The national security backlash of ‘America First Foreign Assistance’

During a messy pivot to transactional foreign policy rife with document redactions, AID funding survives for Cuban dissidents, “good governance” in Venezuela, and "ethnic Tibetans" in China.

A screenshot from training materials for new hires with the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) within the U.S. Agency for International Development, “OTI 101.” A description of the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative (UCBI) media program can be seen on top of a map of worldwide OTI political action programs, including in Pakistan.

Toward the end of an off-the-record panel moderated by billionaire investor David Rubenstein in New York City on Thursday, President Trump’s former deputy national security advisor Nadia Schadlow chuckled before prefacing her answer to a question about the recent dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “I'm really never gonna' be invited back here, but, USAID was badly in need of reform for many, many years, many years,” she stated.

“Humanitarian aid is in response to an earthquake, foreign aid should be aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests. That's not necessarily accepted across the AID community, but it's a legitimate point,” Ms. Schadlow argued. While AID was formally created in 1961 as a tool for opposing communism, the agency has understood that perceptions of its independence are central for maintaining access to organizations whose reputation might otherwise be harmed by receiving U.S. funding.

Following a recent partisan elimination of the bulk of AID’s workforce and political action power, what remains of AID’s previously substantial support for media organizations – especially in Eastern Europe – is a smattering of contracts with organizations supporting Cuban dissidents. During the course of this reporting, AID’s contracts with hundreds of former employees were silently redacted and a major former media fundee stated that it would delete a public description of some of its drafts being distributed to “authorities.”

Ms. Schadlow’s co-panelist on Thursday, former Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan, stated that he did not “intrinsically have a problem with State taking a heavier hand in priorities for implementation by USAID,” joking that AID’s existing relationship with the State Department was equally as dubious as the U.S. One China policy regarding Taiwan. His concern was the “wholesale cancellation” of worthwhile medical aid programs.

“Yes, we can reform foreign assistance, but there is a project here that goes way beyond that that I think is deeply harmful to America's national security interests,” Sullivan added.

A former U.S. Special Forces unit commander who was recently terminated from AID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance further told the author that, “I think that the dissolution of USAID is catastrophic for U.S. national security, absolutely catastrophic.”

AID had two broad mandates, generally speaking: a primary focus of long-term development, ranging from economic assistance to combating infectious diseases, and short-to-medium-term humanitarian support, including in response to earthquakes and wars. But the purpose of such foreign assistance has always been explicitly political, beginning from President Truman’s inaugural “Point IV” description of foreign assistance as a central tool for opposing communism, leading to the naming of AID’s ceremonial conference room.

“If Point IV was the launch, the [1961 Foreign Assistance Act] was the landing,” wrote former acting deputy AID administrator David H. Moore in a 2021 article, referring to President Kennedy’s 1961 legislation formally establishing AID.

AID’s sometimes secretive – though they have preferred the term “discreet” – political action has historically received significant attention from the American left, including in relation to AID’s attempts to subvert the socialist governments of Cuba and Venezuela since the turn of the century. But criticisms of AID’s political influence are now associated with the Trump administration, especially as a result of the president’s support for the centibillionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has led the new administration’s informational assault on AID.

The near-shuttering of the political influence arms of AID has been largely overshadowed by widespread reporting on the mass firings and humanitarian assistance impacts of the new administration folding the agency into the U.S. State Department, prioritizing what Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently described as “an America First Foreign Assistance Program.”

“Do you support nascent movements of political parties, do you ensure that economic reform and stability is the first step, and then you work on democracy?” asked Ms. Schadlow during Thursday’s panel, expressing doubt about AID having resolved basic foreign policy questions.

During the process of the author reaching out to more than 100 former AID employees, their names and contact information were silently deleted from U.S. procurement databases.

When reached by phone regarding the redactions, a former program officer with AID’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) stated, “It was precisely for security reasons that we started masking the personal information from the internet.”

“There was an ongoing effort to take what should not have been public out of the public domain to the extent to which you can once someone has downloaded it,” stated another former DRG contractor. (The roughly two dozen former employees who agreed to speak were granted requests for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions.)

The leadership pages of numerous AID contractors have similarly been deleted since Trump’s election, and the Trump administration has now kept the AID website offline for more than two months, as well as taken down a public budgeting database following its usage by journalists to expose funding levels for DOGE.

One former DRG contractor stated that, “I think there is anxiety about how much information is floating around now as a result of all this contracting information being out there,” later adding that there is a question of, “How do you keep our partners from being the targets of terrible, terrible vitriol online?”

‘What is left and how will it be placed inside the Department of State?’

“Other functions [beyond humanitarian assistance and global health] are likely to be substantially duplicative of existing functions and capabilities at the [State] Department, and would be eliminated in the restructuring plan,” stated a March 28 congressional notification letter.

An analysis of recent State Department documents reveals that what remains of the Biden administration’s AID-based media and governance support is largely focused on opposing the governments of two countries which have caused scandals for the agency in the past, Cuba and Venezuela, and that a more than $9 million grant supporting “ethnic Tibetans” in China was also continued.

Continuing AID programs in Cuba focus on supporting dissident voices, including through the Miami-based organizations CubaNet News, Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, and Support Group for Democracy in Cuba . A grant for “independent media and free flow of information” in Cuba was also listed as continuing through the Pan American Development Foundation.

Another recently terminated DRG contractor was unsurprised by the newfound focus on Cuba, emphasizing that the Cuban-American Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “historic expertise on foreign policy has been Cuba.”

The executive director of Support Group for Democracy in Cuba, Fernando Mirabel, told the author that, “Marco Rubio is a patriot,” but that “this is the only government that threatened to pull the whole thing down.” “I think it was pressure on top of Rubio from [...] Musk,” he added.

A $15 million grant affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) further hopes to generate “good governance” in Venezuela, a country in which the U.S. State Department has long openly opposed the dominant socialist political leaders.

A sizable percentage of the remaining $81 million in transition initiatives funds is occupied by an ambiguous $50 million contract across the Middle East and North Africa with the previously-suspended contractor Blumont Global, which rebranded from International Relief & Development. According to Blumont’s website, the company’s ongoing projects in the Middle East are in the West Bank & Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, with no ongoing efforts in North Africa.

Blumont told the author that the contract “would have involved pilot activities USAID wanted to explore in the region,” but noted that, because of the hold on foreign assistance, the company had not “done any work under the task order.”

And despite widespread reporting on the recent termination of support for the Central Tibet Administration (CTA), a $16 million award providing “assistance to ethnic Tibetans in People’s Republic of China” survived the budget slash, with the North Carolina-based nonprofit FHI 360 as the implementing partner. The CTA also published a letter which it received from Secretary Rubio on March 10, which expressed a U.S. commitment to advocating for the human rights of Tibetans.

AID’s Office of Transition Initiatives

As part of a discussion relating to the recent AID cuts, a former senior contractor with AID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) – perhaps the most sensitive component of the agency, typically focusing on political campaigns only a few years long – told the author that, “If you shut down and fire people like me, and the partners go bankrupt and the people who are overseas come back, [when] the president and the White House have an emergency, there are no tools left.”

“The 82nd Airborne is not around to escort kids to school, which is famously what they were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan,” they added. One of OTI’s conflict and stability advisors revealed in a now-redacted contract to be embedded at U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida did not respond to a request for comment.

OTI’s 1994 creation was in response to the transition of numerous Eastern European countries out of the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on support for the Serbian anti-Milošević student movement Otpor (“Resistance”) during the Yugoslav Wars in the late 1990s. One OTI Balkans staffer was quoted in a 2015 interview stating that OTI had found “creative and unconventional means” to fund Otpor alongside NED and the liberal Open Society Foundations (OSF), with further reporting from an Otpor-affiliated think tank that “OTI helped the [Serbian military’s] conscientious objectors obtain passports and connected them to civic groups.”

During a late-2017 podcast interview, then OTI director Stephen Lennon boasted of his office’s work in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) over the previous decade as “the most successful counterinsurgency civilian operation ever,” claiming that the Government of Pakistan increased its control of the area – as part of a competition with the Taliban – from 10 to 80 percent.

But the decade-long counterinsurgency program spanned a tenuous relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan, particularly surrounding a fraudulent, CIA-run vaccination program led by Dr. Shakil Afridi in the lead up to the May 1, 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan which executed Osama bin Laden. A former director of AID’s Office of Pakistan Affairs with knowledge of the events stated that, “[Dr. Afridi] was definitely at one time affiliated with USAID, so all of a sudden Pakistan traces that back and that lands squarely in our fucking lap.”

“And that was just terrible for us and our program and Save the Children,” they added, referencing Dr. Afridi telling Pakistani intelligence that Save the Children’s country director provided his initial introduction to the CIA.

(Save the Children separately published a detailed critique of post-9/11 Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan and Iraq, which AID helped lead. According to one former AID contractor, the agency retained significant “scar tissue” from its Vietnam-era police-training support for the CIA-designed “Phoenix” intelligence and counterinsurgency program, which was administered by the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) program under future CIA director William Colby.)

As part of this reporting, the author was able to sign up for, and receive official certifications of completion from, OTI’s “101” and “201” courses for new hires.

One of the videos obtained from the ‘101’ course detailed the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative (UCBI) efforts to counter Russian narratives, as well as a collaboration with Hollywood script writers. The $256 million fourth iteration of UCBI, which began in February 2023 through the implementing partner Chemonics, was one of the contracts predictably terminated by the new administration. Years of partisan divisions regarding how the U.S. Government should balance free speech protections with its apparent responsibility to counter foreign government influence operations continued during an April 1 House Foreign Affairs hearing.

Partisan in-fighting over the tripwire phrase ‘regime change’

The broad outlines of the dramatic changes to AID were forecast one year ago in a podcast interview with Timothy M. Meisburger, who recently took charge of BHA despite his earlier ejection from his role as head of the DRG unit following his support for the January 6, 2021 riot. Meisburger’s views are echoed by deputy acting AID administrator Peter Marocco, who was reportedly caught on camera inside the U.S. capitol on January 6 and had been the subject of a leaked dissent memo from OTI during his tenure as head of their parent bureau.

During an April 2024 discussion with Florida politician and “GrassRoots TruthCast” host Gene Valentino, Mr. Meisburger asserted that: “The problem is that democracy assistance has been hijacked in many countries.”

Alluding to a sequence of nonviolent revolutions with symbolic color associations – including Georgia’s 2003 “rose” revolution and Ukraine’s 2004 “orange” revolution – Meisburger continued that, “In countries where the United States has political interests – I would say like Ukraine, and much of Eastern Europe – you have seen what they call ‘color revolutions.’ And the color revolutions were not really pro-democracy movements, they were actually pro-socialist movements. They were really trying to drive the installation of socialist regimes in those countries.”

In response to questions about Mr. Meisburger’s remarks, fellow former DRG director Shannon Green stated, “USAID's DRG programs were not aimed at regime change or ‘installing’ regimes of any type. Full stop. To suggest otherwise is not only categorically false but also defamatory.“

Peter Marocco and Timothy Meisburger did not respond to requests for comment.

One former OTI country manager candidly noted that, unlike other components of AID, “frankly, we're trying to effect a regime change,” with a typical pattern being for OTI to “take the beach” during the first three to four years, passing control of long-term political support to DRG or the relevant regional bureau on the way out.

The most likely target of Meisburger’s “color revolutions” critique was President Biden’s “Powered by the People” initiative, which focused on the application of “nonviolent collective action” to encourage transitions from “authoritarian” governance. Two of the announced partners for the initiative, the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), are currently led by former leaders of the Serbian Otpor.

When asked about the “Powered by the People” initiative, a former contractor with the DRG bureau stated that “it barely got off the ground as you know,” adding that “it wasn’t going to shove [Hungarian President Viktor] Orbán off his ledge.”

Gerardo Berthin, a vice president at the State Department-funded nonprofit Freedom House, whose AID funding was recently entirely cut, stated during the launch event for DRG’s October 2023 elevation into a bureau that, “[DRG’s] language also has changed, I think, which is very interesting. ‘Social movements,’ for example, is something that will appear in the DRG, and that’s important because that is the language, basically, sometimes, of the other side.”

AID and Freedom House’s continuing post-Cold War allergy to socialism was made public through a leaked U.S. Embassy Caracas cable from 2006 which noted the two organizations’ collaboration towards a five-point country strategy including: “penetrating [socialist President] Chavez’ Political Base,” “dividing Chavismo,” “Protecting Vital US business,” and “Isolating Chavez internationally.”

The chair of Freedom House at the time of the cable, the late ICNC founder and junk-bond trader Peter Ackerman, had succeeded former CIA director James Woolsey in the role in 2005. Roughly one year prior to Mr. Woolsey’s tenure, the CIA had covertly recruited Freedom House Center for Religious Freedom’s director of research for Sudan and the Middle East, Joseph G. Assad, and his wife, Michele Rigby Assad, as case officers. (The couple became minor celebrities after opening up a private security firm which advertised Freedom House as a partner and becoming embroiled in a 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro.)

Mr. Assad refused to confirm the date of his transition from Freedom House to the CIA by phone and demanded that the author speak to his attorney, whose number he could not find.

ICNC and Freedom House did not respond to requests for comment.

Reporting from The Associated Press further exposed OTI’s activities in Cuba during the Obama administration, ranging from supporting dissident hip-hop groups to setting up a ‘Cuban Twitter’ known as ZunZuneo.

“OTI doesn't start this stuff in places like Venezuela or Cuba without someone high on the food chain wanting us to try it,” stated a recently terminated OTI contractor, adding that, “Someone somewhere thought ZunZuneo was a good idea. It blew up in our face.”

In response to AID’s insistence that its Cuba programs were “discreet” as opposed to “clandestine” or “secret,” Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project was quoted in 2014, stating that “’Discreet’ is the new ‘covert’ and USAID is the new CIA.” And when asked about the differences between OTI’s work with local organizations and that of the CIA, a recently terminated OTI contractor stated that, “we collect all the [same] information as the CIA, but we use it for a different purpose.”

But such conclusions are now largely associated with partisan, “America First” foreign policy, and Kornbluh adopted a different tone in a recent video interview with Democracy Now!, stating that “it’s easy to look back on the older history of USAID when it was first started as a tool of the Cold War. The Cold War has been over for a long time now.”

“With the current administration's destruction of government, the sort of roles and positionality of different groups and people is upside down,” explained a former DRG personal services contractor. They added that, for people who “want to believe that [AID] are here to do good things [...] it's harder in the short term to say, maybe there is some more political stuff that happens.”

An ‘offensive’ posture for democracy-promotion

At roughly the one-hour mark of the October 19, 2023 launch event elevating AID’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) program into a full bureau, then-director Shannon Green noted a shift into an “offensive” posture.

As part of a legal strategy for U.S. foreign policy, Ms. Green argued for “influencing sanctions targeting and determinations,” especially on foreign judges with “connections to authoritarian or kleptocratic actors” through the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act. “We accept that our work is very political at the end of the day,” she added.

“We have GloMag [Global Magnitsky Act]. It can be an effective tool in addressing corrupt actors and people who are violating human rights, including judges and people who are in the justice sector that are undermining democracy as they have been in Guatemala,” Green stated.

Ms. Green further noted the role of AID’s program for defending US-backed anti-corruption journalists against so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), known as Reporters Shield. The program had been jointly administered by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international journalistic nonprofit which successfully sued the Trump administration earlier this year to prevent a freeze of its significant AID funding.

OCCRP’s reporting has been closely affiliated with the passage and enforcement of the Global Magnitsky Act. And in a testimony to Congress regarding AID’s efforts towards “countering [Russian] oligarchs” the previous year, in her capacity as director of AID’s anti-corruption task force, Ms. Green noted the development of “new tools such as [OCCRP’s] Russian Asset Tracker.”

During a December 13, 2021 panel hosted by NED’s International Republican Institute, Ms. Green noted the recent occurrence of “FBI agents swarming the house of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska [...] three years after Treasury Department sanctions were imposed upon him.” In addition to being profiled in OCCRP’s Russian Asset Tracker, the panel included OCCRP’s current editor-in-chief, Miranda Patrucic.

OCCRP has also jointly run, alongside the anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International, the State Department-backed Global Anti-Corruption Consortium (GACC), though AID funding for all three was recently disclosed as terminated.

During the IRI panel, Ms. Patrucic referred to the Magnitsky Act as “the greatest way to sanction individuals,” and stated that the GACC “program basically meant that somebody is actively following what we are investigating, and then strategically looking to promote sanctions and actions and changes of law based upon what we have discovered.”

Later in the panel, Ms. Patrucic noted the application of the Global Magnitsky Act to a subject of one of their investigations, Kyrgyzstan customs official Raimbek Matraimov, stating, “The person we investigated was put on the Magnitsky sanctions list, and afterwards government really reacted.”

In a detailed public summary of a fellowship with OCCRP co-founder Paul Radu from the entrepreneurship-focused philanthropic organization Ashoka, GACC was said to ensure that, since 2017, “before OCCRP publishes a new investigation, [Transparency International] sends it to authorities, prepares policy papers and responses to stimulate policymakers' action.”

OCCRP told the author that, “The statement you’ve pointed to on Ashoka’s website was a mistake. Ashoka has acknowledged the error, and has or will correct it.” OCCRP further stated that, “OCCRP never provided any information to authorities anywhere in the world, other than what was published online in our stories. TI, as an advocacy group, may submit information to law enforcement or other authorities at its discretion, but this happens after our stories are published.“

“We’ve probably been responsible for five or six countries transitioning over to another government,” stated OCCRP co-founder Drew Sullivan in a videotaped interview with German journalist Armin Ghassim in Bosnia, with a Cold War-era Air Force poster leveraging a hammer-and-sickle-adorned bear to encourage good “Operations Security (OPSEC)” against the Soviet Union hanging above his desk. And the German for-profit company OpenSanctions, which incubated within OCCRP, received $54,280 as a subcontractor on a classified Air Force intelligence program codenamed MORTAL MINT.

OCCRP further stated that OpenSanctions “has no connection to our organization and we have never worked together,” and that the author’s questions “prove nothing and will lead to false conclusions.”

AID’s increased focus on sanctions targeting came alongside the Biden administration formally elevating AID administrator Samantha Power as a participant in cabinet-level meetings of the National Security Council (NSC) for the first time. Ms. Green, a former NSC senior director for global engagement, stated during the DRG bureau launch event that, “under Administrator Power’s leadership,” “engaging in those sanctions conversations [...] is one contribution we can make.”

Ms. Green told the author that, “My remarks on sanctions were aspirational and were about USAID officials being included in interagency conversations about when sanctions would reinforce accountability and anti-corruption efforts, nothing more." “We did not have any programs or partners directly supporting sanctions determinations or targeting,” she added.

Humanitarians or executors of U.S. foreign policy?

According to a February report from AID’s inspector general, prior to the second Trump administration’s mass firings, more than 1,000 of AID’s roughly 10,000 employees were employed by the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), which led the agency’s provision of emergency support in the form of “food, water, shelter, emergency healthcare, sanitation and hygiene, and critical nutrition service.”

While far from the short-term political action focus of OTI and long-term focus of DRG, several recently terminated BHA contractors echoed Ms. Schadlow’s previously mentioned remarks by discussing a tension that arose – particularly in the bureau’s Gaza response – as to whether they were humanitarians first and employees of a U.S. Government agency second, or vice versa.

“I will be frank,” stated a recently terminated BHA personal services contractor, there were “a lot of people on the humanitarian assistance side who struggled with the fact that they were part of U.S. foreign policy and not working for a humanitarian organization.”

Referencing the Pentagon’s controversial provision of a $230 million maritime aid delivery system from Gaza into Cyprus – known as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) modular system – the same former BHA contractor stated, “This time last year I was working on the planning for the JLOTS maritime relief … and it was amazing to me how anti-Israel within the BHA response, how blatantly anti-Israel people were.” Their conclusion was that, “USAID had made themselves a target for years.”

Much of the controversy surrounding JLOTS stemmed from its alleged usage by the Israel Defense Forces on June 8, 2024 for an aggressive rescue of four hostages in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in Gaza which United Nations human rights experts referred to as “the umpteenth massacre by Israeli forces in Gaza,” “which killed at least 274 Palestinians, including 64 children and 57 women, and injured nearly 700.” The UN experts further wrote that the Israeli military “entered Nuseirat disguised as displaced persons and aid workers in a humanitarian truck.”

Another recently terminated BHA contractor described the entire aid situation in Gaza as “confusing,” “because we're supplying Israel with the bombs, and we can't get the aid in, because Israel keeps bombing.” According to a recent estimate, the Israeli military has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023, with nearly one third being under the age of 18.

While the recipients of the post-transition assistance support to Gaza are censored in official procurement databases, the February 26 provision of an additional $13.5 million in “support to vulnerable households in Gaza” is revealed in a widely distributed list of active AID awards to be through Save the Children. The same list reveals the redacted recipient for a $13.75 million obligation on February 7 to be through the French NGO Acted, and a $12 million obligation on February 4 through the International Medical Corps.

Prior to the recently announced cuts to U.S. support for the World Food Programme in fourteen countries on April 1, an anonymous AID official was reported to have stated that Washington “restored most of the aid intended for Gaza” roughly two weeks prior. A source with direct knowledge further told the author in late March that $305 million in Gaza support had been recently reallocated.

With effectively all of AID’s disaster response staff eliminated, and with massive funding cuts from the world’s largest supporter of humanitarian aid, there is a widespread sense that the entire industry has collapsed. “We already had a hard time staffing responses,” stated a recently terminated BHA contractor who joined the predecessor Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance immediately after college. “Now they just wiped out pretty much everybody, and these are specialized skills,” they added.

Several former BHA employees also expressed concerns about the damaged public reputation for their work, particularly in light of exaggerated, and sometimes outright false, claims of AID’s corruption and relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies.

“There were conversations in Peace Corps that I also found myself having in BHA: are we spies or not?” stated a recently terminated contractor. “It has been hard among some skeptical people in our circles to convince them that it's just an altruistic effort,” they said, adding that “it was a tough conversation before [and] it's going to get much harder.”

Another BHA interviewee signed off a St. Patrick’s Day discussion with the Latin slogan for the Green Berets, ‘de oppresso liber’ (“to free the oppressed”), while wearing a green shirt emblazoned with an adaptation of the skull logo of the once highly classified Military Assistance Command, Vietnam’s Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG).