Hello,

That's kind of conversation to your soul.

Hello, American Prestige listeners.

It's Derek.

We're joined, as always, by my friend and comrade Danny Bessner.

And we're very pleased to welcome to the program, Caitlin Tulloch.

She is Give Directly's head of research.

She's also a former USAID economist.

And we are going to talk about the wreckage that has been left by the

Trump administration's decision to basically destroy U.S. aid. We'll have all sorts of things to

get into about what humanitarian aid looks like right now. But Caitlin, thank you so much for coming

on the program. Yeah, it's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

So why don't we just start with sort of talking about your background, your experience kind of, you know, prior to going to USAID and at USAID, leading up to, obviously, the decision to largely kill the organization off by the Trump

administration, but just give people a little bit of background. Sure. So I am an economist by

training. I am a member of the dismal science, unfortunately, but the part that I've always

specialized in is analysis of social programs. So

largely development programs and humanitarian programs, using kind of more advanced methods to

understand the impacts of those, and particularly a focus on cost effectiveness. How much impact do

we get per dollar? And if we make evidence-based decisions, can we get more impact per dollar, which matters to a lot of people? So I started my career at MIT, but I worked for a humanitarian organization called IRC for many years. And then I was lured away from that to the promise of working on cost effectiveness within government.

About three years ago now, they started up what was called the Office of the Chief Economist

with a mandate to really focus on evidence use and improving cost effectiveness within USAID.

And I jumped ship from my job to join that. It sounded like a pretty exciting place to be.

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