Natsios Remarks - Foreign Policy for America
By Andrew Natsios - May 19, 2025
Thank
you for this award and for recognizing the extraordinary contributions
of the career staff at USAID whether they be foreign service officers,
civil servants, or contract staff. They should be honored for their
careers of service not attacked. They have put themselves in harms way,
others been wounded in action, and some have paid the ultimate price. We
have tried over the years to honor those who have gone before us at
USAID.
Janet
Ballentyne, who served in 2001 as acting deputy administrator of USAID
while we awaited Fred Schieck’s confirmation by the Senate, proposed to
me that we recognize the nearly 100 career offices who paid, in
Lincoln’s immortal words, “the last full measure of devotion” with
plaques on the rotunda wall as you enter USAID at the Ronald Reagan
Building. A committee was set up under Janet’s leadership to make it
happen. Many of us were deeply worried that the memorial would be
destroyed by the DOGE team, but rumors turn out to be wrong. The
memorial has been moved to the State Dept and will be transferred to a
suitable location in main State. These men and women are our heroes.
They are part of what Lincoln calls the honored dead. We thank the
senior leadership at State for treating the memorial with the respect it
deserves.
Many insults have
been hurled at the career officers of USAID over the last few months I
suppose to justify the destruction of the Agency. These insults are a
contemptible lie particularly given the sacrifice many of the career
staff have made for the United States and for the hundreds of millions
of people USAID has served over the last 63 years. I held seven
leadership positions in my career in the public and private sectors, and
USAID are the bravest, most competent, brightest and most dedicated
professionals I have served with. Blaming foreign aid for the paralysis
in Washington is a smokescreen to avoid reality.
Our
massive two trillion dollar budget deficit that has accumulated over
the past eight years is the most severe crisis facing the United States
right how. Not foreign aid spending. We are living well beyond our
means. While Elon Musk and the President say they created DOGE to
address the deficit that is nonsense. Musk promised cuts of two trillion
dollars; he gave us by his own admission $150 billion. The budget
deficit cannot be addressed by cutting the 150 account, only entitlement
reform will do that which virtually everyone in the city opposes
because the public thinks the budget deficit is caused by waste and
fraud. It isn’t. Entitlement programs and mandatory spending like debt
service make up 72% of the federal budget. Foreign aid makes up 1% of
federal spending.
USAID is
needed now more than ever. The world order has been descending into
chaos for some time now, and more human life is now at risk than at any
time since the end of World War II. That chaos did not begin in January,
but the trajectory of the federal government since then has increased
not reduced the chaos. The forced migration crisis--the worse since
WWII--has driven more than 120 million people to leave their homes
because of civil war, famine, and mass atrocities, many have traveled to
refugee and IDP camps. The DOGE team destroyed the Bureau of
Humanitarian Assistance that runs the DART team system that responds to
these crisis. We just experienced a terrible pandemic that killed
millions; it will not be the last pandemic. It is only a matter of time
when the next one spreads across the world. DOGE just destroyed the
USAID health data system developed over the past 25 years in 90
countries to warn us new disease outbreaks are occurring. That systems
is our early warning system for disease outbreaks. The world food system
that feeds 8 billion people is under increasing stress because of
threats to the Suez Canal and other choke points on the high seas, the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, population pressures particularly in
Africa, and a world water crisis. A collapse of the world food system
will be a humanitarian and a geostrategic disaster. The agriculture
investments of USAID to address the coming world food system crisis were
gutted by the DOGE staff because they appear not to have realized what
they were cutting. The dismantling of USAID has destroyed the one US
government institution with expertise and project and policy management
skills to address these challenges and protect the American people
The
plan submitted by the State Department to the Congress for reorganizing
foreign aid lacks any understanding of the role of development and
foreign aid in our national defense and is wholly inadequate to meet the
challenges I just described. It would ensure there is no long term
development strategy or operational capacity anywhere in the US
government to address these problems. When the DOGE juggernaut destroyed
USAID it created a massive vacuum with no alternate operational or
project management system to take its place. The chaos in the world is
being mirrored in the chaos in the US government.
While
there is $16.9 billion in the FY2026 budget for foreign assistance,
there is no operational mechanism for how to spend it. The State Dept
Inspector General has produced a detailed report on what State needs to
do to create business systems to spend that money responsibly to produce
results. It will take at least seven to ten years to implement what the
IG has described if there is even the political will in the
Administration to carry these reforms out in the first place. We don’t
have even two years let alone seven to ten years. The challenges I just
described are sure to get worse not better in the interim.
I
want to conclude by drawing attention to two efforts underway. The
first is to preserve what USAID as an institution has learned over the
past six decades about international development. It is called the AID
TRANSITION ALLIANCE at FORWARD GLOBAL. A second effort being managed by
former career USAID staff as well as from the NGO and faith-based
organizations. It is called AID on the HILL and proposes a constructive
and forward looking aid architecture for the future. While I don’t agree
with every line of their report, the great bulk of what they propose is
a serious effort at reform. More people should take notice and support
these two efforts.
Thanks for inviting me this evening. And thanks for honoring the career staff at USAID.