Current Events/Politics
Date Published: September 26, 2025
Publisher: MindStir Media
Inside USAID is an insider's view of some of the sillier aspects of government bureaucracy, revealing the adventurous, often risky life of diplomatic staff posted in third-world countries as well as some of the waste in the system. It also takes readers through some fascinating and dangerous events in the author's own twenty-seven-year career with USAID, peeling the curtain on nearly three decades of diplomatic service across seven countries, sharing war-zone experiences, absurd government acronyms, failed aid attempts, and moments of genuine impact.
The stories balance critical reflection with a deep appreciation for the ideals behind U.S. foreign aid. The book is both a tribute to the unsung heroes of development work and a critique of the system's inefficiencies, political intrusions, and sudden dismantling. It contextualizes the countries historically, politically, and economically, off ering readers a nuanced understanding of how aid shapes (and sometimes fails) entire nations. The book also is both a eulogy and a call to action for rebuilding what the author sees as one of the U.S.'s most effective foreign policy tools.
Witty, wise, and often sobering, Inside USAID is a must-read for policymakers, development professionals, historians, and anyone who wants to understand the real stories behind America's global influence through foreign aid.
CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS (OR WAS) USAID?
Before getting to my own stories, here’s
a short description of USAID and a bit of commentary about foreign aid
generally.
Examples of US foreign aid can be found
that predate the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe following World War II, but
they are few and far between. Congress appropriated $50,000 to help survivors
of the earthquake that destroyed Caracas, Venezuela, in 1812. After World War
I, the US provided $387 million to the Committee for Relief in Belgium to help
feed the hungry. Before he was president, Herbert Hoover, as the head of the
American Relief Administration, led a large relief effort to address famine in Soviet
Russia from 1921 to 1923. There were some others, but the modern version of our
foreign aid program, most of which has gone through USAID, dates from a 1961
Executive Order by President Kennedy and the Foreign Assistance Act enacted the
same year.
There was never a consensus about how to
say the Agency’s name. Some pronounce each letter—you ess ay eye dee—while
others say yoose aid, accent on the yoose. Earlier it had been called simply
“AID,” a clever acronym that officially meant, not “aid” in the sense of
assistance, but rather “Agency for International Development.” They could have
said “for economic development,” which would have been more accurate and
understandable, but then the acronym would not have been a cute pun.
A word about the many other acronyms
used throughout the foreign aid world: These show, in small part, the great
variety of targets USAID was asked to deal with, for which we often went to
great effort to develop meaningful project names. Some examples:
• SUPER (Support for Uganda Primary
Education Reform)
• PEACE (Programming Effectively Against
Conflict and Extremism)
• ASPIRE (Achieving Sustainable
Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship)
• BRIDGE (Building Research and
Innovation for Development, Generating Evidence)
To lighten the bureaucratic grind, I
once half-jokingly suggested one for a project I still seriously think could be
used to combat the rampant sexual violence in so much of Africa: EMAJO
(Encouraging the Men of Africa to Jerk Off).
***
Structure—How it Worked
USAID had a large staff of civil
servants, both foreign service (FS) and civil schedule (GS, for “general
schedule”), in Washington, DC. It was divided into operating units, most of
which were called Bureaus. Some were geographic; some were thematic, related to
crosscutting areas or functions (health, education, management, policy,
legislative affairs, and more). Names of the Bureaus changed, but the functions
remained largely the same during most of my career.
Overseas, USAID had Missions, most of
which (when I joined in 1987) were offices physically located in their own
buildings. After 9/11, Missions were moved into the more-secure embassies. In
2024, there were about sixty Missions, but the number was nearly one hundred at
one time. Most of the larger Missions were organized around the so-called
“technical” areas: health, education, agriculture, economic growth, democracy
and governance, etc. Each Mission also had its respective “support offices,”
such as the legal advisors, the contracting and grants officers, the financial
controller’s office, and the “program office.” The latter was the office most
directly involved in assisting the Mission Director and, if they had one, the
Deputy Mission Director, with planning, budgeting, and reporting to DC.
Each Mission was staffed with both local
and American employees. Some might have had only one or two Americans; some
twenty or more. The acronyms here were USDHs, for US direct hires, and FSNs,
for foreign service national employees, i.e., local staff. The overseas USDHs
were most generally members of the US foreign service, but sometimes we would
have people from other federal agencies, like the Center for Disease Control
(CDC) or Forest Service, or even from the Department of Justice or Treasury, on
loan. There also was an important group of staff called “personal service
contractors” (or “PSCs”), who were under time-limited contracts and did not
participate in either the civil service or foreign service retirement plans.
USAID had both US, local, and even third-country PSCs.
Most, though not all, of the actual work
of foreign aid was carried out through the “implementers”—organizations,
whether for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, or universities, who,
with some exceptions, competed for financing. The group also included public
international organizations (PIOs) such as the World Health Organization or
other UN organizations.
Two former USAID lawyers created a
school in Rome and qualified it for “public international organization” status.
It was the International Development Law Institute, IDLI—now IDLO, because the
“institute” became an “organization.”
Agreements with implementers fell into
two broad categories: contracts and assistance instruments (aka, “grants”). The
main distinction is that contracts gave the Agency more control. Assistance
instruments imposed less onerous reporting requirements on the recipients and
sometimes could be put in place more quickly. There was a category of
assistance instruments called “cooperative agreements” which allowed for more
management involvement by the Agency but were still not legally “contracts.”
They, like ordinary grants, had fewer remedies if there was a mistake, but they
allowed for more direct USG participation in the management. Both contracts and
assistance instruments normally had to be awarded following federal regulations
requiring competition, but there were ways to avoid competition in the right
circumstances, such as a grant to a PIO, or when it was clear that only one
organization could do the work well or on time. To design, compete for, and
award any instrument could take many months, often well over a year.
The implementers had their own staffs,
both local and US-based, or even from third countries, normally housed outside
the USAID Missions. (Some of the most heartbreaking stories from the
destruction of USAID involve the non-US implementers, for whom we have
abandoned the teach-aman-to-fish approach and instead thrown them under the
water.) The boss of an implementer’s staff was called the “Chief of Party” or
COP. COPs normally took their instructions from the Missions, although some of
the so-called “Central Bureaus” (the crosscutting, thematic Bureaus without
geographic names) managed overseas implementers.
What these implementers really did in
country obviously depended on the project design and area of work. The variety
of work was mind-bogglingly extensive. A list of random examples follows, minus
any cute acronyms. They are all but drops in a very large bucket:
• Teach tax collectors better ways to
detect corruption.
• Teach teachers better ways to teach
kids how to read.
• Teach hospital managers better ways to
manage.
• Teach poor communities the how and why
of eco-tourism and forest preservation.
• Teach judges and local lawyers how to
implement a trial-by-jury system.
• Organize community health workers to
spread information about sanitation practices
• Teach local aspiring entrepreneurs how
to, say, sew and market their products or make chocolate candy from locally
grown cocoa instead of only exporting the beans.
• Create a network of farm suppliers to
lobby their own government for reforms.
• Teach farmers how to better manage and
maintain a group irrigation system.
• Set up a group of human rights
defenders in the country to defend prisoners.
• Give training to game wardens on how
to best detect poachers.
• Help local emergency response agencies
get better prepared.
• Install more effective payment systems
in rural communities to facilitate commerce.
• Teach local governments how to detect
stealing from the national electrical grid.
• Create a microfinance organization to
make small loans to groups of women entrepreneurs.
This bullet list could go on for pages,
perhaps occupying this entire book, and other books could be written about each
such bullet.
For any one of these, there could also
be a “please buy and provide the following stuff to ____” budget line item.
Where I worked, the biggest part of the program was normally for staff and
travel. The projects and programs I saw financed a lot of meetings, mainly for
training and consensus-building, both critical for true social change. In a few
countries, however, the “stuff” part would be a majority of the budget: roads
in Afghanistan, schools in Pakistan, etc.
USAID was charged not only with
promoting economic development overseas but often also with accomplishing US
goals concerning a host of other issues, basically anything for which the USG
at any given time decided a nonmilitary response was necessary and appropriate.
As shown, this is an enormous universe of possibilities, so setting priorities
was difficult. Our jobs were to choose the technical areas to focus on in each
country (or accept priorities given to us by Congress), justify our choices to
the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget and Congress, put the
agreements in place, and then facilitate, monitor and adjust the work of the
implementing partners when necessary. We support staff (lawyers, controllers,
contracts officers, program officers, etc.) were not the technical experts.
Instead, we had the privilege of dabbling in thousands of different subjects
while doing our main jobs. The same was true for the senior managers as I
learned after I became one.
The term “AID” itself did not
automatically announce that the Agency was part of the US government. It could
be mistaken for the name of some international or UN organization, e.g., the
IMF, ADB, OAS, WFP, OECD, etc. Such confusion was never intended, but at one
point in my career a USAID Administrator insisted that we only call it USAID.
The shorter acronym nevertheless remained in use at the State Department (they
all knew the US bit anyway, and he was not their boss), so “AID” can still be
heard there and among academics. USAID had long been an independent agency with
its own appropriation. It was always much smaller than State, and, by law,
required to “take direction” from State. Since ambassadors could expel any one
of us at any time for any reason, or even for no reason, on a personal level
the US Ambassador was always the ultimate boss of field staff in any country.
In most countries, USAID was not the
only aid donor. Most major Western countries, along with Japan, New Zealand and
Australia, have aid programs. Except for some of the UN units, these normally
do not have large staffs in the countries. They also often use other
implementers. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the various
Development Banks, the World Food Program (WFO), etc., are examples of such
donors. While it is dwarfed by the “military/industrial” complex, the foreign
aid/consultants/PVO 4 complex was and remains a very large industry.
***
The Bigger Picture
Did foreign aid work? Yes, but not
always. It certainly meant a great deal to the individuals and organizations
who received the assistance, even far beyond the obvious cases when we
responded to natural disasters and such, saving uncounted lives in the process.
I recall visiting a clinic we supported in Guinea where women received medical
treatment to repair fistulas (open wounds) suffered during unattended
childbirths. These women become so incontinent that they are shunned by their
own families and villages and forced to make a subsistence living alone or with
only their kids. While I did not start the program, my visit as the USAID
Mission Director, to them, was like the second coming of Christ. The drums
beat; the ladies sang and danced; their joy and gratitude were unbelievable.
USAID created entire industries in many
countries by, for example, investigating which crops could be harvested at
times when they would be out of season in the US, such as onions, strawberries,
or melons, and/or financing a trial shipment to, say, Miami for a relatively
small investment. Years later, in Honduras, over half a million workers made
their living shipping onions to the US so consumers could enjoy them during
seasons in which they previously had gone without. Shrimp, cantaloupe and melon
farms in Central America, flowers from Costa Rica and Colombia, and broccoli
and strawberry farms in the hinterlands of Guatemala are all the results of
USAID projects and part of trade with the US.
I once helped design a USAID guarantee
to US investors in two funds that made collective loans to Guatemalan villages
(all the villagers signed the note) to help connect them to the national
electrical grid. USAID collected a $30,000 fee from the protected investors,
the villagers purchased the equipment and provided the labor, and over three
hundred villages got electricity for the first time, facilitating major
improvements in their own economic well-being and reducing the pressure they
felt to flee to the US. Every loan was repaid in full, though two villages were
late. Apart from our own staff, it cost US taxpayers exactly nothing! The US
Treasury kept the guarantor’s fee.
On the other hand, plenty of evidence
shows that some types of aid (for example, governance and rule of law programs)
often did very little, long term, to change the governance or cultures of
recipient nations. Look at all the money we and many other donors sank into
Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC). I first visited there
in 1992. Exact figures are elusive, but the country had received dozens of
billions of dollars in assistance from all donors in the years since its
independence in 1960. In 1992, it was a total basket case. Mobutu Sese Seko
fled in 1997, and it all fell apart. I returned in 2019 after almost another
thirty more years of massive foreign aid, both US and European, and it remained
a basket case. It still is, and the USAID staff most recently evacuated from
the DRC for security reasons (in February 2025) soon found themselves in limbo
without help from or access to their prior employer.
I was in Nicaragua in 1999, nine years
after Violeta Chamorro had defeated the Sandinistas of Daniel Ortega. We and
other donors thought real democracy had blossomed for good. Assistance poured
in from all sides. In 2025, Ortega’s back in charge, and whatever donors
accomplished in the interim made little difference.
I was in Colombia in 2001, helping to
manage USAID’s part of one of the largest assistance programs in the world,
called “Plan Colombia,” an expensive effort to reduce coca and cocaine
production. Twenty-four years later Colombia is still the biggest coca producer
in the world, despite the small army of contractors who sprayed the coca fields
and tried to get farmers to grow other crops. Much the same occurred in similar
programs in Bolivia and Peru.
. . . .
While there is no doubt the current
administration intends it, what happened to USAID in 2025 is incredibly cruel
and unsettling, especially for those dedicated career staff and the staffs of
the many contractors and grantees thrown unfairly and without notice into total
chaos. To me and many others, there are far better ways to improve our
effectiveness. The sudden, blanket stop-work order has created a feeding frenzy
for lawyers that will continue for years—not unlike a major commercial
bankruptcy. As you will see below, this is a topic close to my heart. Will it
save the USG money? Perhaps in the very long run. Will it improve our standing
overseas? Not where it counts, in my view—quite the opposite. More people will
die much sooner than otherwise, the environment and biodiversity will suffer,
and the US will be much less safe and respected.
Foreign aid is a manifestation of our
“better angels,” i.e., the common love most humans naturally feel for each
other, regardless of borders. The Golden Rule does not say “Do unto others as
you would have them do unto you, unless they are not Americans.” Of course,
this is not to suggest that we throw open our borders. That would require even
more potent angels. Foreign aid, however, moves humanity in the right
direction. It helps others and saves lives, and it keeps us in closer contact
with and much better informed about the world. We benefited enormously from
this; the simple breadth of the work made both our nation and the world
collectively wiser. Could it be done better and more efficiently? Absolutely.
Do I have all the answers? Of course not—but details are worth exploring, some
of which occurs below.
Before joining USAID, Brown practiced commercial law for eleven years in Los Angeles as a partner at Ervin, Cohen & Jessup in Beverly Hills, California. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Whitman College, where he was also a Thomas Watson Fellow, spending a year conducting independent research in Latin America. He earned his Juris Doctor from UCLA School of Law, where he served as Managing Editor of the UCLA Law Review.
Brown is the author of Dilettante: Tales of How a Small-Town Boy Became a Diplomat Managing U.S. Foreign Assistance (2021), a collection of stories tracing his path from early work on farms, railroads, and tugboats in Eastern Washington to a career in international law and diplomacy. He is retired in Maryland.
X.com at @bliffordcrown
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