Two stories from a USAID career

by Doug Muir on February 18, 2025

“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.

I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID.  There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies.  It’s pretty depressing.  

So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.


The political one first.  I worked for years in the small former Soviet republic of Moldova.

Moldova | History, Population, Map, Flag, Capital, & Facts | Britannica

Moldova happened to be one of the few parts of the old USSR suitable for producing wine.  The other was Georgia, in the Caucasus.

The Soviets, in their central planning way, decided that both Moldova and Georgia would produce wine — but Georgia would produce the good stuff, intended for export and for consumption by Soviet elites.  Moldova would produce cheap sweet reds, which is what most Russians think wine is.

Red Wine KAGOR Sobor Red Edition Sweet 0.75 L 11.5% Vol Wine : Amazon.de:  Grocery

So for decades, Moldova produced bad wine and nothing but bad wine.  But Russians liked it, so that was okay.

Then the USSR collapsed.  And, well, Moldova continued to produce nasty cheap sweet reds, because that was all they could do.   By the turn of the century, wine was Moldova’s single biggest cash export.  And about 80% of that wine went straight to Russia.

This continued through the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia.  Back in 2003 or so, he wasn’t invading Russia’s neighbors… but he was already swinging a big stick in Russia’s “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics that he thought should still be under Russia’s thumb.  Which absolutely included Moldova.

So whenever the Moldovan government annoyed or offended Putin… or whenever he just wanted to yank their chain… the Russian Ministry of Health would suddenly discover that there was a “problem” with Moldovan wine.  And imports would be frozen until the “problem” could be resolved.  Since wine was Moldova’s biggest export, and most wine went to Russia, this meant that Russia could inflict crippling damage on Moldova’s economy literally at will.  

Stream Pain dial turndown ! by John Rothery | Listen online for free on  SoundCloud

This went on for over a decade, with multiple Moldovan governments having to defer to Moscow rather than face crippling economic damage.

Enter USAID.  Over a period of a dozen years or so, USAID funded several projects to restructure the Moldovan wine industry. 

They brought in foreign instructors to teach modern methods.  They worked with the wine-growers to develop training courses.  They provided guarantees for loans so that farmers could buy new equipment.  They helped Moldovan farmers get access to new varieties of grapes… you get the idea.


How to grow vines at home - Montemaggio

(By the by, the wine project was not my project. But it was literally up the street from my project.  It was run by two people I know and deeply respect — one American, one Moldovan — so I had a ring-side seat for much of this.)

The big one was, they worked with the Moldovans on what we call market linkages.  That is, they helped them connect to buyers and distributors in Europe, and figure out ways to sell into the EU.  I say this was the big one, because on one hand the EU is the world’s largest market for wine!  But on the other hand, exporting wine into the EU is really hard.  There are a bunch of what we call NTBTs — “non-tariff barriers to trade”.  For starters, your wine has to be guaranteed clean and safe according to the EU’s very high standards.  That means it has to consistently pass a bunch of sanitary and health tests, and also your production methods have to be certified.  Then there are a bunch more requirements about bottling, labelling and packaging. 

Regulation of wine labeling in the EU - CASALONGA

The EU regulates the hell out of all that stuff.  Like, the “TAVA” number?  There’s a minimum font size for that.  If you print it too small, it’ll be bounced right back to you.  The glass of the bottle?   Has to be a sort that EU recycling systems can deal with.  The adhesive behind the label?  It can be rejected for being too weak (labels fall off) or too strong (recycling system can’t remove it).  There are dozens of things like that.

And then of course they had to do marketing.  Nobody in Europe had heard of Moldovan wines!  Buyers and distributors had to be talked into taking a chance on these new products.  This meant the Moldovan exporters needed lines of credit to stay afloat.  This in turn meant that Moldovan banks had to be talked into… you get the idea.

This whole effort took over a decade, from the early 2000s into the teens.

And in the end it was a huge damn success.  With USAID help, the Moldovan wine industry was completely restructured.  Moldova now exports about $150 million of wine per year, which is a lot for a small country — it’s over $50 per Moldovan.  And it went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%.  Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East.  

Chateau Purcari Negru de Purcari Red Wine Dry from Moldova 0.75 L :  Amazon.de: Grocery

(If you’re curious: their market niche is medium to high end vins du table.  Not plonk, not fancy, just good midlist wines.  I can personally recommend the dryer reds, which are often much better than you’d expect at their price point.)

Russia tried the “ooh we found a sanitary problem” trick one last time a few years ago.  It fell completely flat.  Putting aside that it was an obvious lie — if something is safe for the EU, believe me, it is safe for Russia — Moldovan wine exporters had now diversified their markets to the point that losing Russian sales was merely a nuisance.  In fact, the attempt backfired: it encouraged the Moldovans to shift their exports even further away from Russia and towards the EU.

So that’s the political story.  Russia had Moldova on a choke chain.  Over a dozen years or so, USAID patiently filed through that chain and broke Moldova loose.  Soft power in action.  It worked.

Nobody knows this story outside Moldova, of course. 

Okay, that’s the political story.  Here’s the personal one.

Some years ago, I moved with my family to a small country that was recovering from some very unpleasant history.  They’d been under a brutal ethnically-based dictatorship for a while, and then there was a war.  So, this was a poor country where many things didn’t work very well.

While we were there, my son suddenly fell ill.  Very ill.  Later we found out it was the very rapid onset of a severe bacterial infection.  At the time all we knew was that in an hour or two he went from fine to running a super high fever and being unable to stand up. Basically he just… fell over. 

Wham, emergency room.  They diagnosed him correctly, thank God, and gave correct treatment: massive and ongoing doses of antibiotics.  But he couldn’t move — he was desperately weak and barely conscious — and there was no question of taking him out of the country.  We had to put him in the local hospital for a week, on an IV drip, until he was strong enough to come home.

If you’ve ever been in a hospital in a poor, post-war country… yeah at this point someone makes a dumb joke about the NHS or something.  No.  We’re talking regular blackouts, the electricity just randomly switching off.  Rusting equipment, crumbling concrete, cracked windows.  A dozen beds crammed into a room that should hold four or five. Everything worn and patched and held together with baling wire and hope.   



We’re talking so poor that the hospital didn’t have basic supplies.  Like, you would go into town and buy the kid’s medication, and then you’d also buy syringes for injections — because the hospital didn’t have syringes — and then you’d come back and give those thing to the nurse so that your kid could get his medication. 

In the pediatric ward, they were packing the kids in two to a bed. Because they didn’t have a lot of rooms, and they didn’t have a lot of beds. And kids are small, yeah?  

But there we were.  So into the hospital he went.  Here’s a photo:

— Take a moment and zoom in there.  Red-white-and-blue sticker, there on the bed?  It says “USAID:  From The American People”.

Every hospital bed in that emergency room had been donated by USAID.  I believe they were purchased secondhand in the United States, where they were old and obsolete.  But in this country… well, they didn’t have enough beds, and the beds that they had were fifty years old.  Except for those USAID beds.  Those were (relatively) modern, light and adjustable but sturdy, and easily mobile.  The hospital staff were using them to move kids around, and they were getting a lot of mileage from them.

And of course, every USAID bed had that sticker on it.  And so did some other stuff.  There was an oxygen system that a sick toddler was breathing from.  USAID sticker.  Couple of child-sized wheelchairs.  USAID stickers.  Secondhand American stuff — USAID was under orders to Buy American whenever possible — but just making a huge, huge difference here.

As I said, it was crowded in there.  Lots of beds, lots of kids, lots of anxious parents.  So we got to talking with the other parents, as one does.  A couple of people had a little English.  And so my wife mentioned that we were here working on a USAID project…

…and god damn that place lit up like an old time juke box.  “USAID!”  “USAID!”  People were pointing at the stickers, smiling.  “USAID!”   “America, very good!”  “Thank you!”  “USA!  USA!”  “Thank you!”

This went on longer than most of us would find comfortable.  When it finally settled down… actually, it never really did entirely settle down.  For the whole time our son was there, we had people — parents, nurses, even the hospital janitor — smiling at us and saying “USAID!”  “Very good!”  “Thank you!”

I’m not prone to fits of patriotic fervor.  But I’m not going to lie: right then it felt good to be American.

Anyway, USAID stories.  I could go on at considerable length.  This is my career, after all!  I could tell more stories, or comment and gloss at greater length on these.

But this is long enough already.  More some other time, perhaps.





 

{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }

1

CityCalmDown 02.18.25 at 11:00 pm

Perhaps because it’s beyond the horror-pain threshold for many people to contemplate, but it seems quite clear that the trumpmusk tyranny are quite aware of the suffering and death that their swathing cuts will cause both domestically and internationally.
Not fully aware as authentic knowledge is an epiphanic, enlightened state of that both halves of the tyranny have been mentally and morally disabled from attaining for the entirety of their wretched lives. But they know enough that they fully aware that they can enact their neo-fascist eugenics program via these means. They know the suffering and death that they are causing and are enacting this death-squad policy, not by accident but as precisely their goal.

There will be blowback, including in the form of the terrorism of the sort that the CIA envisaged when they came up with the word “blowback”. But naturally trumpmusk possess such a supreme ignorance of the way the world works that such a possibility cannot have ever passed their benighted, abyssal minds.

The ease with which Musk bought his position, and the brutal simplicity of his program, is due to the fact this path of action is, after all, a simple extension of the reigning oligarchical neo-liberal slash-and-burn ideology. trumpmusk’s modus operandi carries with it all of the momentum of this neo-liberal historical-systemic weight. As a form of hyper-neoliberalism, this also indicts the Democrats whose socio-economic policies and ideology have been in lockstep with those of the GOP. As such, the Democrats are rendered the heavily compromised and morbidly feeble opposition that they have proven to be so far. This applies to both their pitiable fecklessness in these early months of the trumpmusk tyranny and a fortiori during the mentally sclerotic, morally moribund ancien regime admin. of Butcher Biden the Genocidaire of Gaza. Always overshadowed by the threat of trump, Biden had the choice of being an opposition or of being an open door. Senile demented old fool that he was, Biden lacked the dexterity for anything other than path-dependent bourgeois-liberal prize idiocy.

2

ljsjl 02.19.25 at 12:33 am

Thanks Doug. I could stand to read as many of these accounts as you could bear to write! They are valuable context to what most of us only encounter as headline figures situated in a political contest.

3

Matt 02.19.25 at 12:57 am

Back when I used to live in Russia (1999-2001) and later spend a fair amout of time in fairly regularly (2001 – around 2010), I drank a fair amount of Moldovan wine. Even early on, you could find dry wine from Moldova, if you looked. It wasn’t great wine, but it was cheap and typically not worse than bad French wine you could by for a lot more money. I had long hoped they’d be able to turn towards the EU, so I’m glad to see that they have been able to do so. I do remember at one point Russia saying they wouldn’t allow in Moldovan wine because it had too much pesticide on it, and the relevant Moldovan official pointing out that they had not been able to afford to buy pesticides since the fall of the Soviet Union, so this was obviously false. It was very typical – an obvious political ploy.

I have a friend – a former colleague from the Peace Corps – who had just started in a USAID position in Kenya at the start of the year, and had moved her family, including a school-aged kid, there. I think she’s a government employee, not a contractor, but I’m not completely sure. They are in total limbo now, for no plausible reason at all. It’s also so terrible and depressing.

4

paul beard 02.19.25 at 2:28 am

Perhaps the feckless Dems will understand how much power they have, should they ever regain control.

But this post documents the incredible wealth of intergenerational goodwill the US taxpayer has created over decades. The ROI on every dollar spent on USAID vs the DoD would be incredible to see, had we a way to measure the value of human lives improved vs assets/resources secured through “force projection.”

I have no idea how many will die from the Trump/Melon Husk onslaught, but whether it’s hundreds or millions, I want their names and faces to appear next to the lists of names. Someone in this community could write a historical précis from 100 years in tech future…let them know how they will be seen, as wreckers and vandals and murderers of millions.

5

dk 02.19.25 at 2:58 am

Billionaires get off on exploiting the suffering of others. That’s part of the selection process for becoming a billionaire.

6

Alan White 02.19.25 at 4:00 am

What wonderfully detailed and impactful stories. But of course this will mean nothing to MAGA, and USAID destruction. We are in the transformation of the USA to a dictatorship, and seemingly nothing can stop it. Blaming Biden is a non-starter–inflation and the merely mild discomfort of the American electorate brought us here. Of course aided by the Goebbels’ FOX-“News” distortions of facts. The US is doomed–and collectively we deserve it. I’m so very sorry that the collateral damage is all those helped around the world by things like USAID.

7

Edward Gregson 02.19.25 at 4:48 am

Trump’s a zero-sum guy. He likes the idea of gratitude in theory, but I think if he saw it directed to him in person, he’d assume he left some spoils on the table somehow.

8

Alex SL 02.19.25 at 6:22 am

What gets me again is the stupidity of destroying USAID that is revealed by these stories. As beneficial as it can be to the recipients, from the provider’s perspective, foreign aid is soft power projection and a subsidy to one’s own economy. And indeed I have, of course, read left-wing critiques of that since I was a teenager, to the effect of, “we only do this to open doors for our companies, not to help people” and “most of the money flows right back to our own economy because that is where the agency is obligated to buy the grain/machinery”.

Point being, there are two possibilities here. Either Musk and Trump deliberately want to weaken the global influence and economy of the nation that they are not only citizens of but that they right now are in control of, or they genuinely believe that USAID is full of marxist radicals whose mission is to weaken the global influence and economy of the nation that they are citizens of. Both possibilities are stupid. But the first one seems implausibly stupid – why would they knowingly weaken their own influence? That leaves the second; this is really what they believe, and they act on that belief.

They are not just cynically riding a movement of paranoid conspiracy theorising rubes to power but they are actually themselves some of the rubes caught up in believing the conspiracy theory. High on their own supply. Somewhere in Fox News or the Heritage Foundation must be a few people who currently say, wait, did nobody ever take them aside and explain that this is all just a story we tell the suckers so that they vote against their own interests? Wait, I thought you were going to do that… Oh no.

9

otto 02.19.25 at 11:16 am

Fun Wine-and-Hospital beds story combo.

And in a good cause. It will all need to be put back together again post Trump.

10

MisterMr 02.19.25 at 12:33 pm

@Alex Sl 8
“They are not just cynically riding a movement of paranoid conspiracy theorising rubes to power but they are actually themselves some of the rubes caught up in believing the conspiracy theory.”

I think this is something that happens quite often in extremist movement and in authoritarian regimes: there is a sort of echo chamber that is produced by the inner workings of the system.

So to take some famous examples, Stalin probably really believed that ukrainian farmers where hiding the produce (while they were starvating to death) because his system promoted people who told him what he wanted to hear (and killed the others); Mussolini likely greatly overestimated italian military prowess, in particular the navy, because the regime hid the damage done by autarky to italian productive capacity; Putin obviously overestimated Russia’s military might; probably Hitler really believed Germany was losing WW2 because of jewish influence and so on.

So this “the powerful drink their own kool aid” phenomenon is quite common.

11

Harry 02.19.25 at 2:35 pm

Thanks Doug. This is what CT is for.

In response to Alex SL, I think it’s fair to see what Musk and Trump are doing as accelerating the decline of America’s influence in the world outside the Americas, and the growth of Chinese, and other influence. Is it deliberate? Its very hard to think they’re dumb enough not to know what the effects of USAID have been over so many decades. Or what the effects of rewarding Russian aggression will be, or… If they don’t know it, for sure their enablers in the Senate and Congress do.

12

Lisa H 02.19.25 at 3:09 pm

Thanks for a wonderful read, which makes Trump’s decision all the more painful. It made me think of the reactions (very anecdotally) to EU money in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. They seemed far less enthusiastic than what you describe. Do you know anything about differences in their approach? Is it maybe that the incredible bureaucracy of the EU that you describe has a negative impact on the effectiveness and its support programs? Just a thought…

13

Harry 02.19.25 at 4:00 pm

otto’s very brief comment is maybe more depressing than the post. I have no confidence at all that a post-Trump Democratic administration would have the will, let alone the competence, to put this back together.

14

John Q 02.19.25 at 8:47 pm

Doubling down on Harry, I can’t see anything being put back together, or even envisage a post-Trump Democratic administration, in the sense of a normal alternation of power. Unless/until Americans reject the Republican party so thoroughly and effectively that it ceases to exist, the US has ceased to be a functioning democracy.

And, unlike the quasi-democratic manoeuvrings that brought Hitler and Mussolini to power with minority support, a majority of Americans (all those who voted Republican, third party of not at all) have chosen this in full knowledge that they were doing so, or else as a result of deliberate self-deception.

15

Ogden Wernstrom 02.19.25 at 8:58 pm

There will be blowback, including in the form of the terrorism of the sort that the CIA envisaged when they came up with the word “blowback”. But naturally trumpmusk possess such a supreme ignorance of the way the world works that such a possibility cannot have ever passed their benighted, abyssal minds.

They don’t want to think about blowback, they’re to busy thinking about kickbacks. They have people who have already created scenarios for post-blowback acts that will make us wistful about the freedoms we still had during the early part of the US’ final presidential term.

16

Cheez Whiz 02.20.25 at 3:19 am

The choice of USAID as the initial target doesn’t fit anywhere in the Trump revenge/Heritage demolition/Musk hack the government agendas. I’ve seen speculation it was Musk retaliation for some investigation in his businesses. That might have been enough to select USAID as a test run for a process to take over a legacy system and database that none of them had any experience or understanding. Who cares if you trash the USAID system? But they learned enough to move on to where the real money is.

17

Neville Morley 02.20.25 at 7:45 am

Many thanks for this. I now need to try some Moldovan wine – and I wonder if they produce rosé, as my wife has become a big fan of Bulgarian rosé (which in a vaguely similar manner seems to have enjoyed a post-1989 boom).

On the reasons for attacking USAID: this is pure unfounded speculation, but I’ve found myself wondering about the possible influence of Effective Altruism, in its Longtermism variant: we must prioritise the Future People, and our calculations show that money invested in taking humanity to the stars will bring far greater returns than helping a few African children in the present, so let’s clear away the barriers, like inefficient aid spending, state spending that doesn’t fund rocket ships etc.

18

novakant 02.20.25 at 8:39 am

Thank you, Doug. This made my day.

While US (and EU) soft power has always been a bit of mixed blessing, I think it’s been mostly a force for good (e.g. Germany!) and it is stories like this that are so important in showing its value. I think deontological ethics has a point maybe not explored enough, i.e. the motivation of the agents is inherent to the outcomes, an aspect consequentialists tend to ignore.

I think the attack on USAID can explained by a deep aversion among some voters to sharing with others and the strong feeling that those others are undeserving freeloaders – it’s just a facet of America First. The same happened in the UK by the way, it’s a pretty universal feeling:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/18/uk-overseas-aid-cuts-ngo-warning

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