Forget quiet quitting, the State Department appears to be quiet hiring

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Global Development

Episode: "Forget Quiet Quitting, the State Department Appears to be Quiet Hiring"

Date: December 17, 2025
Hosts: David Ainsworth (A), Alyssa Miolini (E), Michael Igoe (B)
Special Segment: Kate Warren (C) with Boucret Zupplikar (D), Terre des Hommes Netherlands

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Episode Overview

This final episode of the year provides a candid breakdown of the latest—and often chaotic—shifts inside the U.S. State Department, particularly in the aftermath of the Trump administration's unanticipated dismantling of USAID. The team investigates the “quiet hiring” trend, attempts a new “who’s who” of foreign aid leadership, and assesses whether the State Department is rebuilding a system it only just tore down. The second half features an interview on enabling systemic change to combat child exploitation in Asia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Year in Review and State Department Shakeup

• Opening Reflections: The hosts comment on an “extraordinary year,” marked by unpredictability in U.S. global development policy.

  • “Somebody texted me this morning and said that it’s a year that development people will want to view in the rearview mirror.” (David Ainsworth, 00:15)

• Post-Election Uncertainty: Early Trump administration 2.0 caught many off-guard, including analysts predicting appointments.

  • “Very few of them are [involved in foreign aid now]. … We did not see the events of 2025 coming.” (Michael Igoe, 01:21)

• Leadership and Power Structure:

  • Introduction of key players—many with personal connections to administration insiders, including the Kennedy and Trump families.
  • Example: Amaryllis Fox Kennedy at OMB and Ben Black at the Development Finance Corporation.
  • “It’s a list of people who are just sort of deeply intertwined with each other personally and professionally. ...There are a large number of family connections.” (B, 04:50)

• Reduced Transparency: The current administration is harder for journalists—and the public—to access than previous ones.

  • “This group has a lot of pre-existing connections...but is not easy to access.” (B, 06:03)

2. Experience Concerns & Quiet Hiring

• Lack of Subject Matter Expertise:

  • New appointees often lack traditional foreign aid experience.
  • “These seem much more like people who’ve come in from the administration and being told, sort this particular thing out, not people who really understand the subject…” (A, 07:23)

• USAID to State Department Transition:

  • Jeremy Lewin tasked with leading foreign assistance is described as a “late 20s something former attorney…initially tasked with dismantling USAID.” (B, 07:52)

• ‘Quiet Hiring’ & Workforce Flux:

  • State is backfilling positions—often using the same external contractors from the USAID era, despite initially laying off much of that workforce.
  • “We’re seeing a ton of different job postings for really similar USAID-style roles...across various foreign affairs hubs.” (E, 15:59)
  • Notably, only about 600 (from a workforce of ~10,000) made the jump—leaving the Department vastly understaffed.

• Morale and Institutional Breakdown:

  • AFSA (American Foreign Service Association) reports “98% of people exhibiting low morale,” high burnout, and communications cut with State (24:21).
  • “At the beginning of this year, there was an executive order that essentially severed the ties from a number of these union organizations...Now they’re not recognizing that for this individual. … They don’t answer our calls anymore.” (E, 24:21)

3. Funding, Spending, and Strategy (or Lack Thereof)

• Aid Outflows:

  • Over $30 billion in U.S. foreign aid dispersed this past fiscal year—but much of it under the outgoing Biden administration.
  • “They didn’t really commit any new aid at all meaningfully...until the start of the next financial year.” (A, 26:34)

• New Directions Reveal Old Patterns:

  • Recent months see a “ramp up” in global health compacts—mainly large, complex agreements with high price tags.
  • “This totally unproven process is...putting a lot of weight on a super condensed process of hammering out these agreements with countries that are pretty complex and not without some controversy.” (B, 29:12)
  • Example: Mining provisions in the Zambia health compact spark debate.

• Unclear Overarching Strategy:

  • The consensus: there’s little evidence of an actual strategic plan behind these pivots.
  • The dismantling of USAID may have been an “accident.”
  • “It paints a picture of nobody having a really very clear idea of what they wanted to do when they dismantled it, and no one having really formed a very clear idea of what they want to do afterwards.” (A, 17:57)
  • “What’s the strategy behind it? Is it just a kind of cool grant to zipline or does this administration have a strategy for global health supply chains that’s going to replace decades of back and forth to put that system together?” (B, 30:07)

• Rhetoric vs. Reality:

  • Many actions (e.g., using same contractors, restoring old functions) suggest eventual recreation of USAID model, despite anti-bureaucratic claims.
  • “Are we just going to be rebuilding back exactly what we lost? And that’s kind of what it seems like at the moment.” (E, 21:24)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I was really struck by [Susie Wiles’] willingness to lay so much of this at the hands of Elon Musk. That almost felt like a very intentional move. … It’s sort of odd for an administration to explain away their own power and decision making to hand that over to somebody else.” (B, 19:27)

• “98% of people exhibiting low morale, a lot of people wanting to leave the Foreign Service, one in four Foreign Service officers generally that have been booted, including all the USAID staff.” (E, 23:01)

• “The grand challenge is to achieve both of those things [responsibly manage aid, and build a better system]. … Their thesis is that that system didn’t work very well and that they’re capable of doing something different and better.” (B, 33:43)

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Interview Segment: Systemic Change to End Child Exploitation (08:30–14:53)

Host Kate Warren interviews Boucret Zupplikar of Terre des Hommes Netherlands about their work in Asia.

Key Takeaways

• Systemic Change means addressing the root causes—laws, power imbalances, social norms—not just the symptoms of child exploitation.

  • “A systemic change approach really focuses on strengthening laws, policies, institutions, and addressing power imbalances that lie essentially at the heart of exploitation.” (D, 09:04)

• Interconnected Stakeholders:

  • Law enforcement, government, schools, families, businesses, even criminal networks all influence children’s vulnerability.
  • “Each of these parts have a role to play. None of them operates in isolation.” (D, 10:20)

• Example from Nepal:

  • Advocacy led to inclusion of online safety and child exploitation awareness in the national curriculum—impacting future generations at scale.
  • “We were able to include education and awareness on protection from online child sexual exploitation in the national school curriculum of Nepal.” (D, 12:45)

• Need for Collaboration and Accountability:

  • Real change “will require much closer collaboration between governments, civil society, law enforcement agencies, and international organizations. … They need shared goals and a long-term commitment.” (D, 13:48)

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Timeline of Major Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:04–04:29 | Year in review; intro to State Department’s chaos, new movers and shakers | | 04:50–07:52 | Discussion of new power players, family ties, and limited expertise | | 08:30–14:53 | Interview: Boucret Zupplikar on systemic change in child protection | | 15:02–19:20 | Analysis of “quiet hiring,” State in flux, USAID absorption, staffing issues| | 19:20–24:21 | The Susie Wiles/Elon Musk variable, tension over hiring, contractors | | 24:21–26:58 | Union breakdown, communication blackout, AFSA survey | | 26:58–31:41 | Funding and aid disbursement trends, global health compacts, lack of strategy| | 31:41–34:43 | Speculation on motivation and future reconstruction of USAID model | | 34:43–34:57 | Hosts’ closing thoughts |

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Conclusion

This episode offers rare, on-the-ground insight into the turmoil and reconstruction underway at the State Department post-USAID. The sense is of a system improvising its way back to old patterns, with insufficient staff, unclear strategy, and a leadership team built more on connections than development experience. Meanwhile, the interview spotlights how genuine systemic change is possible—albeit slowly—when actor collaboration and root causes are addressed.

As 2025 closes, the key questions remain: Can the U.S. rebuild something better than before? Or will it simply end up rebranding yesterday’s bureaucracy with new names and faces? Time—and much more quiet hiring—will tell.

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For more detail, see the full transcript and related Devex reporting.

Transcript

[A]

My name is David Ainsworth and you're listening to this Week in Global Development, hosted by myself, Richard Kamba and Adva Saldian. And I'm joined by my colleagues Alyssa Miolini and Michael Igoe. Great to have you both here. Good morning or good afternoon where I am in the UK right now. So this is going to be the last this Week in Global Development this year. And it's been a hell of a year. It's been an extraordinary year. Somebody texted me this morning and said that it's a year that development people will want to view in the rear view mirror. And I think that is probably entirely correct. So we're going to talk a little bit this week about what actually is happening at the State Department, because after quite a while of nothing happening at the State Department, things do look as if they are kind of starting to move. So, Michael, you've been kind of charting some of the key people who are among the movers and shakers at State as we begin to understand maybe a little bit about what the strategy might be going forward for aid. I think there's still not a lot of clarity is my understanding, but a little bit more than there has been. Can you talk a little bit about kind of some of the key things that you, that you found whilst you were doing that?

[B]

Yeah, sure. And thanks. It's good to be here at this Year in Global Development. It's funny to think. Well, funny. I don't know, it's interesting to think back like a year from now, around that time, I guess, shortly after the election in November that Trump won, I put together a list of like, folks who might be involved in US Foreign aid under a second Trump administration. And very few of them are. So we, we did not see the events of 2025 coming. I don't think anybody did. And it's been hard to scratch beneath the surface and find out who is making decisions, who really does have influence in this administration. And I think that's for, you know, a lot of reasons. One is that we didn't really even know what we were talking about for a long time, as you sort of alluded to. Like, this transition was messy. You know, we had the structure of USAID that was dismantled. Some of the people who were involved in that process have now carried over into the State Department. Some of them haven't. You know, obviously Elon Musk's role in all of this early on was outsized and kind of the balance of power between him and people like Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been hard to sort out, but I think you're right. Like, as you said, now we're sort of getting a clearer picture of what the new structure looks like, and that new structure is starting to move resources and make decisions. So it felt like a good time to kind of take another shot, putting together a list of the people who are involved in these processes and try to do a little bit of service journalism for our community so that they know they can put some faces to the names. And honestly, it's a helpful exercise for me, too, because I think it's fair to say that this State Department and this collection of people has not been the most open and transparent with us, with the press, with the public. And so we've put together kind of a who's who of key players in America First Foreign Aid. I think it may have published by the time this podcast comes out, I'm not entirely sure. And it's sort of our. Our best at mapping the sort of power and influence in, in the foreign aid sector as it, as it exists right now. So it includes a number of familiar faces, some of the real power players in the administration who've had a ton of influence over foreign aid spending. People like Russell Vogt at omb, obviously Secretary of State Rubio, Jeremy Lewin, the acting Undersecretary for Foreign assistance, a lot of folks that people have probably heard of. But then there's sort of another layer that includes, you know, some names that I suspect many in our community will not have associated super closely with foreign assistance yet. And hopefully it'll be, yeah, a helpful list for people to have in their back pocket. Now things change rapidly. We're entering year two. There can oftentimes be some pretty significant turnover and transition. Some of the bureaucratic structures that exist in the foreign aid space are also changing, so we might see some rising and falling. But this is, this is our best take on the people that you need to know right now. And I'm happy to sort of talk a little bit more about some of the characteristics of the list, too, if that would be helpful.

[A]

Yeah, I think so. I think it would be interesting to hear a little bit. Alyssa, you've been doing all sorts of charting what's going on at Stakes, so we'll come through to what you've been finding out in just a second. It would be really interesting to kind of anything that jumped out at you whilst you were writing this. And some you mentioned a couple of people who you think are kind of people of growing influence. People may not be aware of. I'd love to thank those for our listeners.

[B]

So I think there's sort of like there are two main characteristics of the list that kind of jumped out to me. One, and I think this is in keeping with, you know, what we've seen from this administration writ large is it's a list of people who are just sort of deeply intertwined with each other personally and professionally. So there are like, maybe it shouldn't be surprising, but there are a large number of family connections on the list. For example, the person at the Office of Management and Budget who is in charge of the International affairs account is a woman named Amaryllis Fox Kennedy. And it probably won't come as a shock to hear that she is part of the Kennedy family. Married into it. She's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. S daughter in law. She's also a former CIA officer who you can go down rabbit holes with a lot of these folks. But one of her claims to fame in that role was that she covertly recorded an interview with Aung San SUU Kyi, like back when she was under custody. So anyway, she's bringing a unique profile to this space, but also that that connection to the Kennedy family. And then, you know, there are relatives by marriage of the Trump family. You know, folks are probably familiar with Ben Black, who's running the Development Finance Corporation. One of his chief of staff has come over from his former investment firm, Fortinbras Enterprises. You know, there are sort of Trump business associates on the list as well. So that was something that really jumped out to me is it's just, I think that's a difference this time around is that this group has a lot of pre existing connections. And then the second thing that jumped out to me is what I mentioned before, which is just that this is not a group of people that's easy to access. And so I think, you know, that really speaks to the reason that we put this together in the first place was just to do a little bit of demystification. You know, just by contrast, like I think three weeks after Mark Green was in position as the administrator of USAID during the first Trump administration, I was in his office doing an interview. That is not the vibe here at all. These are folks who are harder to reach and oftentimes even harder to discover. And so, yeah, really looking forward to getting some feedback on the list. I'm sure there are people that we missed. So if we did, I hope our readers will let us know. Like, hey, what about this person who's doing X, Y, And Z, like we're looking for that kind of feedback. We're hoping to sort of crowdsource this a little bit because it has been a challenge. But yeah, I hope it's, I hope it's useful.

[A]

One thing that jumped out to me a little bit was not a huge amount of foreign aid experience, not a lot of knowledge. The kind of. You talked about the first Trump administration, some of the people there had some pretty deep knowledge of kind of how things worked in the world of international development. These seem much more like kind of people who've come in from the, from the administration and being told, sort this particular thing out, not people who really understand the subject, they're not subject matter experts.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's, that's absolutely fair and accurate. We did see nominees and appointments sort of from the development community during Trump 1.0. You know, I think it's telling that the person who's been, you know, given the responsibility to essentially lead foreign assistance during Trump 2.0, Jeremy Lewin, is a late 20s something former attorney who was initially tasked with dismantling USAID. So, yeah, it's certainly a different range of experiences this time around.

[C]

Hi, I'm Kate Warren with devex and we are taking a moment to highlight an organization focused on an issue that remains both urgent and difficult to solve. Child exploitation. I'm joined by Boucret Zupplikar, who's the regional director for Asia at Terr d', Homme, Netherlands. Brucera, thank you so much for joining me. So at Terr d', Homme, Netherlands, you focus on enabling systemic change. Can you talk about what that means in the context of child exploitation and why it is so crucial?

[D]

So when we talk about systemic change, we actually mean transforming deeper structures that make lasting improvements and not just treat the symptoms of the problem by addressing it at its roots. So a systemic change approach really focuses on strengthening laws, policies, institutions, and addressing power imbalances that lie essentially at the heart of exploitation. Child exploitation is a very complex, multi layered phenomena and it happens as a result of deep rooted systemic inequalities, power imbalances ranging from social norms to weak laws, gaps in education and awareness and so on. And child exploitation essentially is a result of these several interconnected factors that do not happen in isolation and need really a systemic approach that is holistic and comprehensive enough to enable an ecosystem that can effectively stop exploitation from happening and allow children to flourish.

[C]

And when you break down the system, who are the most influential actors and structures and how do they interact, either protect or endanger Children.

[D]

So when we talk about a system in the context of child child exploitation, essentially we are looking at the interconnected stakeholders and structures that shape a children's safety or vulnerability. These include law enforcement agencies, the government, the parliamentarians, the policymakers, institutions, businesses, families, I would say schools, communities and even criminal networks and perpetuators. So this creates a multi stakeholder ecosystem with various levels and degrees of power and influence that are interlinked. Just to give you an example, strong child protection policies are only effective if the government has enough resources allocated for its implementation. If the police have the capacity and are trained to implement them properly, if families and communities have access to child protection services. So on the other hand, where there is extreme poverty, lack of access to education, and when income relies solely on child labor, where there is very weak to no private sector regulation, then these factors force children into exploitation. And this interlinkage means that even when there is failure in one small part, there is a spillover effect across the whole system. Each of these parts have a role to play. None of them operates in isolation. That's a very important element of the interconnectedness of this ecosystem. And when stakeholders work together and understand the complementarities, institutions become more accountable and the system as a whole operates in.

[C]

Favor of children and tarde. Netherlands has adopted a catalytic approach, so focusing on shifting policies, practices, power, as you just said, rather than say running large on the ground programs. Can you share an example from Asia where this approach has helped move that wider system towards change?

[D]

Yes, thankfully there are several examples in Asia and I'm really proud of every single one of them. So firstly, it's important to understand that Nepal is a country where children are highly vulnerable and face online sexual exploitation on a daily basis. Now, to address this problem, it was very important for children to recognize and be aware of online dangers to their safety. And we wanted to work towards a long term solution to this issue. Therefore, we worked very closely with the National Curriculum Development center in Nepal, involving the Ministries of Education, Communication, Women and children. And as a result of our advocacy, together with our partners, we were able to include education and awareness on protection from online child sexual exploitation in the national school curriculum of Nepal. So this enables a very strong and accountable mechanism within the education system itself that benefit children at a very large scale and our children will be taught online safety in classrooms. Also bringing schools and parents and their communities and caregivers into the dialogue.

[C]

Looking ahead, what needs to change in how governments, civil society, international organizations, all of these stakeholders work together to really create the systemic change and long term protection for children.

[D]

So looking ahead, driving true systemic change to protect children will require much closer collaboration between governments, civil society, law enforcement agencies and international organization. So it's really going back to that ecosystem we spoke about earlier. Governments must strengthen the laws, allocate necessary budgets and resources, and ensure that institutions from the local police to social services are well equipped and capacitated to protect children. But laws only work when civil society and communities also help ensure that they reflect the real needs and when they hold duty bearers to account. So they have a very important role to play. And finally, I would say that for all these actors to work together effectively, they need shared goals and a long term commitment. And we also have to recognize that when each actor brings its strengths, we can all work towards creating the kind of systemic change that can offer real, lasting and positive impact for the lives of children out there.

[C]

Well, Versha, thank you for sharing the important work you're doing to protect children around the world. So thank you for your time today.

[A]

Alessa. So, well, firstly I wondered if you had any thoughts on this. But also you have been doing a huge amount of work on what's been going on at State yourself and you've uncovered some really interesting things. So tell us basically what's going on in your mind about all this stuff? Like what have been your impressions taking a look at this over the last week or so?

[E]

Yeah, no, I mean, I think just to comment on the list, I think it's really helpful. It's also Michael's kind of broken it down into separate categories. So there's kind of the strategists, those like Rubio, the deal makers, the gatekeepers, the implementers. So it's a fun way to kind of try to make sense, as he mentioned, of the inner workings of a very closed off circle. Michael also did mention that a lot of this could change. We're already seeing a lot of kind of talk and back and forth in terms of whether the structure within the State Department is currently in flux. I think that's very much the case we've reported. Especially our food focused reporters, Ayanat Mercy and Tanya Karas have focused on this shift to USDA for food, taking Food for Peace out of the State Department and into usda. So that's one potential shift. There's others. So it's still very much an agency in flux. And I think that's something that we've been trying to kind of peel back the layers at here at Devex, a piece of that fluctuating Puzzle that I looked at this week was staffing. So really kind of looking at the way in which the State Department is one, changing the nature. Obviously they took over what was left of USAID starting July 2nd and really cemented that by early September. And now they're kind of trying to fill out a lot of that, the gaps that were created. So we're seeing a ton of different job postings for really similar USAID style roles like humanitarian program analysts or folks in the financial, the financial space, grant management, et cetera, to sit within various foreign affairs hubs. So there's one in Bogota we're also hearing kind of anecdotally about large swaths of hiring across embassy offices. A lot of former USAID staffers kind of filling gaps again that were created earlier this year. And really kind of the emphasis from the initial, you know, the beginning of this year, especially coming from the messaging from Secretary of State Marco Rubio's office, was a ground up approach. So really focusing on regional offices and making sure that diplomats were kind of empowered to figure out what to do with their own, you know, foreign assistance aims and how that related to embassy aims as well. It doesn't seem like that's fully there yet. It seems like that's very much still a work in progress and we're going to be keeping our eye closely on how those hirings then shape the eventual nature and structure of the State Department and then again how that all feeds into foreign assistance.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, we spent quite a while, you and I, going back and forth trying to work out the scale of this hiring. It's very unclear at the moment. It's the best that we can tell you as an audience. We can only identify directly a relatively small number of jobs, but we're hearing that there's a lot more going on there. What there isn't is anything like the scale of staffing that there was under usaid. Still, they do seem to be moving a little bit back in that direction, but still in order to give away the amounts of aid that they are kind of nominally committed to distributing, they're hugely understaffed. And this, I think remains a very significant problem for any kind of coherent aid effort is there just are not enough people doing it. They do seem to be have identified that and to be moving back in that direction. But we talked a little bit at the very top of the thing about strategy and it just isn't clear to me that there is one, that there is a unified strategy that's actually driving this thinking. It feels Much more as if they never intended to get rid of usaid. It kind of happened by mistake because this kind of emerges from the Susie Wiles interviews, the interviews with Donald Trump's chief of staff, which were published this week. She talks a lot about how it kind of took her by surprise completely that USAID was being disrupted, dismantled in the way that it was, and that it was kind of very much a one man initiative from Elon Musk, who just kind of rushed off and did it all by himself. And it paints a picture of nobody having a really, very clear idea of what they wanted to do when they dismantled it, and no one having really formed a very clear idea of what they want to do afterwards. And all of these reactions, the kind of the individual appointments, the staffing stuff, the funding, seem very much to be a kind of reaction to that.

[B]

There's nothing I want to read more than the full transcripts of the interviews with Susie Wiles as they pertain to usaid, because there's so much glanced at in what appears in the article. You're right, Dave. I was really struck by her willingness to lay so much of this at the hands of Elon Musk. That almost felt like a very intentional move. It's sort of odd for an administration to explain away their own power and decision making to hand that over to somebody else. But then she also sort of like very briefly mentions this larger critique of usaid. There's like a line, no rational person would think that the USAID model was good or something like that. I feel like we only see the very, very tip of the iceberg in what was published there. I also can't recommend enough the piece that Alyssa just wrote on the State Department hiring, because I think it includes there's so much there in terms of the various tensions that are at play right now between the sort of claims of efficiency and the actual workforce shortages. This broader argument that they're doing things completely differently, but they're actually using the same contracting firms to bring in institutional contractors. I think Alyssa should say more about that because it just like having covered these companies like Credence when they were doing the hiring and the institutional contracting for usaid. It's sort of like jaw dropping that the State Department is just using them again. And I think a lot of people who are in those jobs feel similarly. So I'm curious. I'd love to hear a little bit more about those interviews.

[E]

Yeah, definitely. And I think Michael's raised a really, really fascinating point, which was again, looking at these job postings and you're like, oh, these are companies, these are contracting companies that we recognize. And I think, you know, just kind of anecdotally through interviews, hearing about folks that were just saying, like, this is my role, you know, this is the role that I was just fired from or rift from, and now it's being kind of rebuilt. And I think that was. We always expected that, right? We always expected that there would be a complete kind of woodchipper style, as Elon Musk put it, evisceration, and then kind of a rebuilding based on what the administration's priorities were. But this is literally like Michael said, you know, it's, it's following the footsteps of usaid. And I think there's, there's someone in the piece that says, you know, looking in the future, are we just going to be rebuilding back exactly what we lost? And that's kind of what it seems like at the moment. I mean, I think I'm just really keen to know more about what's happening, I think across the world. I think the Washington is one thing. Another thing is, especially in these strategic embassy offices, places like Amman places, you know, we're seeing a lot of foreign aid money, even if it's not high in volume. There was a number of different, there's been a number of different awards going to places like the Philippines, for example. So these places that make sense for American foreign policy interests, I do think are ramping up in a different way. And I'm really curious to just continue digging at that in terms of what that really looks and feels like on the ground level. We've gotten some of that insight, but I think there's a lot more, especially as, again, this is a moving process, right? We're kind of following it as it goes and as it moves. And again, these people haven't been hired yet. You know, these, these posts just went up. These roles just went up. We've seen pretty big contracts for some of these companies being posted online in terms of millions of dollars. And where that money goes and what that will be used for will be something that we're going to be continuing to track. I think the other thing there too is just the fact that at the moment, and we've covered this in the past, the workforce is strange, right? I mean, of course it is. We saw massive layoffs throughout the year. I think the amount, it's a little fuzzy in terms of how many folks were actually brought over from USAID to State. But I think the general thing we're pinning at is somewhere around 600. 600 people, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. That's if we use the lower cap of USAID staff of 10,000, that's 6%. Right. So that's in a tiny, tiny portion of people. And in some places, again like the Ammans, across the East Asia Pacific bureaus, there's quite a lot of foreign aid that's still operating. Right. So you, you have been picking up, or we have been picking up these stories of people that are overworked, people that are kind of burnt out, people that being able or trying to manage this, especially in a lot of really difficult situations, the syrias, the Gaza's, etc. We reported a couple weeks ago on a report that the American Foreign Service association put out, which was a survey about just kind of looking at the workforce. I think they got, you know, a couple thousand members of their, their union organization, so a couple thousand members of the Foreign Service to describe that. And the results were pretty stark. You know, we're talking 98% of people exhibiting low morale, a lot of people wanting to leave the Foreign Service, one in four Foreign Service officers generally that have been booted, including all the USAID staff. So there's a lot going on there, both in terms of capacity, morale, et cetera.

[B]

Maybe this was already out there, Elissa, but I was surprised in your piece to hear that the State Department has also like cut off communication with afsa, the American Foreign Service Association. That's like, that's pretty intense.

[E]

And actually I wasn't aware of this either until talking to them about it. And there's been, they've been involved in an ongoing court case for the past several months because of this. So at the beginning of this year there was an executive order that essentially severed the ties from a number of these union organizations in the national security space of which AFSA was named as one. Typically there would be an individual from the State Department that would go over to afsa, kind of provide the link as a liaison and that would be a seconded position from the State Department. Now they're not recognizing that for this individual. So that's just one example of the way in which things have fractured. And you know, it was simple things like calling them up. You know, the State Department did not respond to requests about just the pure number of staff that one they have, they're hiring for, how many people have come over to usaid. So I went to AFSA to ask that question and I was told, you know, typically in any other year we would be able to Just call them up, get that number for you. They don't answer our calls anymore. So, yeah, you're right. Very stark.

[B]

And it's, we're in good, good company.

[E]

At least we're not alone.

[A]

You're not talking to anybody at all. The other thing, which we did a lot of work on this week and last week, which you did a lot of work on as well, Alyssa, and also our data analysts, Megs and Lexie, was looking at how much they've actually spent and this was really interesting as well. We're seeing a picture, kind of actually, the US government has dispersed more than $30 billion of aid in the last financial year, which seems like a lot more than you would initially expect. Most of that, it turns out, was under Biden because the financial year runs from September. On September, October, November, December and January were all under Biden. So about four months, October, November, December, January were under Biden. And so a lot of that spending, more than half of that spending took place during that period. But still they carried on, as you said, they carried on spending quite a lot of money with ongoing programs. They continued to disperse a lot of cash. What we did see was that essentially they didn't really commit any new aid at all meaningfully. A few bits and pieces, but very only food. Kind of humanitarian disasters, really, between shutting USA down and the start of the next financial year, FY 2026, I should say fiscal year. This is an American podcast, we call them financial years. In the United Kingdom from October 2026, again, they've started to give money away and we're seeing that ramp up. And we've seen so far more than $4 billion in new obligations, almost all for health in that period, which is getting back towards the sort of level you'd expect to see from a US Administration, but still on the low side.

[E]

And I think it was interesting to look at this. We kind of did a breakdown of everything that's been again, this is public information. This is information that we could grasp from my kind of going through the various public statements, our data reporters, going through various portals and tracking funding. And we pulled together this list of what has State spent its money on since the Trump administration. Like Dave said, that really began it was late late July with a grant to the Philippines about mostly economic growth and development aid. And then that kind of, yeah, again, bits and pieces. There were some big kind of multimillion dollar awards in August for food aid, and that was in the form of ready cheese therapeutic food, which we've, we reported on when that all happened. So you can go back in our archives for that. But typically it's kind of short stint humanitarian relief. And we saw that evidenced in Hurricane Melissa which hit the Caribbean last month. And then what we really saw, the tide, when we really saw the tide turning was this month, this December, with these global health compacts, which are health reporters. Sarah and Jenny have done a fantastic job of laying out and just kind of looking at what the, what is in these compacts which are now these big, big, big in many countries, places like Kenya, deals between countries where they also are asking other countries to levy up their additional resources to spend more on the domestic spending in the health realm. So, but between kind of those, those big health grants and the start of this year, it was basically nothing and then small pockets, and now it's ramping up. And you know, the day after that I published this story, we saw another global health contract. And I think actually maybe two or three more has come out since this piece. So it continues, it continues to change and to evolve. And I think for folks like Michael and I who are curious and tracking this stuff, it's, we're really keen to see what January holds as again, more of this structure starts to be kind of created in real time. Right. And it's created with the money. And again, going back to the staffing issue, it's, it's being kind of delivered without the staff to back up that cash. Right. Like who's coordinating that? I think that's a question that we have in terms of who's monitoring this cash. Who's kind of on the back end to make sure that it happens, to make sure those countries actually can have this partnership that they want and make that effective.

[B]

Yeah, you do see the larger price tags now attached to these global health agreements. And I think to me that really just speaks to how important this totally unproven process is for the future of US Global health, US Global development engagement. It's just putting a lot of weight on a super condensed process of hammering out these agreements with countries that are pretty complex and not without some controversy. Like folks have probably seen some of the questions around obligations for sharing health surveillance information that some countries are being asked to include. There's also been some reporting, I think Emily Bass, the PEPFAR journalist, had some reporting recently about including mining provisions in the Zambia agreement and that sort of like throwing a wrench into the gears. So I just, I think it's really important to pay attention, obviously it's really important to pay attention to this global health compact process. But it also is like it's such a large portion of what is actually happening that I think whether or not that process succeeds is going to be one of the sort of defining questions early next year that we'll have to watch really, really closely. And then outside of that, we've seen some sort of one offs, like this grant to zipline that we covered very closely, $150 million to scale up their operations in Africa. The big questions that I've heard about things like that are, and it gets to what you were saying earlier, Dave. What's the strategy behind it? Is it just a kind of like cool grant to zipline, or does this administration have a strategy for global health supply chains that's going to replace the decades of back and forth to put that system together? All of this comes back to the sort of original approach, which was what Susie Wiles talks about in the interviews, like just break it and then put it back together. And I think because of the sort of lack of direct communication and the challenges of sort of engaging with the people involved in this process, we just haven't really had a big opportunity to put that strategic question to them. How does all of this fit together? And I think whether it does or not is going to be kind of like a really defining question for 2026.

[A]

Yeah, you can certainly construct a narrative. Whether it's the correct one or not is extremely hard to discern because we're kind of, we're just, we're watching shadows on the cave wall here and trying to work out what's actually happening inside. You can kind of look at it and say, oh, well, they broke it. They didn't really mean to break it. They did it accidentally. Elon Musk went a bit far and then nobody wanted to admit that they couldn't actually control him and he'd made a complete mess of things. So they pretended it was a good idea and then they were kind of left holding the pieces and going, okay, well we've got to put this together. But they didn't really have the capacity or the skills or the nous or the kind of will to really focus on building a major aid strategy. So yeah, they didn't really seem to have necessarily the kind of the capacity to put it all together. And they then just now going, oh, okay, so what do we need? What do we need? What do we actually need to do in order to solve this sort of stuff? And they're finding, I suspect that a lot of the things that they have to do in order to meet Their strategic kind of needs are exactly what USAID was doing in the first place. And they're putting together a lot of deals in a lot of different places that I suspect are going to end up looking quite a lot like US Aid funding, because US Aid funding was developed directly in response to what the US Identified as its strategic needs. Maybe worth remembering that the United States aid funding was highly earmarked by Congress based on what Congress thought were the right strategic things for the United States to be doing in order to pursue its foreign aid, like its foreign objectives. And presumably those earmarks came from some kind of notion of strategy learned over time. And I suspect as we, as they begin to redevelop the strategy, they'll discover that there were compelling imperatives for all of the things that they were previously doing. That's obviously highly speculative because we don't know what's going on inside the Trump administration. We don't have that clarity of vision to what their thinking is. But that certainly seems like a narrative that may make some sense, and it will.

[B]

I mean, the narrative will take shape around whatever the outcome is. Right. Like, there are two fundamental questions. One is, can the Trump administration, through the State Department, responsibly and effectively manage a US Foreign assistance program? The second is, can they build a system to do that that's better than the one that existed previously? And there's a tension between those two, because the system that existed previously, we all knew what that was. And so you can hire the same contractors to hire people into similar roles and end up with something that kind of does that, and maybe that's the path of least resistance. But their thesis is that that system didn't work very well and that they're capable of doing something different and better. And so I think it's whether they achieve the grand challenge is to achieve both of those things, and whether they do one or the other or both, that's going to make things look different in retrospect.

[A]

And that is indeed the question, how much do they achieve different things that deliver different outcomes? And to what extent do they end up basically recreating exactly what was there before with slightly different names and slightly different structures? Time will tell.

[B]

To be continued.

[A]

Well, hopefully that was an interesting insight into our latest understanding of what's going on in the State Department. We're going to wrap it up there. It just remains for me to say thank you very much to Alyssa and Michael, and thank you very much to all of our listeners who've been faithfully following us all year. It's been a hell of a year. We're wrapping it up here. Happy holidays to all of you, wherever you are. Yes, and we hope that you have a productive and comparatively uneventful 2026.

[E]

Thanks, everybody. Bye. Happy New Year.

[A]

Sa.