Disaster Assistance Response Team Employee Misses Opportunity To Make the Case For USAID Funding

An American aid worker describes the implosion of the humanitarian mission to support rape and famine victims in Sudanhttps://t.co/EMzWQT89ti

— Rolling Stone Politics (@RSPolitics) February 7, 2025

DART is a small and specialized part of what USAID does, and it represents the agency's most politically defendable and humanitarian mission. The Rolling Stone story is worth the four minutes it will take you to read. 

Here are the first two paras of a transcribed chat:

What is your role with USAID? I work on the Disaster Assistance Response Team for the Sudan Complex Emergency, [funding] partners like WFP, UNICEF, and other international NGOs. I work with impressive, dedicated, honest people who want the same thing: to help alleviate suffering from the most vulnerable. We just found out we have all been terminated; for me, in less than 30 days.

What does that mean for your work? Though we were treated poorly during this, we aren't the real casualties of this political war. The programs we delivered saved lives by providing food and nutrition to SAM (severe acute malnutrition) children, and clean water and health needs for women in Sudan who were raped or impregnated by soldiers and gangs. All down the drain. We have abandoned all of it, as of now. Our NGO partners have laid people off and aid is no longer getting to those most vulnerable. It's a horrible feeling to let all that go. I feel empty and angry, sad, unvalued, confused. It hurts.

You get the sense of it from that snippit. I won't dispute anything the DART guy said. But I will point out that DART delivers all that humanitarian aid by funding its implementing partners - those NGOs and UN programs - who are the parties actually delivering the assistance. 

That being the case, does USAID need much of a field presence other than to audit contract compliance? Probably not. 

And could that necessary presence be provided just as well by DOS instead of USAID? Probably so. 

But notwithstanding all of that, what annoys me about this media piece in defense of USAID is its complete one-sidedness. No mention of the money spent on totally non-humanitarian programs, especially on funding news and opinion media outlets both at home and around the world, which is what brought USAID down. 

The humanitarian mission has public support. Funding the BBC and Politico does not. 

The interviewee and his co-workers could have improved the public perception of USAID's value by objecting to the millions USAID spent on buying media influence and other 'soft power' whim-wham rather than on his starving Sudanese. You know, be whistleblowers instead of whiners.  

That would have been an attractive proposition for MAGA and The Trumpening, I'd bet. But it's an opportunity lost, and from the looks of it, permanently.