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This Week in Global Development
What do Trump's cabinet picks mean for U.S. foreign aid?
00:34:03
As key appointments in the Trump administration come into focus, what will they mean for U.S. foreign aid? With high-profile picks such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and Marco Rubio for secretary of state in the spotlight, all eyes in...
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A
Hi, everyone.
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I'm Rajkumar, president and editor in chief of devex. This week, we'll be breaking down the big headlines in global development and bringing in some top experts to help us do it. If you want to follow along with the stories we're talking about, check out devex.com and subscribe to our daily newsletter, the Newswire. There's a link in the description. Follow us along on Twitter and you can see many of the stories we're talking about today. And we'd love to hear what you think. This is this Week in Global Development.
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A
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of this Week in Global Development, our weekly podcast where we talk about all the headlines in global development. I'm Rajkumar. I'm the president, editor in chief here at devex. And as always, there's a lot to get into. And I'm joined by a colleague, Adva Saldinger, who's with us. Hey, Adva.
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C
Hi, Raj. Good to be with you.
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A
Adva is a senior reporter here at devex. You all know her byline. Well. We're also joined by a special guest who is a returning champion with us often on this podcast. We're thrilled to have her again, Nasra Ismail. Hi, Nasra.
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D
Hi, Raj. Hi, Adva. Happy to be here. Thanks so much.
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A
You are the executive director of US Enterprise at Alite and so much more. You've got so much experience in philanthropy and the NGO world, and we're just thrilled to tap into that today. You know, I guess we've got to start with the big story everybody's, you know, focused on and talking about, which is the incoming Trump administration. I mean, there's still several weeks before they're here, but every day there's a new announcement of appointees. Few of them are relevant to our space, but some of them are. You know, we've heard about RFK Jr. Who's going to be the new head of the Health and Human Services. We'll assume he gets confirmed. We've heard of Marco Rubio, who would be the new secretary of State, assuming he gets confirmed, which is obviously very likely since he's a member of the Senate right now. But we haven't gotten some of the other big appointments, and devex has been doing some reporting on this. Maybe Adv, I can just turn to you to share with people what our colleague Michael Igoe came up with and sort of where we stand in the appointment sweepstakes that everybody is very focused on right now.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I've been thinking about with this incoming administration is that in many ways it seems like personnel will be policy. Who is in place is going to matter a lot and will probably give us some insights into the directions that some of these agencies will take. So if you missed it, and why.
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A
Do you think that? I mean, because I agree with you completely. But you might say, well, that could have been the same with Joe Biden. What's different in a Trump administration, you think?
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C
Yeah, I think what's different is that there are sort of, there's a big question about whether you get someone who might want to come in and make some reforms to usaid, but believes in the value of global development and US engagement on development issues and will sort of go to bat for funding even I would expect reforms. I think we can expect sort of a return to this idea of a journey to self reliance, to really put countries on a path to economic development, a focus on sort of private sector led development concepts. But there is also a chance that depending on who goes in there, it's going to be someone who will be incredibly disruptive to usaid, to the USAID establishment and maybe even will want to in an extreme scenario, do away with the agency. Right. So I think that's. That the stakes seem higher because who is in that job might dictate more minor bureaucratic, et cetera, changes or some really dramatic changes to the way the aid infrastructure works.
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A
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think the range of possibilities in a Trump administration are just a lot wider than they would be under a more conventional administration, Republican or Democrat, where you tend to have a sense of what the guardrails are. And here it feels like, boy, it could really go in a lot of different directions. Some of them could be very good and very positive for the development community. I mean, the first Trump administration we saw the BUILD act and the, the creation of the Development Finance Corporation, something that's pretty widely lauded among development professionals. So it's not as though it all has to be bad. But that wide range of possibilities does mean, I think, as you say, about the people that potentially get selected really matter here because they, you know, they could have a lot more voice with the Hill, let's say. And the Hill is going to be Republican. You know, it's going to have, both houses of Congress will be Republican. So somebody who can go and, and defend their agency or present and promote a really big reform of their agency might, they might have a chance to actually make something happen there in a way you wouldn't see under a more conventional administration.
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C
I want to add one thing which I think is that the idea that there are things at USAID within the aid establishment that need to be reformed, it's not just a Republican idea. There are people who believe that the system does not function well. And the reality is, is that we haven't had like a new authorization or really an update to the system in decades. Right. So I think that's one important things to think to note that there could be bipartisan cooperation on some of these changes on reforms. And we have seen a bill come out of Senator Coons office that would tackle some of these issues and I think that will be reintroduced in the next Congress as well.
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D
Well, yeah, I would agree. I have to sort of not think about all the worries I had as a young bureaucrat. But you know, these decisions at this moment, you know, Trump 2.0, there's just so much that could happen. And so I think our ability to predict, our ability to feel a little bit more what kind of, you know, values, what kind of opportunities for innovation, our tools don't seem to be working. And I think it induces anxiety. I could imagine anybody in some of the big agencies are full of anxiety depending on who might come and what that means in an era where we're still in post pandemic, in an era where, as you say, Raj, the powers are really leaning, leaning on one end. And you know, as a former bureaucrat, I think about my colleagues, my former friends, diplomats, careerists. Do they have ownership here in the stake? Do they have a say or will we see like I saw most of my friends and state departments in mcc, in USAID actually leave the, leave the federal government. I worry about that. I worry about that as somebody who knows some of the issues we're dealing with in the world are worse today than they were in 2015, 2016. They're much more complicated. There is a need for reform. I agree, Adva, but what that reform looks like and what it does to careerists, I think that's definitely an area full of anxiety for all of us who were in or are now in government. Not to mention Elon Musk and all the other things that he has in mind if he gets into this efficiency portfolio of his.
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Right. I think it's very well said. And I think a lot of people I talk to are concerned that the idea of reform is being used as kind of a stalking horse for something much more fundamental, which is just dramatically weakening and even just completely removing the power of the development institutions and agencies and the idea behind them that you can talk about reform because there is such a need for it and there is bipartisan consensus, so you can kind of use it as a fig leaf to cover what you're really doing. And I don't know the numbers, but I am hearing that's right to your point of people saying under Robert F. Kennedy leading the Health and Human Services Agency, you're going to see a lot of career level people leave, which is sort of what some members of the Trump world want to see happen anyway. I mean, that's a big part of what many people in his orbit have been pushing for. So you may get to that goal and then what does it mean for these agencies and their work if you really undermine their core capabilities? So I agree that that's one of the things we'll be looking for. And, and I think, and again, talking to people at some of these agencies myself, including career people, one of the things that they're looking to is who gets appointed.
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D
Right.
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Because that does send a signal like, do I want to work for that person? You know, and, and if you really feel you don't, that they don't have your best interests or your agency's best interests in mind, that might spur a lot of people to seek early retirement or, or just move on.
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D
Yeah, yeah. And, and how those decisions are being made, I think we would, it would benefit the development, the global development community, because I think the knowledge that has been sustained in our sector, we cannot lose. We cannot lose because the complexities on the ground are too much. They require essential expertise of how things in the past were done. We don't necessarily want all newbies, all reformists. There is such a thing as institutional knowledge that will help us shape a better world. I looked at the figures for the Global humanitarian overview. It's $47 billion. We will. We need collaboration, we need better ideas. We need different kind of thinkers and different reformers. But I really hope I put my prayer. I'm a praying person, but I put it on bipartisan leadership. People who can navigate and people who can really think about good ideas and not just scoring goals for which party or the other.
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A
I mean, when you adva. When you look at the people, we've referred to it already that our colleague Michael Igoe put together this great piece looking at who could some of the people be that get appointed. And it's not just, you know, him imagining it. This is based on a lot of deep reporting and talking to a lot of people in Trump world. And obviously that story is really making the rounds in D.C. but around and really in capitals all over the world because people want to know.
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C
Yeah. And I've heard from people on the list who are happy that we put this out there and are happy to have been included in the list as well. I wanted to add one note because on this issue of sort of career staff at agencies, one of the people that's on this list is Max Permarak, who's one of Project 2025's lead authors. We've written about his ideas, we've interviewed him at devex. But one of the things he said over and over is that he thinks that the entire aid industry is sort of a one party industry. And I think one of the things we've heard and if he is in the mix pushing policies, is that there could be an effort to put in place a lot more political appointees to, you know, sort of. Right. That balance of what he sees as sort of the entire aid industry being a one party industry. But if we want to talk about some of the sort of other big names, some of the.
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A
Well, I just want to say I think that could happen regardless of who becomes the administrator because that might be more of a government wide plan. Right. That could be run out of the White House. So, you know, you could say the same thing for probably a number of other agencies. HHS might be another example that is very much in our wheelhouse. And so I wouldn't be surprised even if you ended up with a somewhat more conventional pick to run usaid, that Max's idea might still obtain there for sure.
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D
Yeah. One of the other names that I saw and I think, you know, there's always depending on your values, depending on which camp you're in. I mean, there's certain people that are essential that have so much expertise, even if they lead with, you know, a different kind of policy, a conservative policy. But to see David Beasley on that list was a sigh of relief for me, just as somebody who we know the reforms that he had brought for WFP and what he's done also for his own state here in the US and what he could do, both domestic and international. So I actually, I love the list. I love how colorful it was. I love how, you know, grand. You never really know which one of these people or which few of them will color what foreign assistance looks like, but also what domestic issues ultimately shape up to be.
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Well, go ahead.
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I mean, I think obviously we can't predict anything, but I think There's a couple other names that are probably worth noting because we know that they've been having conversations with the transition team about USAID or other roles. One of those names is Sean Cairncross, who was the CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and Trump's first administration. Though his path to actually leading that agency was pretty tumultuous, and for about two years, his nomination languished in the Senate. It was drawn out. MCC had a bunch of leaders in that time, which was kind of disruptive to the institution. But I interviewed him when he was leading mcc. I think he was quite passionate about the agency and the agency's work. Another couple names that I want to just put out there, David Bohegian, he was sort of the acting CEO and number two at opic, and then led the transition and sort of BUILD act implementation at dfc. And so he's also sort of in the max. I had a chance to talk to him this week, actually, for a story I'm working on that'll be out next week about the DFC's first five years. So we'll see. I mean, I think that's also a place where maybe he won't be USAID administrator, but maybe he would go to dfc. Another person on this list is Representative Ted Yoho, and Yoho is one of the architects in Congress of the BUILD act that created the dfc. I think leading the DFC is a job he'd probably like and is going for, so I think that's maybe the more natural fit for him. He has continued to be involved in a lot of advocacy, especially this year, around DFC reauthorization. And, you know, I mean, I.
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A
He fits the trend of Floridians getting all the appointments.
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C
Absolutely. One of the things that has always sort of stuck in my memory is I interviewed Ted Yoho fairly early on when he was still in Congress, sort of as some of this BUILD act, some stuff was getting done, just about sort of the way he thinks about foreign aid. And he's a veterinarian, which I think is important for this thing. But he was saying that when he came into Congress, he basically ran on a platform to essentially euthanize foreign aid. And then he came in and he's like, look, when you see an animal, you diagnose the challenge, the problem. And, well, you don't first say, let's just kill this animal. You try to actually fix whatever is ailing. And so I think he came in and said, well, wait, let's actually try and reform foreign aid because there's actually a lot of benefit to it. And I think his philosophy and what we'll likely see in this administration is really a focus on sort of this journey to self reliance, moving countries from an aid relationship to a trade relationship. It's something that we've heard from a number of the people on this list, including someone like Marco Rubio in the past, who I think has sort of stood stress this idea that some of former biggest aid recipients are now some of the top 10 trading partners for the US and I think arguments like that, the sort of economic case could hold some water.
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A
Well, and I think Ted brings a faith perspective to this, too.
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C
He does.
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And I think historically Republicans, especially in the George W. Bush administration, where the president himself brought that perspective, historically that faith approach has led to significant Republican support for things like PEPFAR and other foreign aid initiatives. And I think he, he fits in that camp somewhat, whereas I think there's others in the Trump orbit who take a much different perspective, you know, much more of a bilateral American power perspective, an anti China perspective, or just a cut government, shrink it, you know, fight the deficit kind of perspective. So everybody brings their own lens. And maybe Ted has a few of those, but I think a faith perspective is an important one for him.
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A
You mentioned Sean Caracross, and obviously we've, you know, we mentioned a whole bunch of names on the, on this list that could end up in different positions. But at least the rumor mill seems to put him in a very powerful position for usaid. Yeah, along with David.
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C
That's what I've heard as well.
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Yeah, along with David Beasley as well. And I think everybody is trying to read in well, what would that mean exactly? You know, you know, and that's right, you referred to this, you were at the mcc, you know yourself. So you have a sense of what, you know, what the differences between running an institution like MCC versus something much larger like USAID with a very different remit.
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D
Absolutely. Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So it'll be interesting. Yeah. And to see these folks come in again, these are not young institutions. I mean, MCC is just coming up on 20 years. So it's just a little bit over 20 years, you know, 50 plus years for USAID. So how you handle these long standing institutions, even if you want to do a reform, you know, you've only got four years. So. So I think balancing that desire for big change with an ability to endure some of our greatest institutions and, and to be present around the world. I wasn't here in 2016, I was serving abroad. I was in Mogadisho and Nairobi. And I also remember a little bit of a relief from countries around the world saying the US Is more concerned about itself domestically, so the heat is off of us. So there's also sort of that perspective of what's welcomed around the world and what, and what shape and what relationship could be perhaps redrawn and rebalanced to see what countries are also looking for in terms of how American foreign policy shapes itself in this century. But with Sean Cross and with the mcc. I hate to say it, but yeah, some of my friends are still in therapy about that appointment.
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A
Well, one of the things about Sean that's a little bit different, he came out of the White House, he did have a career as a senior staffer. That's right, in the Senate. So he has some Hill relationships. But the Hill could be particularly important now, whenever you talk about reform. Yeah, significant budget cuts. These are all, you know, congressional mandates, basically. And there's a lot you could do with executive power, but there's a lot that's going to end up being on the plate of members of Congress and Senators. And David Beasley, of course, if it were him, he's got really deep relationships. He never served in those bodies. He's a former governor. But you saw when he was World Food Program executive director, the depth of his relationships that led to historic fundraising for wfp. So I think I could imagine those Hill relationships ending up defining the agency differently depending on who gets appointed and how much of a role the Hill ends up taking. And of course, this is a new thing to have a Subcommittee for Government Efficiency Doge, that's a very different thing. And one of the things I'm looking out for we've seen a bit of it already from Elon Musk, but the aid world is a really easy world to go and cherry pick things that sound really negative. And this was done in the UK very successfully by conservatives there. The Daily Mail kind of led the charge. But, you know, they would find things like the Ethiopia Spice Girls. You remember that story where there was a band, you know, an all girls band in Ethiopia that was really promoting gender equality and reproductive care and all kinds of important things that had a really important development and health benefit and you could argue was a really good investment for UK taxpayers, a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, but it made for a great headline and it led to them cutting the funding for the Ethiopia Spice Girls. But that just, that becomes like a way of cutting much more funding, you know, and we've already seen a bit of this on Musk's X account. And I think you may see more and more of this happen. And so then it matters are the appointees people who can defend their agency against that or who can play ball by cutting certain things that are politically unpopular, but protect other things. And I think that's where a lot of the names that you see on Michael's list matter. You know, as you kind of analyze how would they react to suddenly being in the news, you know, in a, in a really big way, how would they be able to respond to that?
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D
And I would even say there's a need to be super careful. This is not Silicon Valley. The US government is much more complicated. It does have a lot of rules. It could use some efficiency and some cleanup, but actions have perverse effects as well. Protection is a really important protection and safeguarding are really important. So just slashing budgets for the sake of slashing budgets or threatening to do away with longstanding agencies that could use some fixing, could use some reform. We also have to take a different perspective and say what harms would come with such swift actions? What is the accountability? What does it look like in that you're dealing with folks that are responsible for very complicated, often human, that will impact human lives both here in the US and abroad. And so I caution against, again, Silicon Valley, easy. Fire people on zoom. Fire people in a really radical way. And saying the US government is not something to play with, despite the need that we all have across parties to make it leaner, meaner, and make it fit for the future and for the complexities of climate and famines and wars that we're dealing with.
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C
One thing which I think is that Congress could also stand in the way of some of the work of this department. Congress appropriates money and they typically really want to see the money spent where they're saying it should be spent. And so if you start seeing, you know, dramatic programs cut or huge swaths of people being fired as some of the recommendations, I think you could see pushback in Congress on some of those things. So I think that's one thing to note and I think the other thing to just think about is whether the priority, you know, where the priorities will be of this department and it could land on the foreign aid, foreign policy world, we don't really know yet. But some of it I think is also going to be on reducing government regulation, because I think that's at the heart of this initiative as well. It's not just about reducing staffing, it's about reducing regulation, probably mainly for corporates.
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A
In the U.S. yeah, I think that's all well said. I just think politically, a lot of the salience, the stories that do really well are the stories that come out of agencies like usaid, like MCC or you can cherry pick something that out of context sounds like, what a waste of American money. Why are we spending that?
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C
Absolutely.
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D
I mean, I think great for media.
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C
Yeah. No, and we've, we've saw an early example already where Elon Musk retweeted a post saying that a certain position at the DFC should be eliminated. And, you know, I mean, I think that ended up being kind of an attack on this particular individual, which was probably pretty difficult for her. The agency hasn't really commented on that, which is, I suppose, understandable. But things like that, picking, oh, this job title seems like it would be useless. It's like how much research went into determining whether that is actually an important position or not. My understanding is that this is someone who is actually like, you know, bringing in a lot of business to the DFC and you know, otherwise doing a good job. But, but I do think there have been programs and you've seen this in some attacks in Congress as well. And some of the testimonies, particularly in the budget, budget hearings around, you know, targeting programs like why is USAID paying for a drag queen show? Or something like that. And in fact, some of these things are like maybe things that were proposed but never funded, but they part of the sort of conversation and gin up a lot of attention and then distrust. So I think you're right on in saying that it could just become part of this. There are some easy targets. So I think there's a question also for the agency about how to position things, what to call things, what language they're using and describing the programs.
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A
Yeah, it's going to put a lot of onus on news organizations like us to try to report what's real, what is being ginned up, what is the scale of some of the things that are being talked about. And because you're right, so much of this is going to play out in the media and particularly in social media, I think more than anywhere. We're fast running out of time. Not a surprise that we could talk for a really long time about what a new Trump administration would mean. But adval, let me turn to you for other stories that we've published this week that you might want our listeners to be aware of.
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C
One of the things I wanted to just flag is that obviously one of the big events that's happening this week is the World Bank's IDA replenishment. That's the World Bank's fund for the poorest countries. And you know, I think some people might wonder like why, why does IDA matter? I mean, one, there's a podcast that I recorded a few months ago you can go listen to for a more in depth answer. But one of the things that stuck with me from those conversations was a conversation with a minister from an IDA country who basically told me that like her country would perish without ida. So these are resources that to the poorest countries in the world are really fundamental in providing basic services for their people. What's at stake is that the World bank is hoping this will be the biggest IDA replenishment ever. They're hoping to have $100 billion replenishment that there have been a lot of calls for that to be 120 billion. So I know they're trying to stretch to that because of the way they are able to raise funds on the capital markets. To achieve that number, they probably need 27, 28 billion dollars from donors. This has been kind of an unprecedented replenishment in that we have seen actually a lot of early pledges. Most of the time you actually don't know very much until the replenishment conference itself. So we do know that some donors have come in with really significant increases and sort of Denmark led the way at the UN General assembly, but we've seen sort of a steady stream and from sort of newer donors. Croatia had a really significant over 100% increase in their contribution. The UK just announced their contribution, which was a significant increase, though important to note that it was below their IDA 19. They very much slashed funding at the last IDA. So it's still well below what it was prior to that cut. But I think some people going into this week were saying that there are some positive signs there. And on the policy side, this IDA is really, I think, going to give more flexibility to countries to determine where funding is going to go. There are less policy prescriptions in the policy package than there have been before. Sort of part of this broader effort by the World bank to cut down on red tape and improve efficiency. So we'll see how some have some of those things go. I will, I will say that there are some experts, particularly in the gender space, who are skeptical about not having specific targets on gender. And so we'll see how sort of this, this new iteration plays out. And I expect that tomorrow morning, South Korea time will learn what that final number is.
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A
I think I like the optimism and I'm hearing some of that too about this replenishment. And I generally think that in the new era, we're entering the new kind of political era, we're entering the millennial. The multilateral development banks are probably going to do pretty well, certainly in comparison to UN agencies and other kinds of multilateral institutions that are not finance focused. I think the DFIS will probably do reasonably well compared to bilateral grant organizations like USAID and mcc. So, but that said, it's hard to avoid the fact that they kicked off the meetings yesterday when the coup happened. The coup, the martial law was declared in Seoul. Right. Like literally it happened the same night. And they had to declare, they had to tell all the delegation, like, we can assure you of your safety. I mean, this is crazy.
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C
Yeah. In the opening. That's exactly what they said in the opening.
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A
The same day that the French government falls. Right. Because they can't get together a budget.
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C
And one of the big things we don't know is what that French contribution is going to be. And they've historically been one of the biggest donors to ida. I mean, it is a Christmas time.
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A
And this is just weeks after the German government is effectively become a lame duck government. They're not going to elections until early next year. So we're in a situation where the biggest donors that you can count on, the us, the uk, Germans, the French and even the emerging donors like South Korea, it's a very important donor now in a few billion dollars a year they do in foreign assistance. You really can't count on them in the way that you used to be able to for things like an IDA replenishment, which given what you Just talked about Nestor, the humanitarian need in the countries that are IDA recipients. It should be such a no brainer that this is a, this is an area where all the countries get together and but, but you know, it's hard not to look at the situation and see how fragile it really is or.
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C
Will these commitments hold Right. Like in the US that is a really big question. The Biden administration is making the pledge they've said for $4 billion for IDA. There is a big question about whether Trump comes in and decides that that is not a number that his administration wants to follow through on. And we actually had this same situation back when the Trump administration came into power. Last time the Obama administration had made a pledge, Trump came into power and he did decrease the IDA contribution but it wasn't by a huge amount. I think it was by a couple, maybe $200 million a year or something like that. And so you know, could that happen again? Could it be a more dramatic decline? We don't know. And I think to your point, maybe this is also going to really shake up. Who are the biggest donors in the IDA replenishment? We don't know China's contribution but they could sort of catapult up the list of biggest, biggest IDA donors, especially if some of the more big traditional donors don't contribute as much this time around. And it is like the math is also challenging. Big donors like Japan are facing really significant currency devaluation in comparison to the dollar which means that for them they have to come up with like, I don't know, a 20, 30% increase just to match with where they were last time.
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A
Right. Measured in dollars. And by the way, that's another Trump effect. Right? Because when Trump won and everyone realized like oh he could put through all these tariffs, the US dollar dramatically strengthened and the yen went to north of 150 to the dollar. So a lot of these are trends that are connected to some of the political shifts we're seeing.
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C
Absolutely, absolutely.
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D
I would even say, not that this is going to provide any sort of calm, but I think it was the ARG when he opens up the opening of the 2025 Global Humanitarian Outlook with the world is on fire. I mean I think there's significant need to pay attention to what countries are doing not only on debt and financing but also on some of these other unpredictable. But you know, with significant impact. Policies are going to be coming here and personnel is policy. I think we have to come back to that. Not that there isn't any levity in these podcasts I also want to say, if you are down, it is the holidays. Go ahead and watch Wicked. I promise you. I know I'm getting smiles from Adva and Raj, but yeah, I think we're looking in a time where everybody's going to have to find their inner Alphabet and lead and show up in a very different way. But it's going to be quite lonely, maybe more sad. But when when the arc says, you know, the world is on fire, I think there's a seriousness there. But at the same time, find hope and find levity where you can.
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A
I think that's a good message. This, this new era may be a lot of things. One is it will not be boring. That's for sure.
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D
No, for sure.
- [33:12]
A
And. And so this podcast will come back next week and we'll have lots more along these lines to talk about. We might have some of these appointments by then to even get into very specifically. So just a big thank you to Adva Salvinger and Nasser Ismail. This has been another episode of this Week in Global Development. Thanks.
- [33:29]
D
Thank you.
- [33:29]
C
Thanks, Raj.
- [33:36]
A
This has been this Week in Global Development.
- [33:39]
B
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe using the link in the description to get even more coverage and analysis on the most pressing development issues of the day. Become a Devex Pro member by going to devex.com membership and signing up. Thank you for listening and see you next week.