The Eulogy USAID Never Received

And the America That Must Remember.

“To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe… we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves… not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.”

— John F. Kennedy, 1961

This is the eulogy they stole.

Not just for an agency, but for a covenant—the last unbought promise America still carried in a fractured world. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) did not collapse from incompetence or irrelevance.

It wasn’t shut down. It was liquidated—methodically and without honor.

In Bong County, Liberia, sacks of rice provided by the U.S. sat rotting at the port. The kitchens they once filled are silent; the children who once counted on them now stay home. Just four months ago, that rice sustained more than 127,000 schoolchildren through a postwar feeding program. Now it’s compost.

What once fed a generation now rots at port. The end of mercy doesn’t echo—it spoils, slow and sour, like the rice left behind.

What ended was not a line item—it was a bulwark against collapse. And it ended with no floor speech. No commemoration. Just a digital announcement.

For sixty-four years, USAID embodied an idea more radical than it sounds: that American power could build—not just bomb. That we could be trusted not for our might, but for our mercy. In places unreachable by embassies and unprofitable to investors, USAID meant wells drilled, clinics staffed, children fed, vaccines delivered. It meant light, where there was none.

Founded in 1961 under Kennedy’s “Decade of Development,” the mission was born from Harry Truman’s Point Four Program and the postwar Marshall Plan. It offered a different kind of foreign policy—one measured in seeds, not soldiers.

USAID wasn’t perfect—it was never meant to be. But it was irreplaceable.

At its height, it funded HIV clinics in South Africa, rebuilt maternity wards in post-earthquake Haiti, trained midwives in Afghanistan, stabilized peace processes in Colombia, and kept cold storage vaccine chains running in 60 countries during COVID‑19.

Those weren’t slogans.

These weren’t metrics. They were mile markers between life and death.

In 2023 alone, USAID delivered emergency food to 53 million people in 47 countries. Its programs helped cut under‑five child mortality from 22.7 percent in 1950 to 3.6 percent by 2021—preventing 91.8 million deaths, according to The Lancet. The U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, under USAID coordination, saved over 6 million lives. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), co‑run by USAID’s global health bureau, brought HIV treatment to 9.5 million people in a single year.

That was the covenant. That was the standard.

In Arua District, Uganda, Dora Mawa once carried cold vaccine boxes on foot when fuel ran dry.

“The difference between 2 °C and 8 °C,” she said, “is a life.”

By June 2025, after the collapse, her program was gone. More than 400,000 children under five lost safe access to immunizations.

In Yemen, a parachute striped in red, white, and blue once lowered sacks of American wheat into a war zone.

In Goma, a midwife once held a newborn and said thank you—in English.

These weren’t relics. They were the living memory of a country that tried.

Then came the purge.

On January 20, 2025—his first day back in office—Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing all foreign aid. USAID operations halted mid‑crisis. Programs were locked. Clinics were shuttered. A six‑week liquidation followed: 90 percent of USAID programs were canceled; the budget collapsed into the U.S. Department of State; the inspector general was fired; cold‑storage lines went dark; food shipments were stranded at sea.

A 60‑year legacy ended without a word from the podium.

On July 1, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “the end of an era.” Not before Congress. Not in testimony. Not even in a formal press release. But in a Substack post—an informal message to followers, his justification for destroying decades of progress through the lens of an executioner trying to save face.

There was no commemoration. No naming of the mission’s dead—development officers killed in Sudan, Gaza, Georgia, Haiti, and Afghanistan. No roll call. Just silence.

And then came the slander.

Rubio called it waste. Trump called it a cartel. Elon Musk called it a criminal organization and, under his oversight, the agency’s website and staff email systems were taken offline. They cited discredited myths: that only 12 percent of aid reached recipients (a distortion); that non‑governmental organizations grew fat on federal largesse (despite salary caps and rate ceilings); that USAID aligned with “anti‑American” causes.

None of it held up to audit.

USAID’s inspector general—before he was fired—found improper payment rates under 1 percent. Government Accountability Office audits confirmed no major fraud. Independent evaluations from the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Programme, and the International Monetary Fund repeatedly ranked USAID among the most effective multilateral donors.

The truth is, USAID didn’t fail. It embarrassed those who did nothing.

And it did so without applause.

“We’re just trying to keep everybody alive,” said Hajooj Kuka, a Sudanese relief coordinator.

“My biggest worry is high mortality,” said a Nigerian health supervisor.

“We have no place to put survivors,” said a Cambodian counselor for trafficked women.

They didn’t ask for slogans. They asked for help. And they got a hashtag.

In places like Myanmar, USAID wasn’t just foreign aid—it was a lifeline to communities the military junta considers enemies: ethnic minorities, religious groups, and rural dissidents whose schools and clinics were often the only spaces resisting authoritarian control.

A former USAID Foreign Service National in Myanmar, laid off in the July collapse, said it without ceremony:

“The military here will never support the United States. They will never support democracy. They only hold onto power—and now that USAID is gone, and Mr. Rubio says we should only help governments that vote with America, I guess our churches, clinics, and ethnic schools will keep getting bombed from the sky. And no one will come. Because the people who suffer most in my country aren’t the ones aligned with the dictator. It’s the ones fighting for something bigger. The ones who believe in freedom of religion, freedom of identity, freedom of speech. Just the freedom to exist.”

This wasn’t just dismantling.

It was political liquidation.

In the same months, more than 275,000 federal civil‑service positions were eliminated—through mass firings of probationary employees, buyouts, and wholesale agency shutdowns—while Trump moved to reshape the bureaucracy: demanding loyalty to the man, not the mission; to him, not the Constitution.

There was no farewell for USAID. There was a military parade for the man who ordered the burial.

But we must tell the truth:

USAID was not innocent. It funded development projects in authoritarian regimes. In Egypt, in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, and under Plan Colombia, its dollars abetted human rights violations and elite capture. Civil society advocates warned of “accountability gaps” and the militarization of aid. In parts of Latin America, it blurred the line between diplomacy and counterinsurgency.

USAID made compromises—some bitter, some necessary, some unjust. But the blame does not belong to the field doctors, engineers, teachers, and translators who showed up anyway. Who kept showing up. Even when policy failed, they held the line.

“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” — James Baldwin

If we want to tell the truth about what was good, we have to confess what was not.

But it also gave more people their fifth birthday than any U.S. program in history. It helped the blind read. It vaccinated children in conflict zones. It funded teachers who taught girls how to write their names.

It had limits. But not in what it gave.

They didn’t just end an agency. They ended a legacy that said American power could show up not as an empire, but as a neighbor. Not to conquer. But to care.

That’s what they dismantled. That’s what we must now rebuild. Start with the names. Start with the memorial wall. Start with the truth.

But do not stop there.

They killed a covenant. We are its resurrection.

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