The Uncertain Future of USAID with Jeremy Konyndyk

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

So much has happened in the past few weeks. And we’ve seen a speed game of sorts being played by the Trump administration to try to act as rapidly as possible to rework the administrative state of the government. One example of that is the attempts to end the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The letters have even been taken off of the building. But is any of this even legal and what are the implications of gutting USAID? Jeremy Konyndk is the president at Refugees International. He served as a senior official at USAID in the Obama and Biden administrations. Konyndk joins WITHpod to discuss progress that has already been undone, diplomatic repercussions, the effects on American soft power and the uncertain future of USAID.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is already killing people.
0:09.8	Like, this is no kidding killing people.
0:11.7	The numbers are not yet huge, but if it continues, they will become huge because
0:16.5	USAID supports massive numbers of people around the world.
0:23.8	Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:33.2	There is so much going on and so quickly that we've been sort of struggling to keep up on the show.
0:38.6	And I thought that the podcast might be a useful place to take a little more time with some of the developments that we've been dealing with in the first month of the new Trump administration, which has been, you know, people use the metaphor of a blitzkrieg,
0:54.8	probably excessively, but the whole point of a blitzkrieg is to sort of take your forces and
0:59.8	push through very rapidly in one spot so as to break through the lines of defenses.
1:05.3	And this is kind of like that.
1:07.4	It is an attempt at essentially using speed of aggression more than thought-out tactics,
1:14.6	more than even overwhelming force. It's really a sort of speed game to try to act with a relatively
1:22.0	small group of people as rapidly as possible to overwhelm the institutional defenses of the constitutional order,
1:29.0	of the administrative state, of the federal civil service, et cetera.
1:33.0	The place where that is being deployed most viciously, acutely, and I think with the highest
1:39.1	human cost up to this point when I'm talking to you on February 14th, which is when I'm
1:44.0	recording this.
1:44.6	And it's important for me to put a timestamp because God knows what happens between now and when you hear this.
1:49.5	But when I'm talking to now, I think the place that's been the highest level of material harm to human beings has been at USAID.
1:56.6	There's a ton of misinformation floating around around USAID.
2:00.2	And I just wanted to talk to someone
2:02.0	who had spent some time there, knew the agency about, you know, what is USAID?
	...

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