of the conflict on the environment, the impact of war is so much more than just emissions from tanks, ships and will fight modern booth. it has a devastating effect on people and the the department of defense is emissions is as large as many countries. every time ministry spent and increases military emissions increased. and this war and this climate christ all hail the planet on. it does ita it's funding pulling and it's stuff sent home. the world's largest international humanitarian. donna usa ivy is under assault. as a trump administration doesn't restore the flow of age who will fill the void. and what does it mean for the levels us central and this is inside story, the

hello and welcome to the program. i'm elizabeth put on him. president donald trump's administration is dismantling the us agency for international development or usa id for decades. it's been the was probably, yeah, humanitarian agency distribution, live saving medications combating the spread of disease and providing disaster relief and conflict phones. thousands of employees have been placed on leave and aid recipients, and more than a 150 countries have been left in limbo. spearheading federal budget cost is 1000000000 in on mosque and has department of government efficiency. while it may represent an instant saving on the books, will they be in on seen costs to american influence and put the quotes end up blocking yet another of trumps endeavors will get to those questions at the moment . but 1st this report by michael apple. a mold in 60 us the united states agency for international development has been at the full front of every

global humanitarian initiative food parcels, medication h, i. v. aids testing kits, civil service capacity building and developing nations. us a id was behind it all. us 8 as being the biggest, it's a refund and i would what i would say that a number of people close to 20000000 people are receiving error ivy's at the treatment of testing services from the funds that suicide has been providing to us . but that's all stopped at least for now. us president donald trump sees the aid agencies 2023 budget to $40000000000.00 as a waste of money to work and not and aligned with his america 1st agenda. i love the concept, but they turn out to be a radical left lunatics. us

a id was established by john f. kennedy. in 1961. he signed an executive order which created it as an independent agency. but it's coming to the cross. hes a billionaire. he loan mosca, department of government efficiency, a task force, but via one of trump's executive orders. us a i, these websites has been taken down and then noticed placing roughly 10010 employees on administrative leave is all that remains. was the announcement met with anger on the streets of washington dc and promises of cor tax and the key issue with muskets actions is that it's happening in this zone that we could best describe as a gray, legal zone, or perhaps more accurately described as a zone of illegality. so he is effectively shutting down an american

government agency that requires an act of congress. it's a question that keeps cropping up with an act of congress to do away with us say id or do you believe you have? i don't know which way of not when it comes to fraud. if this for this, people are lunatics and it would, if it comes to fraud, you wouldn't have an active talk from once america to project strength at home and abroad. he's costing aside anything he sees is impacting his administration's bottom line. it's a move critics say, the clays, the age of america, soft power, well, and truly of mike level. oh to 0 for inside story. the. when that spring and i guess from washington dc, we join by heart and leg the vice president for programs and policy at refugees international

and colchester. and the u. k is natasha instead of us foreign policy specialist and a professor of government at the university of essex. and the nairobi is alan boswell, the international crisis groups project director for the horn of africa, a very warm welcome to all of you. natasha. i'll start with you in colchester. the us says that every dollar expense has to be justified with the answer to the questions. does that make america safer? most stronger and more prosperous. is the freezing of us a id in line with these goals? no, not at all. i mean, this is such a significant shift in us military policy, and it is not making american say for, but it's definitely not making many people who are vulnerable safer. because usa, i was, was instrumental in providing life saving vaccines. i mean, all the work that we just even look at the area of global health,

where usa did work in partnership with organizations like top, far to, to help prevent the spread of age saving somewhere around 26000000 lines or work to support the now we are in vaccine or to, to find malaria which kills 450000 children under 5. and your work, i'm not, has helped save some 7000000 lines or in finding tv, which kills over a 1000000 people still and their work. and that has, has saved some 79000000 people. so in addition to all the work that they do in the health care field, there are instrumental and disaster relief in providing food a and, and also in support of democracy. yeah, so services, really catastrophic on a number of funds had an natasha talked about how devastating this is for vulnerable communities, especially how does it look for the wells,

which is 98 on mosque to be unplugging, a lifeline to the world forest people. hey, i was like, is there a way which america has shown up in the rest of the world? and in many of these communities that are facing humanitarian crisis that are smart in poverty, a id and it's programming have been that face. and what the most is doing, in essence, is pulling the plug all of that. and so it's not hard to see how this narrative is going to play in countries and communities around the world because it's already gathering some steam. and the fact that you had sort of russia and china welcome. this move tells you a lot about what is doing to us of power and the perception of the united states. a trip march. i mean, it's as though we have gone into hospitals and for unplug the translators, people who were counting on their h, i v minutes next day show. and the door's locked. the ripple effect to this truck

you is what you have. i mean, if i get women from afghanistan and you know, we're on the wrong natal along inside of the campus and orient. practiced on who's safe houses. i've had to shutter their doors. so the level at which this is going to ripple out across communities and countries amongst the world for us that even people were watching this. our allies and partners are we reliable as a country to show up both when they need it for humanitarian assistance or support them in your brain. for example, like the message is going to be clear that we are not reliable and that actually, but on accountable billionaire, an oligarch has the ability to unplug, what has been a global life on an insurance policy. and alan africa is probably the region that will be most impacted by the freezing of this aid. what has been the full out? the already that you can tell is you know, from soup kitchens where you are and i robi, to the 10s of millions. and so don, who need food aid a. yeah, it's

a total made him and there's 2. i'd say main areas that have people especially worried, one of which is the amount of 2 data that are coming from the united states. and by far the largest donor to w p. um and to other implementing partners. i'm although that technically a data has a life saving emergency to data has a technical waiver in practice. so many people have been laid off or put on leave. but that essentially, uh, and then many of the indians themselves have actually had to fire people or stop the work that the result has been. no one even knows what's being delivered anymore . um, i heard stories of, i was actually returning food to uh, w warehouses for instance. because even though w p has been allowed to continue, the videos have been so effective that they, they can't. and these are places where people are starving to death, such as in sudan, i'm the 2nd one to use the public health support each i the malaria compared to low . so this of us was by far the biggest uh, contributor there. and

a lot of those pros, programs are essentially on hold again, they might pick off, but i think the, the underlying, i think to know is that in the meantime, i don't care how much do you with will eventually come back in and put somebody in, get some of these programs or anything, but in the meantime definitely africans will die. and natasha, as alan is saying, that has been so much confusion. i mean, you mentioned pet file which supports millions of people who need a child support for h i v. and even, you know, the wave about that is unclear absolute confusion, but do you think that this is something that this us administration will actually be able to do whether was merging usa id with the state department or trying to scale it back to the level that it is, i mean, usually idea is not supposed to be part of the state department supposed to be independent and it received congressional approval and funding for this. so it

doesn't really work when it's part of the state department, particularly the state department left by marco rubio, who has really been promoting this. trump, you know, trump's agenda that everybody that works for the trouble government administration has to be in line with trumps. ideological goals, and that's not really the purpose of monitoring agency organization, but it's trying to stay lots and they're trying to find people whored as loyal and create a much meaner organization that will only have really lackeys people without you know, the type of experience i know the are keeping some people there, but i mean, the, the way that they got in the workforce is just incredible. you only have some 12 people working in africa now some 8 working in latin america in the caribbean. 21 people working for the entire middle east in asia. i mean, it's very difficult for an organization to function when it has been gathered so

completely as hot and what kind of challenges do you expect to this from the us congress itself are true, but let me just go back to the question, which just as though it was a super important part of what you're saying. now the numbers that we're saying is around most of the us, the id workforce laid off or for load. so we're getting a point with about 2. i think we 290 officers is supposed to be transferred from usaa the over to the state department. right. if you say that you have, sir, the roughly has a budget of say, $40000000000.00 and a given year. and then site 10 to 14000 thing on account of employees working there, overseeing that. if you're just transfer i 300 people over to the state department to oversee ongoing a programs. there have the capacity to oversee a fraction of that for team building. and so we're talking about us here, the total humanitarian enrolled today, going down to a couple of $1000000000.00. if we're lucky in the interim. what's also happening here is while we're waiting for congress and the course to really kick in,

to exercise our oversight. which of having is the destruction of the agencies for the cutting of contracts through the fire and of employees in following through the software orders to the entire ecosystem munoz and support the system. so the goal here i think, is to push humpty dumpty off the wall having been shipped and crash on the ground and shudder to blame pieces before congress can step in and act timely that we're looking here for is that there's a reconciliation process, a budget process is going to kick in the united states to try to keep the lights on for the government across the system by march 14th. the hope is that us or you will be able to kick in before the congress will take him to exercise its oversight. and if i can constitutional authority here, because to be honest, we're in the midst of the constitutional crisis. the fact there were world for just man has gone in and unplugged a system with some dubious authority to do so. this is the moment the congress needs to step up and exercise its mandate for a, a, an agency that he has many of the existence there of. and of course you just kinda

happened at the time. yeah. at alan, while we wait for that to happen and see if that happens in the meantime, countries like china, a ready funding to void in a programs in the pacific. how much of an opportunity is this full countries like china to fill the gap left by us a id? it's an interesting question because i actually think the type of programs us a id did at large is something that many uh, well, actually not come back and do i think us aid. in hindsight historically i don't need to talk about it in, in the past tense. already, but i think i think it will probably this will look like something like a closing chapter on a type of aide. and it was an a that was viewed as being purposely a political that was distributed intentionally on most so it didn't. there wasn't political leverage. tied to a um, the type of data that will be coming in from russia or china for instance. well,

you know, come with strings attached and they may very well be that a future a coming from the united states might have a lot more strings attached to, i think. and you know, it goes without saying that there was obviously a lot of, of the load in the, in the system. there was a lot of data that actually the countries themselves and leaders themselves even sometimes the people themselves didn't even like or want to i think there are kind of 2 categories. there's a very like saving aid which, which is highly disruptive to cut off and the night do you think there will be a lot of programs where. busy there won't be many. busy for miss it, or even notice that they're gone except for who they employed and a lot of that will never be picked up by someone else. latasha. that's a really interesting point that alan is making that you know, not all of the 8, of course, the bulk of it is humanitarian but not, not all of it is humanitarian. the really interesting thing is that while they're humanitarian sector, as reasoning from this announcement, there are some sort of terry in regimes including russia and china. but you know,

everywhere from el salvador baton rouge. and they cut out of the vendors way that old sharing on the dismantling of us aid. can you tell us why as they are, because you organizations like use the id that provide democracy support that supports civil society that supports human rights and the rule of law, these types of programs are, you know, they, they undermine of torturing views. and so they're the often a target, whether it be done or other n g o is which is why we saw a flurry of anti and your laws that were passed by torturing machines. they really want these types of organizations to, to be just males law. because it poses a threat to their rule and we have felt that they can be effected in supporting sort of society. and this is one of the reasons why and bottom are to lose so. so frightened by what, what,

when there had been protests after fraudulent elections because organizations like this total, mobilize these groups and helps red best practices about pushing for accountability and transparency. so of course they're rejoicing, so it's not just stop, but also there is a void in, in, in soft power and in the china, hispanics in the last 12 years of over a trillion dollars in promoting, you know, the road initiative and other forms of soft power and they'll be avoid there with, with a loss of what looks like the loss of us a id. and it's not going to be supporting these human rights space, democracy based projects. and we do see that the level of democracy globally is affected by hedge funds like the us and, and the quality of democracy in the us of course. but uh the, the role that they play in supporting democracy around the world. and how and what

impact do you see that having on, you know, everything from civil society organizations to n g o's or so let's say they've been started to grow. so they're like international and yeah, those who have footprints in a couple of countries in certain regions to a global presence, not this one which is out of the united nations for the international and yours. what we're seeing and contractors for use id is the global style more orders as have like a catastrophic effect, right? we're seeing layoffs of 40 percent and 90 percent of the stuff. and this is a once you've actually laid the stuff off. so rebuilding that if my were to come back online is going to take a long time, it's gonna take effort. and so you really are seeing a cascade effect across the eco system. implementing partners at the an international g o level to provide everything from some development assistance to the support for uh for

a public health programs to the emergency humanitarian assistance that's supposed to have some waivers, but which in fact is not function of those that and that system is collapsing globally or at the civil society level inside of the countries be like so slight organizations, local organizations really are sort of the front line of the effort, right. these folks are on the front line and ukraine and elsewhere. really providing assistance to communities in need and getting that volume support from the international jersey, united nations. we're already hearing from a number of them that they're having to shut down their program. right. and these organizations are critical not just for actually news, but they are the bedrock of civil society and something that it's very deeply in the us street interest to see civil society strengthening inside of us just inside of the countries. because a strong civil society is good for stability, but also to provide us that sort of organizations of pro, i presume democracy into corruption, human rights issues. and this is a very real danger that the kind of external support upon which many of the sole

society organizations belie is crumbling very quickly. and there will find ways to continue to survive, hopefully. but it's going to do very significant damage to a strategic level to so, so i need to sort play the role that we always depend on sales site and place. but alan, do you think that this u. s. administration is the whole interested in building up strong civil societies and other countries because as donald trump in, in on mosque have repeatedly said, usa i, these, i want the usa, i d is doing is not aligned with the administration's goals. oh yeah, i took a lot of these so society, uh, you know, uh uh, quite a little pro democracy uh, grounds from usa. you'd have had very strong bipartisan support for very uh for a long time. but it's clear that that support really doesn't come from the trump administration and, and you know, a lot of other countries, i think i've stopped, you know, also view the supports as uh, as on welcome as well. so you can see it. the truck administration's very

transactional, you know, a lot of, you know, as people ask a lot of african leaders don't really appreciate that. the us basically findings. a lot of what we call civil society is what they see as political activists. you know, and then this is a, this can be a drag sometimes on, on the other relation. so you can see that terms of ministration, which one think of very transactional products wants to do deals. uh, you know, doesn't have a great democracy record at home to, to say the least. um, you can see why that was sort of programs are, are not something that will, you know, that might get, don't get restarted. and we'll see how much appetite there is for actually be starting it after a trump administration, and whether it is bipartisan consensus that had been there in the us system is now just gone. latasha allen was talking earlier about how china will not be interested or china doesn't have the appetite to kind of all the kinds of programs that the us a id funding gap will leave. it's a huge gap. but given that, you know, they work on things that will affect countries beyond the board. as with the aid,

as distribution, things like preventing organized crime, terrorism conflicts, and the impact that, that will have on human security. are they any of the countries that we can expect maybe european nations, for example, to try and fill some of this gap? that's a good question. i mean, uh, traditionally the scandinavian countries in particular have big have been big donors. of course they've donated quite a bit in terms of a percentage of, of g p, a and they're often above the point 7 percent, that the countries are supposed to spend on foreign aid. but it is hard to sell the scott because the u. s. was the biggest owner, even though the u. s. was far below what the expectations were in terms of the folks at the federal budget where it's under one percent or it's for need was 2.2 percent or something along those lines. it's hard for all the smaller countries to,

to meet, you know, all the demands, all the competitor and crises that are taking place around the world. though, i think you're gonna see you're trying to, to step up. but you have to also understand that the same time you're is facing huge costs with the ongoing war in ukraine. and so there are so many fires to put out at the same time that this, this loss of the us in terms of the, the role of a major for an a doctor is really going to have more than mental effects on security. yeah. are human secure, we're seeing that it's already having around the world had and i was reading that the, you know, democratic pop, pop, pull policy, politicians have been talking about how that could jeopardize us national security . they cited prison gods, and sylvia who are in charge of securing ice will fly. so this temporarily walked off the job when the us funding was, was cash off, for example,

a yeah, there any number of examples of where the sort of national so the touch points between what you will see and he does and you, especially security, are quite clear the example of the caps in ne syria were an absence. the ministration had not thought through or recognize that if you pull the plugs on huge on this is like assistance. you're going to pull the applauded on one of the contractors in northeastern, and that was providing the security for the accounts where tens of thousands of ices families, and probably some fighters were still living under the guard of, of a certain partners, other certain partners in the area, and this had a huge like ripple effect across the system and people gain some visibility on it. but there are lots of others examples of this or other places where the touch points between national security and development, you mandatory and assistance or claire. all right, one thing just to keep in mind, let's go back to a ball in the, in the,

in 201415 if that crisis right. the board crisis lead to in western west africa, led to a huge mobilization on the part of the united states and others to contain it. and that's because when the president obama saw the projections of what could happen to spread the millions of people who could be killed. and the possibility of that is he's getting to the united states doing very serious damage. a full court press effort was put into place involving civilian actors, use military and support center to try to help him contain that if and this is your taking the tools from that tool. okay. and removing them, you are a critic, huge one village, united states, the masses, freight of these kind of diseases. as we've seen under co, if you don't have those tools in the tool kit, very direct the national security implications. and humans to turn in quotations. not just abroad, but in the united states. and alan, even if the cuts to us an idea going to be successfully challenged. and the quote says, how much damage do you think this has already done?

not just in terms of all of the people that a 8 has been cut off from thought to a now, cuz reputation as a reliable partner, a certain well, i don't think you seen it as a reliable partner. um, uh that is not only because of the way you say it was was you know, put through the, the wing chair for uh, as it was said, um, when you know the trouble administration coming in for a 2nd term is seen by most other countries in the world as a signal that there is no continuity from the us on many of these major issues. he's obviously a huge disruptor. and this is obviously a case in point. and there's a huge amount of uncertainty about what to expect from the us. from here on, on almost every single on almost every single file. so i think this is another example of it. um, there's already been, you know, in the african side, you know, which is why. and there's already been a lot of calls actually for leaders or former leaders saying, hey, it's not hard for us to stop relying on this for an aide and realize that we can't

be dependent. and it's time to, you know, feel our own public health budgets and things like that. so i think it is also a moment of reflection for countries to say they can't rely on the us for necessarily anyone else moving ahead. but for sure, this is just, uh, you know, this is just further convinced everyone that if they thought they could rely on the us moving ahead so that they can do it every 4 years to bring something entirely different. all right, that is our discussion for today. thank you so on of, i guess, todd and lang and washington dc. natasha instead and colchester and alan boswell in nairobi and thank you to for watching. you can see the program again any time by visiting our website out a 0 dot com. i prefer the discussion to go to a facebook page that's facebook dot com, forward slash a inside story. you can also join the conversation on x. a handle is at a inside story from me, elizabeth put on them and the whole team here, bye for now. the

the pumps agenda includes everything from tax cuts to the immigration, but how much is real and how much is bluster? is it runs footprint across the middle, the shrinking. the trump administration is weighing options to end the rest of your brain more. but what does it mean for your acoustic a? look at us politics. the bottom line, the streets of domestic is not safe for children. the safety in numbers, but that doesn't always work. i was passing by the bridge and this guy came out. you asked me how much money i got. i told him i didn't have any, just hit me. i was supposed to. afraid of being docked again, putting you on use now sleeps in a different location in the night maternity. the often foundation estimate that they are 1200000 often abundant children across syria. the

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death is the survivor, the syrian refugees seeking ounces searches for a disappeared sister. mine may suit a witness documentary on adjust the escapade of 73 captives held in guns as to the si, fi i deal with this right as well. released the 183 palestinian prisoners, most of homes detained from cause as part of this strange news. hello, i am dire in jordan, this is out of here a life. and so i'll focus this out. the release of his rated kept his from gaza in exchange for ballast and in prison is from is right the.