America is a Post Dated Check

The USAID freeze sends a message to Putin.

I had this flashback this week - talking to friends in Ukraine and Goma and Kenya and Kabul about the impact of this USAID freeze — that I thought: this feels like 2008. Right now we look back in 2008 as this huge recession but at the time I remember it started with small signs. A friend in real estate mentioning houses sitting on the market longer than usual. Hiring freezes at mortgage companies. More moving trucks on the road. Then foreclosure signs on lawns. Then the stock market drops, mass layoffs, extended unemployment. And what I’ve been trying to figure out is not just who is affected by this freeze now (millions of people), but where is this a message to? And what happens down the road, if USAID pulls out of everywhere, all at once, immediately? (If Congress and the courts allow this executive order to hold.)

Which is how I ended up on the phone with Lydia Wanja.

Lydia is a farmer, and she’s not the typical poster child for foreign aid. Despite being born with only one working arm—due to an obstetrician’s mistake her mother couldn’t afford to fix— she’s always possessed a “winners never quit” attitude about life, refusing charity and the comforts of self-pity. She put herself through teacher’s college, and when school jobs were scarce, she built a farming business, growing basil, avocados, and medicinal herbs. She was able to hire dozens of employees, many of them young mothers, so she applied for and received a matching grant from USAID to build a daycare center where her employees could breastfeed their babies on a break.

That was this fall. Then she realized what she needed to scale up her business was install an industrial dryer to preserve her crops. USAID offered her funding to install a solar-powered model and said the money would be in her account by February. Which is when she did something that all of us are warned not to do, unless we really, really, really, really trust the lender….

She wrote a post-dated check.

But the harvest was coming. She wanted to start using this thing. And besides, USAID’s promises were backed by America. What could go wrong? She gave a postdated check of almost $10,000 to the supplier and the drier was installed.

And then came Trump’s executive order. A freeze all USAID activities.

The guy she gave that check to is calling her every day now. Where’s my money, he’s saying. She’s terrified if he tries to cash that check, she doesn’t have the money in her account, he can sue her. She’ll be dragged off to prison, lose the farm, everything she built, all because she believed in America’s word.

“Just give us time,” she told me. She doesn’t even begrudge America for wanting to cut off foreign aid, just requests to do it slower in a way that doesn’t destroy everything she’s built up over the years. “Just give us six months, or a year. Let us adjust ourselves to go a different way.”

Let us adjust ourselves, she says. You don’t want to pay for a Kenyan farmer to have a solar drier anymore? You don’t want to pay for people’s HIV medication and school fees and domestic violence clinics and poll watchers and everything else that USAID spends billions of dollars on around the world?

That’s ok, Lydia says. Just give us time to adjust ourselves.

But this administration allows for no adjustment. no grace period. This isn’t about winding down aid. It’s about speed. Sudden, chaotic, indiscriminate speed.

I joined my friends on the Reflector podcast today to talk about all the ways that aid scholars have lambasted aid over the years. Despite the lives it saves, the poor it feeds, the diseases it monitors, the education it funds, there is a moral hazard as well. Listeners of Rough Translation might remember that in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I reported how American money earmarked for survivors of sexual violence forced local women into an impossible choice, to have to lie about being raped just to receive a bag of food. Like Sarah Chayes, my former colleague at NPR, I saw the way billions of dollars of USAID funding in Afghanistan went into the pockets of warlords and corrupt cops. Living in Nairobi as NPR’s East Africa correspondent, I kept a ready copy of Bill Easterly’s, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, as well as Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo, who wrote: "The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but have increased."

And yet, the people who critiqued aid assumed that changes would be incremental. That the transition would be managed. Dambisa Moyo suggested a five year plan to wean the world off assistance.

What happened instead is something else entirely.

In Kabul, underground girls’ schools—secret classrooms defying Taliban restrictions—have shut down because USAID was paying their teachers’ salaries. In Ukraine, independent Russian-language media outlets countering Kremlin propaganda are scrambling to stay online. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, humanitarian groups providing emergency shelter and aid to displaced civilians are closing their doors. And in Kenya, Lydia Wanju is staring at her solar dryer, wondering if this piece of expensive equipment, meant to be a step toward prosperity, will instead be the thing that ruins her.

The speed isn’t an accident. It sends its own message—one that echoes Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, where those who risked their lives to help American troops were abandoned overnight, left to face the prisons and blades of the Taliban.

USAID was always about messaging. From its inception under Kennedy, it was designed to send a signal about American power and generosity, a counterweight to Soviet influence. For decades, it told the world: We are here. We are stable. We are reliable.

Now, the message is different. To the world it says:

The whims of one president can supercede the promises of a nation.

To Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Xi Jinping of China, it says:

We’re not going to push democracy among your neighbors. We won’t fund opposition media, or poll watchers, or anti-disinformation campaigns, or human rights activists. We’ll stay out of your way.

No wonder Putin seems so eager to sit down with Trump.

America has become a post-dated check. A promise for the future. Only now, the promise isn’t for aid, but for silence.

Listen more on the Reflector podcast.

And, if you’re seeing knock-down effects from the USAID freeze that I’m not seeing yet, please send me a message or leave a comment below. I fear that just like that first trickle of news in 2008, this is only the beginning of a much bigger shift.