID manages. You can’t manage that with fewer than 300 people. So what they are doing rather than what they are saying is destroying the workforce, destroying the partners that USAID works through, and then just basically making it impossible to spend the budget that they have as a way of cutting the budget. They’ve got Rubio over here saying, No, we’re treating the patient, while behind the scenes, they’re murdering the patient.
Sargent: How can Rubio function as a secretary of state in an environment like this? It seems to me that at some point, this comes to a head, doesn’t it? In other words, Rubio can’t conceivably want anything like the outcome you’re describing here, can he?
Konyndyk: Well, I sure hope not. I was frankly optimistic when he was named secretary because he had always been supportive of these things. I don’t think he’s driving this; I think he’s along for the ride here. But clearly, this hugely disempowers him as secretary. One of the really powerful tools that a secretary has is the example of American generosity and partnership and solidarity with other countries.
Something that I did when I ran disaster response at USAID was, after a global earthquake somewhere, I was the guy who would deploy the search and rescue teams. You’ve probably seen these on the news from time to time. Fairfax County Search and Rescue would get on a military plane, and we would fly them over to Nepal or to Haiti or wherever, and they would start pulling people out of the rubble. And it is an amazing story, and an amazing example of American partnership and leadership. That will not happen if there’s an earthquake tomorrow. We will not be there. All the people who did that are fired, or being fired, and the contracts with those search and rescue teams are being canceled. It’s a microcosm of the larger absence and retreat of American leadership in the world.
Sargent: USAID has been criticized for wasteful spending before, we should acknowledge, but it’s almost a sideshow because the agency is all about humanitarian assistance. In 2023, the budget was $2 billion for food aid. It also, as you said earlier, delivers all these treatments for diseases around the world. But Musk has said the agency has to die. He claims he’s interested in cutting wasteful spending, but he wants to destroy that humanitarian role. What would be the impact globally long-term, if you were to succeed at that? How bad would it get?
Konyndyk: Well, a few things. Obviously, a huge amount of human damage of resurgent HIV, of people starving in conflict zones, of children who will not learn to read, of human rights activists who will be unprotected, unarmed, and potentially targeted by their governments and so on. A million examples of that. At a strategic level, it also just withdraws America from a key way that we show up in the world and that we differentiate ourselves from some of our geostrategic rivals.
When I was leading Global Covid Response, we were in a vaccine diplomacy battle with China. China would go to countries and say, Well, OK, you can have our vaccines, but we’re going to charge you a hell of a lot of money for them. And we’re going to make political concessions: You can’t recognize Taiwan and other things, you’re to have to give us economic concessions for this. They really use that to extract a lot of strong-arm concessions out of countries. We were able to then come in and say, Well, hey, we have better vaccines. We’re going to give them to you for free because we see this as a shared fight against the pandemic. Countries would take that deal. And it both strengthened our relationships with those countries and also blocked out China from pursuing this very extractive foreign policy that they had. So we lose the ability to do those kinds of things.
It also gets to another point: An extractive transactional approach to foreign aid actually reduces or removes one of our comparative advantages vis-a-vis China in that strategic competition, because that’s a way we differentiate ourselves as a partner.
Sargent: That actually gets at what the real core difference is between Rubio on one hand, and Trump and Musk on the other. Trump and Musk have something different in mind, especially Musk, I think. We’re already seeing that strongmen, dictators, and authoritarian rulers around the world are cheering Musk’s attack on USAID. Leaders in Russia, Hungary, and El Salvador are very happy because USAID also funds pro-democracy, pro–human rights organizations. But the thing is, Jeremy, Musk and Trump are aligned with those dictators and authoritarians. They share the same vision for the future global order. Can you talk about what that global vision really is? What it is that Musk, Trump, and those dictators want for the world? And why ending or badly hobbling USAID would help achieve that order, that new order?
Konyndyk: Yes. What’s been really striking....so who’s cheerleading this since Musk started doing it? Russia has been cheerleading it. Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia, still very close to Putin, no friend of the U.S., is ecstatic, absolutely ecstatic over this. Iran has been putting out public comments saying this is a great idea, finally, USAID gets called out for what it is. To any Republican on the Hill who is keeping their mouth closed about this, that should be a real tell. And they should take a beat, and they should think about what that means about what Elon is about to do to American power and American influence in the world if USAID goes down.
Russia’s agenda in the world, Iran’s agenda in the world...whatever you think about our relationships with those countries, they’re certainly not, in recent years, pursuing a global vision that’s aligned with freedom, that’s aligned with human rights, and aligned with American strategic interests.
Sargent: Can you talk about what that global order is that Musk, Trump and the authoritarians want? What does it look like? What does that future world look like and how would badly hobbling USAID help them achieve that?
Konyndyk: It’s back to a world that is about competition and dominance rather than zero-sum competition and dominance, rather than positive-sum partnership. And if American foreign policy and American development policy, particularly foreign aid policy, have been about anything since John F. Kennedy launched USAID in the early 1960s, it’s about this idea that we help ourselves by helping others. We do good in the world by helping others. That is both a direct material interest and strategic interest and value for us. Also, there is a notion that there is an alignment between our values and our interests when it comes to foreign aid. What we are seeing from Musk and Trump explodes that alignment. It’s this idea that foreign aid is fundamentally transactional and extractive. And frankly, that makes us look a lot more like China. For countries where we’re trying to differentiate ourselves in that global competition, we actually lose a major advantage.
Sargent: Musk and Trump want a world in which dominance is what prevails, where there aren’t really any rules, where there isn’t a sense that soft power is good. Can you talk about what this vision is?
Konyndyk: It is not at all based on values. It is not at all based on rights. Frankly, it’s a vision of the world in which conflict becomes much more likely because you have just hard-edged competition and hard power dynamics that define relationships between countries. It loses a critical lesson that we learned after the two world wars in the first half of the last century; it sounds a lot more like the way countries related to each other before the First World War.
And it took two world wars for the world to get that out of its system and then begin building institutions like the United Nations and like the European Union. Which they’re deeply imperfect, don’t get me wrong. I could talk your ear off about all my problems with the U.N., but they’ve done a good job of keeping us out of world wars. We haven’t had a world war in Europe since the EU was created. That’s potentially the world we start heading back to if this attitude takes off.
Sargent: Jeremy, just to wrap up, is the fundamental thing that Musk and Trump want for the basis for America standing in the world to be one rooted in dominance and transaction as opposed to ostensible adherence to rules and international law? Isn’t that what they want? And how does Rubio function in a universe where that’s the dominant ideology in Washington?
Konyndyk: That’s certainly what I think they’re signaling. You can see that with the fact that, out of the gate, Trump has spent a lot more time hectoring U.S. allies and partners than he has U.S. adversaries. He doesn’t understand positive-sum partnerships. He only understands zero-sum dominance. So if Canada doesn’t agree with us on something, we have to dominate. If Mexico doesn’t, if Panama doesn’t. It becomes its dominance contest.
Rubio is going to have a very tough job executing that foreign policy because other countries don’t want to operate that way. And I think Trump is going to undercut him at every turn. Diplomacy is a really delicate process. And when every move he makes and every commitment he makes risks being undercut by the next Trump tweet or the next Trump press conference, it’s going to be a struggle for Secretary Rubio to be effective.
Sargent: Sure looks that way. I really wonder how long he’s going to last. Jeremy, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. We really appreciate it.
Konyndyk: My pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.