Unfit to Print: A YEAR WITHOUT USAID
Plus: A GOP congressman is MIA & Catholics sour on Trump
Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print.
Today we’re covering what former USAID employees are doing one year later, the missing Republican congressman, and some fascinating polling about religious Republicans and Trump.
A YEAR WITHOUT USAID
It’s been just over one year since the Trump administration dismantled USAID, cutting a significant amount of funding and moving essential aid under the umbrella of the State Department.
Democrats warned at the time that millions of people were going to starve or that entire countries would collapse, but now The New York Times has a retrospective on another purported set of post-USAID victims: the agency’s former employees and former employees of the groups it funded.
The NYT article wasn’t received by the public, though, the way they probably hoped. The sympathetic profiles of former USAID employees and what they’re up to now — complete with original photographs of the subjects looking sad and downtrodden — have conservatives doubling down on their victory.
“This is a HUGE success story of this admin. The NGO economy needs to die,” Lomez, the head of Passage Publishing and a podcast cohost with Chris Rufo, said. “Really, genuinely, with utmost compassion hope these people learn to be productive contributors to the real economy.”
One of the USAID-funded employees profiled by the NYT is Sheryl Cowan, a former senior VP at a food security company who made $272,000 a year. Cowan’s LinkedIn profile says she lives in Falls Church, Virginia, (do you think she voted for redistricting?) and works to “deliver impactful solutions in agriculture and food security.”
Cowan says she has been unable to find full-time work — her best shot was getting an online interview last month to work at a spices store near her home.
The other stories are similar.
Amy Uccello worked for USAID for more than two decades and made $175,000 a year, while her husband ran a nonprofit that was almost entirely funded by USAID. They are currently surviving on government assistance programs and may lose their house.
It sucks to get fired — been there, done that. But conservatives have been raising some good points in response to the NYT sob stories.
“So, what you’re saying is that a person who is paid six-figures by a government agency is not worth more than a small fraction of that in the rest of the world? I’m stunned,” David P. Deavel, a professor at the University of St. Thomas, said.
The Media Research Center’s Brittany Hughes replied, “So we’re to believe she was good enough to be worth $272,000 a year and somehow couldn’t find another commensurate job elsewhere? For a whole year?
“Or maybe, like many taxpayer-funded positions, she just wasn’t worth $272,000 in the first place,” she added.
And there’s the rub. It can be hard to find good work. But if you were a supposedly high-level executive at a government agency and can’t find anything better than a job as a spice store clerk for over a year, maybe there’s something wrong with you.
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