Allison Gill (30:38)
Ah, well. The portal permits 450 words of explanation and allows users to submit up to 10 megabytes of digital files. Huh. Interesting. The End DEI portal represents the latest salvo in the Trump administration's anti diversity crusade, which has included executive orders that seek to define trans Americans out of existence, an effort to kick trans soldiers out of the military, the ouster of top women and black military leaders, and the revocation of a civil rights era executive order that desegregated the ranks of the federal contractors. And it would be a damn shame if that snitch line got clogged up with submissions and 10 megabyte digital files. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to render that tip portal useless. The link to submit your $0.02 and your 10 megabytes of files is in the show notes, or you can visit ndei.ed.gov to access the form. Thanks, y'all. We'll be right back. We have a B block story from ProPublica followed by listener submitted. Good news. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey everybody, it's ag. This podcast is sponsored by a Lifesaver. It's called Deleteme. Deleteme makes it easy and quick and safe to remove your personal data online. At a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable, we can't predict the next data breach or know how. Details about us might be repackaged, shared or leaked or sold. It's a sobering thought. But in today's world, staying vigilant is essential. Your private details, like your address, your phone number, even family specifics, could easily fall into the wrong hands. And the risks are real scams, identity theft, or worse. It's shocking to see how easy it is to find personal information online. A quick search can uncover details you might assume are private. And this data floating around the Internet can have real world consequences. Whether it's targeted harassment, spam calls, or even financial fraud, the stakes are high. 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Again, that's JoinDeleteMe.com Daily Beans code Daily Beans. You'll be glad you did. Hey, everybody, welcome back. All right, this next story, I wanted to give this a little bit of a spotlight. It comes from the good people at ProPublica and I really encourage you to support them if you're able. The byline here is Anna Maria, Barry Jester, and Brett Murphy. And the headline is, the Trump administration said these aid programs saved lives. It canceled them anyway. After the Trump administration moved to freeze nearly $60 billion in foreign aid in January, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly assured Americans that life saving operations would continue. Quote, we don't want to see anybody die, he told reporters in early February, eight organizations the world over scrambled to prove their work saved lives. Seeking permission from the State Department and the U.S. agency for International Development to continue operating, the administration conceded that many programs prevent immediate death and should remain online field hospitals in Gaza, an HIV drug supplier for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syrian refugee food programs, health clinics that combat Ebola in Uganda and most of the landmark President's Emergency Plan for AIDS relief, known as pepfar. In late January, Rubio and one of his top aides, Pete Morocco, said those programs and dozens of others could continue granting them temporary waivers while the officials conducted what they have called a targeted case by case review of all foreign aid programs managed by the State Department and USAID aid. That review, they said, would take three months. Four weeks later, on Wednesday, Rubio and Morocco completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop, including those they had granted waivers just days earlier, saying the programs did not align with Trump's agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world's poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating the death toll in the hundreds of thousands. Now, as the administration faces multiple lawsuits challenging its actions, the court fights largely hinge on whether government officials deliberated responsibly before cutting off funding. The US has also refused to pay almost $2 billion that the government owes aid organizations for work they've already completed. Rubio and Morocco appear to have taken their dramatic steps without the careful review they've described to the courts. And that's according to internal doc documents and interviews with more than a dozen officials from the State Department and usaid, which raises fresh questions about the legality of President Donald Trump's evisceration of the American foreign aid system. Current and former officials say that Morocco and Rubio cut critical programs without consulting contract officers who have oversight of individual programs and our aid group's primary contacts quote, none of us believe that they're conducting a careful, individualized review. That's what one official said. In an episode that highlights how cursory and haphazard their efforts appear to have been, Morocco and Rubio ordered the cancellation of contracts, including for cell phone service at an office they do not control. The move stranded people in war zones without phones, according to multiple officials and internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica. On Wednesday, AT&T received a termination notice for a $430,000 contract with USAID's Office of Inspector General. That office is meant to be independent from USAID so that it can effectively audit the agency for more than 24 hours. OIG staff, including people in Ukraine and Haiti, did not have access to their government phones. No one at The Office of Inspector General, including contract officers, knew it was coming, according to the officials, quote, this is an urgent issue for us as we have OIG staff in war zones with no ability to receive security alerts. That's what a senior official in the agency wrote in an email to the company. Eventually, USAID reversed the termination. Current and former officials through USAID and the State Department say the breakneck pace, lack of input from key officials, mistaken cancellations and boilerplate language in Wednesday's termination notices undermine Morocco's claims of a deliberative process. Quote, it's a pretext, said one USAID official. The review was supposed to take 90 days. An actual review based on substance requires laying out a process with guidelines, identifying info on each project and selecting working groups to review. Any review they did was fake. Now, if that turns out to be the case, legal experts and government officials say the administration will have defied a federal judge's order in a brazen gambit to continue dismantling U.S. aid. The morning after the mass termination notices went out, a senior USAID official sent an email saying Morocco and Rubio had canceled awards for essential services that the agency now wanted reinstated, telling staff, quote, we need your immediate input on any awards that may have been terminated that contain essential services related to the safety, security and operations of U.S. aid staff. That's according to a court filing. Since the initial decision to suspend foreign aid, humanitarian organizations and labor groups have taken the government to court, arguing that only Congress can dismantle USAID and that Trump's blanket actions are unconstitutional. The government has told the courts that it has the right to cancel contracts, dismiss staff and reorganize USAID to align with Trump's agenda. Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting USAID and the State Department from following Trump's executive orders to stop all foreign aid and to force the agency to pay its bills. When it did not comply, the judge issued another order giving the government until midnight Wednesday to pay what it owes to aid groups. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the last order over underpaid bills to conduct further legal review. That same day, aid organizations around the world began receiving termination notices. More than 90% of USAID's global aid operations and half of those managed by the State Department received termination notices. The move is already putting children and refugees in gravely dangerous situations. The administration canceled almost 50 United Nations Population Fund projects worth more than $370 million, including program to Address Maternal Deaths and Gender Based violence in Egypt, Nigeria and several other member nations around the world. In early February, the nonprofit Alight received waivers for its program supporting refugees in war torn Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan. On Wednesday, they were all terminated. Alight runs six centers for extremely malnourished children in Sudan, where the organization treats babies and infants so sick that they will die within hours without ongoing care. The centers cost about $120,000 a month to operate. Alight is trying to fundraise to keep them open, knowing that the day they close their doors, children will die. That's CEO Jocelyn Wyatt told that to ProPublica. In the meantime, they've been forced to close other life saving programs. In Somalia, around 700 malnourished children visited the Alite clinics every day for weight check ins and to pick up special food. Thirteen health clinics and mobile units served around 1200 patients that day. On Thursday, all of those clinics closed. Alight also shuttered 33 primary health clinics in Sudan and stopped providing water to three refugee camps that housed people displaced by decades of war. Alight had kept all those programs running these past five weeks, even though the organization hasn't received any payments since Trump took office. Quote we believed when Rubio said there was no intention of cutting emergency life saving services that would basically cause immediate death, said Wyatt. We trusted that those would be protected. One of the State Department's highest ranking humanitarian aid officials, Jennifer Davis, stepped down this week, according to her resignation letter, which was obtained by ProPublica. During a meeting earlier this week, Davis, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency's refugees bureau, told staff she believed she was bound by the judge's order to restore programs and their funding, according to an attendee. She was in tears about it, the attendee said. Davis did not respond to requests for comment. The State Department, USAID and the White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. The State Department did not make Marco Rubio available for an interview. Morocco also did not respond to questions. By Thursday, hundreds of workers had returned to USAID's former headquarters, where the name has been removed from the building facade, to collect their personal items. They left with boxes and suitcases. Some were crying. Dozens of people cheered and rang bells each time someone exited the building. Many of them had recently lost humanitarian aid jobs as well. Quote this is more than lost jobs. We're losing the sector, a former USAID employee said through tears as she waited for her allotted 15 minute time window to pick up her belongings. She went on to say the US Government is losing its influence were now more unsafe as a country in the early hours of February 13th at a refugee camp in northern Syria, two armed men wearing masks and police uniforms broke into offices and a warehouse for the aid group Bluemont, stealing more than $12,000 worth of laptops and other supplies the US government had already paid for. Because the organization hadn't received any funds since Trump took office, it no longer had personnel at the camp full time and had paused all its US Funded work except a daily bread delivery. The armed theft was the result of the US not paying its bills, the group told USAID officials, according to an internal agency email obtained by ProPublica. Shortly after the incident, the government started paying Bluemont's invoices, and the aid group brought back staff and food services that had received a waiver. It's one of the few programs still online and receiving money now. Prior to January 20th, the US spent about $60 billion on non military, humanitarian and developmental aid ego, far more than any other country in total dollars, but less than 1% of the federal budget. The vast majority of that money is managed by USAID and the State Department. A network of aid organizations carry out the work, which is funded by Congress. Since Trump took office, Morocco and Rubio have not only halted foreign aid, laid off thousands of workers and put many more on administrative leave, they've also stopped paying bills for work that's already been done. In one of several lawsuits related to the administration's dismantling of usaid, aid groups are suing the federal government over the mass program closures and unpaid bills. It was that case that led Federal District Court Judge Amir Ali to order the administration to settle those bills, which by February 13 totaled nearly $2 billion, according to figures Morocco gave the court. Almost none of it's been paid, court filings show. Additionally, U.S. taxpayers will be on the hook for interest and damages from the unpaid bills and broken contracts. That's what legal experts told ProPublica. Organizations have struggled to get through the opaque waiver process, and programs that succeeded were often so strapped for cash because the government hadn't reimbursed them that they remained inoperative medicines that were already purchased by the US Taxpayers are languishing in warehouses instead of being delivered to the people who need them. On Wednesday, as Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused the district court's order to the federal government to pay its bills, the administration told the court it had terminated 5,800 of the 6,300 foreign aid programs that USAID administered. The government also shuttered 4,100 programs managed by the State Department, about 60% of the total in Morocco's own testimony to the court on February 18 about the process, he said that senior staff and political appointees choose specific awards to be evaluated for termination or suspension. He said he personally examines the program and any potential consequence of terminating it before making final recommendations to Rubio. But USAID staff says that subject area experts and key personnel who were responsible for the programs were not involved in making these determinations while most others had already lost their jobs. In the case of the phone contract for the OIG office, for example, the contract officers had no idea the termination notices were coming, officials said. Those officers are specially trained in contract law and regulations to manage these agreements and make sure the government is in compliance. But they were cut out of the process and only learned about it from AT&T, according to the officials and internal emails obtained by ProPublica. The one page notice to the telecom giant said that Rubio and Morocco had determined your award is not aligned with agency priorities and made a determination that continuing this program is not in the national interest, the notice added. Immediately cease all activities. The notice came as an emailed PDF and not through the normal file management and correspondence system, which led multiple OIG officials to question whether anyone even looked at the contract's basic information, like its statement of work, much less conducted a careful review. David Black, an attorney specializing in government contracts, said that the law requires contract officers to approve termination notices and that the episode with the OIG raises questions about Morocco's claims in court about careful reviews. Quote it suggests the process was done very hastily, he said. On the ground in the places where the aid kept starvation at bay and deadly viruses in check, program directors say there will now be little to stop those threats. Quote what really bothers me is that we're just looking at numbers. We're not thinking about real people who are actually going to suffer the consequences of these terminations. That's Dr. Anya Gephardt, the acting president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS foundation, which had HIV programs terminated in Eswatini, Lesotho and Tanzania. I hope I'm saying those properly. Let me know if I'm not Pulling Treatment away from pregnant women means children will be infected with HIV in the weeks ahead, gippart said. And doing it so suddenly means other governments and donors don't have the opportunity to step in. Half of the children who are undiagnosed and untreated for HIV die before their first birthday, quote we don't have the luxury of waiting months and months to get this back on track, she said. In Uganda Baylor College of Medicine Children's foundation, which is funded by usaid, treats tens of thousands of patients for HIV and tuberculosis. In addition, it has for years been one of the only organizations in the country that helps contain Ebola outbreaks, including the current one, which has so far killed two people and infected at least eight others. Earlier this month, the US Government issued the foundation a waiver and said it could continue its life saving work. So those who run the foundation were shocked to receive a termination notice just hours later. The Foundation's executive director, Dr. Dithin Kuraga, told ProPublica his staff had just begun contact tracing patients with Ebola. He said they will likely now have to halt all US Funded operations and hope that the Uganda Health Ministry can step in. The patients will be told that we're closing, karaga said. They've relied on our system and support for quite a few years. We saved lives. So anybody who wants to read this article, it's ropublica.org and please support them and their reporting because it's important that we stay aware of just what's being done and by whom. Everybody stick around. We'll be right back with the Good news. Everybody welcome back. It's time for the Good News and if you have any good news stories at all or confessions or corrections, especially pronunciation corrections, or you want to give a shout out to somebody, whether it's a loved one or a small business that could use a boost, or your small business or any self shout out and of course shout outs to government programs that have helped you or a family member or a loved one, whether it's the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, which is on the chopping block in this latest Republican budget, snap, wic, Head Start, great VA Healthcare. You've received any government program that has helped you or a family member or a loved one, send that to us, including student debt relief. And all you gotta do to get your stuff submitted to the Good News and have it read on air is pay your POD pet tax. Which means just attach a photo of your pet or photos, plural of your pets, pet or pets. 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I hope Dana reads this. Oh, you want to take this?
