862: Some Things We Don't Do Anymore

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

On his first day in office, President Trump decided to freeze all U.S. foreign aid. Soon after, his administration effectively dissolved USAID—the federal agency that delivers billions in food, medicine, and other aid worldwide. Many of its programs have been canceled. Now, as USAID officially winds down, we try to assess its impact. What was good? What was not so good? We meet people around the world wrestling with these questions and trying to navigate this chaotic moment.

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Prologue: Just one box of a specially enriched peanut butter paste can save the life of a severely malnourished child. So why have 500,000 of those boxes been stuck in warehouses in Rhode Island? (13 minutes)
Act One: USAID was founded in 1961. Since then, it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world. What did that get us? Producer David Kestenbaum talked with Joshua Craze and John Norris about that. (12 minutes)
Act Two: Two Americans moved to Eswatini when that country was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. With support from USAID, they built a clinic and started serving HIV+ patients. Now that US support for their clinic has ended, they are wondering if what they did was entirely a good thing. (27 minutes)
Act Three: When USAID suddenly stopped all foreign assistance without warning or a transition plan, it sent people all over the world scrambling. Especially those relying on daily medicine provided by USAID. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah spoke to two families in Kenya who were trying to figure it out. (8 minutes)

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0:00.0	From WVEC Chicago, it's his American life.
0:07.4	Okay, let's see what we got in here.
0:10.9	How are you? Good.
0:13.4	This is huge.
0:15.3	We're in a warehouse in Rhode Island whose floor space is bigger than two full football fields.
0:19.8	Three stories tall.
0:23.4	Row after row after row of cardboard boxes stacked high, stretching far into the distance. I feel like the only thing that I know
0:29.2	to compare this to is like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's a pretty good comparison.
0:36.5	Most of these cardboard boxes contain this nutritional peanut paste.
0:40.0	It's kind of miracle food, made to strict international standards,
0:43.4	officially called R-U-T-F, ready to use therapeutic food or pumpy nut.
0:51.4	Each box has two months' worth, enough to save the life of one severely malnourished child.
0:56.8	Over 200,000 boxes that are sitting here in this warehouse.
1:00.5	Each one represents one child's life.
1:05.1	Navin Salem runs his place, making this stuff, and Sarah Rumsey is one of her managers.
1:09.7	They explain that we're looking at millions of dollars of aid
1:12.0	that's already been paid for by the United States government.
1:15.8	They manufactured it for the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID,
1:20.4	for it was shut down by Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
1:23.6	If you look at these boxes, the majority do not have a country destination or paperwork to leave the facility.
1:33.9	And it's been sitting here since February waiting for paperwork to be signed.
1:40.1	The problem when you dismantle all of USAID, there are no people who can proceed with basic day-to-day jobs to process basic things like contracts.
	...

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