As of August 23, 5,515 cases had been confirmed, and 2,642 people had died. According to government reporting, 51 new cases were detected in Ituri and North Kivu provinces.

The staggering figures make this the deadliest Ebola outbreak ever faced by the DRC and put it on track to surpass the death toll of the worst outbreak in history—the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic that claimed 11,000 lives.

The workers fighting Ebola are being affected, too. According to the WHO, 160 healthcare workers have become sick, and about 45 have died. The case fatality rate has more than doubled in the last three months, and now the virus kills almost half of those who contract it.

Contact tracing has improved, but responders continue to face formidable obstacles, including violent conflict, displacement, and attacks on medical facilities.

The rare viral strain causing this outbreak, Bundibugyo ebolavirus, has no approved vaccine, but early trial data suggests that Ervebo, the vaccine licensed for Zaire ebolavirus, may offer some protection. Health workers and experts are calling for more vaccine doses.

Pope Leo appealed for broader global cooperation to combat the crisis. The World Health Organization (WHO) designated it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, its highest level of alert. And still, the United States watches from afar.

But it hasn’t always watched.

Following the disastrous 2014 Ebola outbreak, the United States participated in a coordinated response in West Africa. US humanitarian workers treated the sick, conducted contact tracing, educated communities about sanitation and body disposal, and tracked cross-border spread. Their efforts kept the epidemic from exploding into a worldwide catastrophe, including here in the United States.

The containment of the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak showed what can be accomplished when the world comes together to confront a health threat.

But this time, the US has played a far smaller role. And the price is being paid in lives.

Historically, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) served as a critical pillar of America’s global health and humanitarian presence. USAID had been the main agency supporting US responses to Ebola abroad. When the agency was dismantled last year, so was much of the network of personnel and expertise that had enabled the United States to respond quickly to sudden crises. Many local partner organizations were forced to lay off staff and scale back operations, disruptions that still reverberate today. At the same time, U.S. withdrawal from the WHO left gaping holes in funding.

And now, as another deadly Ebola crisis unfolds, the international community is struggling to keep pace.

Transmission has been interrupted in neighboring Uganda and several health zones in the DRC, which the WHO cautiously pointed to as evidence that containment could be successful. However, WHO officials also said the response needs to be two or three times larger if it hopes to contain the outbreak.

As cases multiply, American withdrawal from the humanitarian sphere begs the question: What did we learn from the last major Ebola epidemic?

We learned that international assistance works, and that waiting costs lives.

Foreign assistance isn’t an abstract line in the federal budget. It’s what gives health workers the resources to find cases, protect communities, and stop outbreaks before they spread.

That’s why we at the Alliance 4 American Leadership (A4AL) wrote and signed the Two Penny Pledge, calling on America to restore its commitment to foreign assistance. Most Americans believe the United States spends roughly a quarter of its budget on foreign aid. In reality, foreign aid accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget. A4AL is calling for 2% of our budget to be dedicated to foreign aid programs, bringing funding back to its level under the Reagan administration. We believe it’s not too late for America to reclaim its status as a leader in global health—especially when it comes to a disease that has been successfully contained before. If you agree, join us in defending foreign assistance by signing our Two Penny Pledge today.

Sign the Two Penny Pledge

And if you’re able, consider supporting A4AL with a donation. Every contribution helps us reach more Americans, mobilize students across college campuses, and urge members of Congress to protect the funding needed to fight Ebola and other preventable diseases around the world.

We beat Ebola before. We can help beat it again. But only if we choose to act.

Fuel the Return of Foreign Assistance

Want to Be President? Pledge to Bring Back USAID.

By Nicholas Enrich

The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development has taken a devastating toll, with more than 750,000 lives already lost—most of them children—due to the cuts, and far worse yet to come. The reckless destruction of USAID stands out as one of the most costly decisions of the Trump administration to date. That decision, however destructive, does not have to be a permanent one.

I was the top global health official at USAID, and my new book, Into the Wood Chipper, takes readers inside the mayhem to expose the jaw-dropping ignorance, indifference, and cruelty of DOGE and Donald Trump’s appointees as they eviscerated one of America’s best ideas in a few short weeks. But it wasn’t solely Elon Musk’s chain saw that killed a congressionally mandated federal agency that had enjoyed broad bipartisan support for more than six decades. Congress abdicated its constitutional authority. Lawmakers merely watched as the administration ignored and violated the laws it had passed to establish and fund USAID. Too many stood silent for too long.

As the midterm elections approach, Americans cannot allow their representatives to make the same mistake again. Now is the time for candidates seeking election to pledge to enter office with an actionable plan to rapidly and immediately rebuild USAID. This is especially important—and it should be a prerequisite for any candidate who wants to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028. (For what it’s worth, it should be a prerequisite for any presidential candidate from either party, but in the current political environment, that seems unlikely.)

This should be an easy promise for anyone seeking office. The case for USAID is both unequivocal and overwhelmingly popular. The agency was one of the best investments across the entire government. On less than 1 percent of the federal budget, USAID saved 92 million lives around the world in the past two decades alone. And it made Americans safer too. The agency helped countries develop early warning systems to ensure that infectious disease outbreaks were rapidly detected and contained before they risked spreading to our borders. It projected American generosity and soft power in ways that built lasting alliances far more efficiently than could ever be achieved militarily.

But don’t take my word for it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a strong case for USAID as a bulwark of American national security. In 2022 he described the agency as a key tool to “counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding global influence.” Regarding USAID’s global health programs, Rubio said: “Travel to the African continent, and you will meet people who are alive today because of the American-taxpayer-funded antiviral HIV medications that kept them alive. It will not be easy to radicalize people who are alive because the American taxpayer saved their lives and the lives of their children.”

USAID was dismantled not because there was something wrong with the agency. In fact, as I describe in my book, DOGE and the political appointees tasked with destroying USAID were shockingly clueless about what it even did. One official matter-of-factly stated that he had assumed that the only thing the agency did in global health were abortions. Another ordered me to make “Barney-style” slides (referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television) to explain the dangers of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

The flimsy lies Trump and Musk spouted to justify dismantling USAID were quickly debunked. The president claimed, for example, that “we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. They’ve used them as a method of making bombs.” But it turned out that the project in question had nothing to do with Hamas, or even Gaza. It was a family-planning initiative in Gaza Province, in Mozambique.

Again, don’t take it from me. Trump’s own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, admitted that there was no justification for dismantling the agency: “I was initially aghast,” Wiles said, “because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”

With USAID shuttered, the shredded remnants of American foreign aid were last summer folded into the State Department, where, Rubio claims, he’ll administer a more effective form of international development assistance. Yet we’ve already started to see why burying development assistance in the bureaucratic tangle of the State Department is not likely to succeed. For the same reason that we have separate departments of state and defense (or war?)—they focus on different pillars of foreign policy, diplomacy and defense—so too do we need an independent agency for the third pillar of foreign policy: development.

Diplomacy and development are two separate ways of engaging with other countries, and they require different approaches, different operational capacities, and different expertise. Over the past several months, the State Department has attempted to shoehorn development into its existing transactional diplomacy approach, for example through its America First Global Health Strategy, which conflicts with and undermines the goals of development. Lifesaving health aid is now being conditioned on quid pro quo deals that grant access to sensitive data and natural resources, including in Zambia, where HIV treatment for over 1 million people is being conditioned on American access to the country’s critical minerals. The new approach jettisons everything we’ve learned over 60 years: that international development is successful when lasting partnerships are built upon a foundation of goodwill.

The symbolic significance of an independent agency for foreign aid is powerful too. As President Barack Obama said: “To many people around the world, USAID is the United States.” The agency’s logo—a handshake over the words From the American People—was a ubiquitous reminder that the U.S. was committed to making the world a healthier and safer place. That is why Congress created USAID as an independent agency in the first place, and now Congress must insist that it be reestablished.

Some will say that it’s unrealistic to resurrect USAID, that it is never coming back, and that we need to adjust to the new reality. I disagree. USAID worked well. It was dismantled to satisfy the ego of a billionaire at a cost of the suffering of millions. It is not enough to decry the damage done by DOGE’s destruction. USAID can be rebuilt, and it must be.

Unfortunately, rebuilding the agency will not be nearly as easy as it was for Musk and his minions to tear it down. Its expertise has been scattered, its contracts terminated, and the trust built with countries, local organizations, and multilateral institutions destroyed. Fully restoring USAID will require a renewed congressional mandate to codify its authorities, procurement systems, and operating structures across the world.

Though it will be a challenge, restoring USAID is certainly not unprecedented. The federal government has redesigned and rebuilt agencies before, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security. It is not a question of whether USAID can be rebuilt; it is a question of whether lawmakers will demonstrate the political will to make it happen.

As with those other new agencies, reestablishing USAID presents substantial opportunities. USAID wasn’t perfect, and there are ways it can be improved in reincarnation to ensure it leads us toward a world where the need for aid no longer exists. A few ideas include setting end dates for aid funding to transition ownership to host governments; flexibility from congressional earmarks so that funds can address crosscutting developmental issues rather than only specific diseases; reformed procurement processes to better tie contractor performance to results; and reconstructing the network of local partner organizations that was decimated by last year’s cuts.

But USAID must be restored. Somewhere, the early version of Project 2029 is no doubt being written, and I implore the drafters to include the reestablishment of USAID as a Day 1 pledge. So too must candidates running for Congress pledge their commitment to immediately begin rebuilding what was lost.

This post by Nicholas Enrich originally appeared in Slate.

Nicholas Enrich is the author of Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. He is a former civil servant who worked at USAID under four administrations. He served as the Bureau of Global Health’s director of policy, programs, and planning until January 2025, when he was designated as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health. On March 2, 2025, he was placed on administrative leave for exposing the Trump administration’s illegitimate and dangerous dismantling of USAID.

SAVE THE DATE

ALLIANCE FOR AMERICAN LEADERSHIP PRESENTS USAID LIVES!

TICKETS & DONATIONS: https://givebutter.com/usaidlives

An Evening of Music, Stories & Solidarity featuring Nicholas Enrich, New York Times bestselling Author of Into the Woodchipper!

Join us for an unforgettable night celebrating resilience, community, and the enduring spirit of American leadership abroad.

When? Sunday, October 4, 2026

Doors Open: 5:30 PM - Food, drinks & music
Program: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Where? 1300 Crystal Drive, Arlington, VA 22202

Hosted by Anne Ralte

The Alliance for American Leadership worked closely with these six leaders to plan this special order (series of speeches).

Tune In Live or In-Person

When: 6-7 pm ET tonight (September 2)*

Virtual: on CSPAN and at this link

In-Person: At the House Gallery. Contact outreach@A4AL.org to reserve a free ticket.

The Alliance for American Leadership is leading the fight for humanitarian aid through mass mobilization and strategic advocacy like this event. Chip in to restore humanitarian aid at https://givebutter.com/A4AL

Join the Fight

USAID represented less than one percent of the federal budget. Without it, over one million people have already died from famine and preventable disease.

*Note, the speeches will last for 30 minutes and will likely start at some point between 6 and 6:30 depending on floor activities.

Save the date. On Sunday, October 4, the Alliance for American Leadership is hosting a night in Arlington we’ve been looking forward to for a long time.

SAVE THE DATE

Join NYT Bestselling Author Nicholas Enrich for

USAID LIVES!

TICKETS & DONATIONS: https://givebutter.com/usaidlives

RSVP

An Evening of Music, Stories & Solidarity featuring Nicholas Enrich, New York Times bestselling Author of Into the Woodchipper!

Join us for an unforgettable night celebrating resilience, community, and the enduring spirit of American leadership abroad.

When? Sunday, October 4, 2026

Doors Open: 5:30 PM - Food, drinks & music
Program: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Where? 1300 Crystal Drive, Arlington, VA 22202

Hosted by Anne Ralte

Nicholas Enrich was USAID’s top global health official when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targeted the agency. He was among the first federal officials to publicly blow the whistle. His book about those turbulent 42 days is now a New York Times bestseller, and on October 4, he will tell the story live in person to all the attendees.

You will also hear from our host, Anne Ralte. Whose connection to the agency is deeply personal. Anne Ralte survived as an orphaned child in India due to the resources and food aid provided by USAID. The life-saving intervention and support inspired Anne Ralte to pursue a career at the agency.

Every ticket and donation directly funds the fight to restore USAID.

Over the next few weeks we’ll share some of the stories behind why this night matters. For now, put it on the calendar. More details to come.

We look forward to celebrating with you.

Asher Moss

Executive Director, Alliance for American Leadership

Congressman James Walkinshaw’s letter begins where foreign policy too often ends: with a date.

The date is September 30.

By then, unless the administration acts, roughly $7.5 billion in international affairs funding will expire: this is money Congress already approved for the work of protecting American interests abroad. More than $3 billion of it is tied to global health, and of that about $1.35 billion, roughly 18 percent of the total at risk, is being withheld to cover the costs of closing USAID rather than spent on the programs Congress funded. The United States has already made these commitments. They now face disappearing before the calendar turns, an administrative failure hardening into foreign policy.

The bicameral letter is led by Walkinshaw alongside Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Representatives Gabe Amo (D-RI) and Robin Kelly (D-IL) and joined by 134 of their colleagues. It urges Secretary of State Marco Rubio and OMB Director Russell Vought to release and obligate the funds before they expire because the funding was enacted for specific purposes: to provide lifesaving assistance, strengthen partners against shared threats, and reinforce American leadership. This is not a procedural footnote. It is a test of whether an American commitment remains a commitment.

A story like this is easy to skip over: another quarrel between Congress and an administration, full of technical details that can put the average reader to sleep, the sort of thing that matters only to people who know what “obligation” means in federal budget law.

That would be a mistake, so stay with me.

Under 31 U.S.C. § 1502, appropriations available for a definite period generally must be spent within that period or obligated by contracts properly made before it closes. The law is not a suggestion. It is the mechanism through which Congress’s decisions become public action.

When time runs out on an appropriation, the funding expires, with consequences that very much show up in the wider world.

The health programs fund work on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, maternal and child health, malnutrition, neglected tropical diseases, and global health security. Allowing it to lapse, the lawmakers warn, could contribute to an estimated 121,000 deaths from tuberculosis and 47,600 from malaria, and cost 22.9 million children lifesaving nutrition products. Their conclusion is stark: “This hardship can be prevented if the Administration spends these funds as Congress directed.”

Without action, a health program loses the ability to plan. A humanitarian partner is left waiting. A diplomatic commitment becomes less credible. A foreign government feels betrayed by the broken promise of the United States.

And the space America vacates does not stay empty. NPR has reported that China is positioning itself for a larger presence in global health and development as the American system retreats; an analysis this year in War on the Rocks examined how China and Russia use food and development relationships to fill the openings American withdrawal creates. A Pew Research Center survey found that the most common view of U.S. influence was that it is weakening — while 62 percent of Americans said China’s is strengthening. The point is not that anyone can simply replace the United States. It is that influence erodes by increments — through delayed commitments, canceled programs, unanswered requests — and every opening is harder to close once another power has walked through it.

That is why Walkinshaw’s leadership matters. The Alliance for American Leadership endorsed him because he treats American leadership as a responsibility with strategic consequences, and foreign assistance not as a ceremonial gesture of goodwill, but as part of the country’s operating equipment, as necessary to American influence as diplomacy, intelligence, and defense.

Support Foreign Assistance

None of that exempts foreign assistance from scrutiny. Public money deserves oversight. Programs should be evaluated, waste confronted, results demanded—serious support for American leadership requires serious standards. But oversight and abandonment are not the same thing. Reform and retreat are not the same thing. A country can insist on accountability without discarding the instruments through which it protects its interests.

A sum this large is not an accounting footnote. It is years of relationships, institutional knowledge, and hard-won credibility: the kind of foreign policy trust that is built through treatment continuity, disease surveillance, trusted partnerships, and the steady presence of American institutions. It is not dramatic until it disappears. Once credibility is surrendered, it cannot be restored by issuing a press release. Once a partner has reorganized its expectations around American unreliability, a later promise is discounted; once another power fills the vacuum, the vacuum does not politely reopen when the United States changes its mind.

Tell Congress to Act

American power has never rested on military strength alone. It depends on the confidence of other nations that the United States can organize, persuade, build, and be counted on.

The lawmakers have demanded answers by September 9 on the administration’s plan to release the remaining global-health funds. That gives the story its next act.

The deadline is approaching.

In rural Nepal, 20-year-old Kabita Mukhiya died just a day after her unborn child. This was one of many deaths that followed the destruction of essential programs for pregnant women around the world when America’s foreign assistance agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was shut down in 2025.

According to the Associated Press, USAID funded health workers that visited pregnant women in Kabita’s village, but when its work was halted last year, the program stopped along with it. The village in Nepal’s Rautahat district is one of the poorest and least literate parts of the country, and without the help of aid workers, many pregnant women find it difficult to access even simple medical care from the system.

USAID had also funded a nutritional program that provided supplements Kabita took during her previous pregnancy, but after the program was cut, she began suffering nutritional deficiencies. Her nurse recommended she take a blood test to check her hemoglobin levels. According to her nurse, Kabita was unable to understand its importance and returned home, where she would experience excruciating pain for weeks until she could not walk on her own.

Kabita’s aunt rushed her to the hospital, where she received the news that her unborn child was dead. The hospital was unable to remove the baby’s remains from her body and urged Kabita to go to another hospital. Lacking both the money and the comprehension of how dire her situation was, she returned home. Kabita died the next day of complications of eclampsia and severe anemia, two conditions that would have been identified with proper prenatal care.

Kabita’s husband had been working in India at the time of his wife and child’s death. He was alerted by neighbors and took the bus home, but the ride took so long he arrived three days after Kabita’s funeral. Since his wife’s death, he has been crying in the dark for days at a time, only working to keep himself and the rest of his children alive.

Interventions protecting mothers and babies are relatively cheap but have a significant impact on maternal and newborn death rates. The Gates Foundation estimates that 2025 will show an increase in child deaths for the first time this century, as a result of the abrupt cessation of foreign assistance.

Support the Return of Foreign Assistance

Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that the USAID shutdown has not caused any deaths, the AP and other non-partisan sources have documented the deaths of multiple mothers and children due to the suspension of health programming. We may never know most of their names, but we can invest in the only solution: reinstating the foreign aid programs like the one that had been working in Kabita’s village. These programs were successfully saving lives before the shutdown while providing priceless soft power and influence for the United States around the world.

The average American thinks the government spends 25% of its budget on foreign aid programs, but the real number was actually less than 1%. Even before the shutdown of USAID, as a percentage of gross national income, the United States was one of the lowest contributors to foreign assistance, spending only 0.23% of GNI. As of 2025 that number is 0.09%, significantly less than most European countries as well as Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

The Alliance for American Leadership believes 2% of our budget should fund life-saving international assistance, bringing funding back to its level under the Reagan administration.

Tell Congress to Restore Foreign Aid

Foreign assistance is a crucial tool for the national security, safety, and global influence of the United States. But when we zoom in, what becomes visible is a more personal, but profound story: were it not for the abrupt cessation of foreign aid, Kabita and her baby would likely be alive today.

Additional Sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/foreign-aid-given-as-a-share-of-national-income

https://features.csis.org/the-ground-has-shifted/

https://apnews.com/article/gates-foundation-annual-letter-8f2c7fe520986786a11a33b2cfce2fcd

At a moment when our global survival demands unprecedented cooperation, the question preoccupying many isn’t how to prevent the next crisis: it’s how many armed military conflicts we should be prepared to fight, and where. As time for meaningful change is wasted, leaders are working to dominate the remains of a ruined planet.

After two decades in uniform and at the negotiating table, I have come to the conclusion that we have the phrase backwards. It isn’t peace through strength. It’s peace as strength.

A Pandemic That Broke More Than It Fixed

I had hoped COVID-19 would be a forcing function: a shared global crisis severe enough to finally push nations toward real cooperation on the problems that do not respect borders: climate change, poverty, water shortages, conservation. But the lockdowns ended, the old rivalries resumed, and the underlying problems were left largely where we found them.

Worse, in hindsight, the pandemic made things harder. Prolonged isolation left people more susceptible to disinformation and radicalization; months spent alone and afraid turned out to be fertile ground for extremist recruitment. The threats we tend to treat as separate—public health, information warfare, violent extremism—are more tangled together than most of us want to admit.

Two Kinds of Power, One Blind Spot

Here is the problem as I see it. Multilateral spending still overwhelmingly favors hard power: military preparedness, arms control, nonproliferation, kinetic counterterrorism. Meanwhile, the conditions that precipitate instability in the first place such as climate fragility, resource scarcity, and the loss of natural habitat, are treated as secondary problems. They are sidelined as development issues, not security ones.

The evidence does not support this order of priorities.

The UN’s own counterterrorism strategy has a section dedicated to what those of us in the field call Pillar 1: combatting violent extremism by empowering youth, women, and civil society; building social cohesion; investing in communities before they fracture. In practice, though, Pillar 1 is often under-funded and overlooked, while hard security still receives the lion’s share of national budgets.

The recent resurgence of populist politics has only hardened political will against redirecting hard-power resources toward this kind of crucial “soft power” prevention work. Community capacity-building, education, youth empowerment: these kind of interventions continue to be boxed off as separate from “real” security, which remains overwhelmingly in the realm of armed confrontation and traditional military engagement. In 2026, the prevailing consensus still seems to chase peace through strength. I’m sorry, but I believe something different: peace as strength.

Left unaddressed, traditional and non-traditional threats do not stay in their lanes: they coalesce. The situation becomes a perfect storm when climate stress, water scarcity, and habitat loss feed directly into conditions that produce violent extremism, while the funding architecture built after the War on Terror stays oriented almost entirely toward traditional military threats.

The Warning Signs Are Already Here

This isn’t theoretical to me. The recent surge of asylum seekers arriving in Ceuta, Spain, should serve as a wake-up call. Climate stress and desperation push people to move, unprepared systems strain in response, and the resulting instability becomes exactly the kind of grievance that extremist movements can exploit.

The link between climate fragility and the risk of extremist recruitment is now well-established. It’s a threat multiplier, and the evidence base behind that claim has grown substantially over the last twenty years. We do not need more studies to establish the connection. What we need now is to translate that research into funded, sustained action, before the unintended consequences of inaction further compound.

When the Money Walks Away

As the United States has reduced its foreign aid footprint, organizations like the Global Counterterrorism Forum which funds community-centered prevention work led by civil society, have lost major partners practically overnight. I find the retreat of the United States in this area especially baffling given how directly these activities serve its national interests.

What I see is a deep ideological shift: away from collaborative soft power prevention programs and back toward isolationist, security-focused kinetic counterterrorism — tanks and guns, instead of the education and opportunities that help make societies peaceful. It raises the question: are we no longer seriously interested in prevention?

Why I Support the Two Penny Pledge

My answer isn’t a new pot of money or another appeal to conscience. It’s a rebalancing of our funding priorities, and it takes just pennies on the dollar. I support the Two Penny Pledge called for by the Alliance for American Leadership: a request for two cents of the U.S. federal tax dollar to support international development and diplomacy. This is precisely the work that dampens expensive wars, terrorism, and hostilities before they break out.

Sign the Two Penny Pledge

Here are the concrete shifts I’d like to see multilateral bodies commit to:

• Fund and encourage networked climate-fragility partnerships across international and sub-regional organizations, so lessons learned in one region reach the next.

• Create sub-regional dialogues built specifically for sharing implementation experience on climate fragility, not just headline commitments.

• Resource capacity-building properly — meaning real, sustained funding, not a one-off two- or three-day training session. Come with money, not just a curriculum.

• Treat development, economic, and security priorities as one integrated agenda rather than three competing ones when working with regional and sub-regional partners.

• Bring civil society’s technical expertise on climate fragility and Pillar 1 directly into UN bodies like the Office of Counterterrorism, rather than keeping it at arm’s length.

I would also like to see this conversation move beyond the Security Council, where climate fragility still hasn’t found real consensus within the peace-and-security nexus. I have proposed starting donor dialogues as a form of early warning at the UN Office at Nairobi, followed by a regional push through the Bangkok UN Conference Center: building toward practical templates that let participants map their own donor needs and implementation priorities, region by region.

The Bet I’m Making

Underneath all of this is a simple wager, and it’s the one I have staked much of my career on: that patient, unglamorous multilateral cooperation of the kind that takes longer and rarely makes headlines produces more durable peace than firepower alone.

I make this case as a former Army officer and diplomat who has spent my career inside the system funding hard power. That is precisely why I see the pursuit of peace itself as our greatest strength. Whether our institutions are ready to act on that, with populism rising and aid budgets shrinking, remains an open question. But as climate stress and instability keep colliding, it’s a question we can no longer postpone.

Thomas Wuchte is proud to serve as an Advisory Board Member for A4AL and its efforts to build support for the Two Penny Pledge.

Support A4AL

Preserving Options for a Future We Cannot Predict

By Eileen Lawless

I was scrolling through my feed a few weeks ago when I stopped at a post that made me catch my breath. The White Helmets, now operating as Truth Guardians, had signed a memorandum of understanding with Syria’s National Commission for Transitional Justice to integrate their documentation of war crimes and crimes against humanity into the country’s formal evidentiary framework. The people who volunteered to pull the bodies of their neighbors from rubble are now helping build the legal foundation for justice in a new Syria.

Invest in Peace

The announcement crystallized something I had been thinking about for months.

There is a growing tendency to dismiss international law and accountability mechanisms as irrelevant because they so often fail to prevent atrocities or hold powerful actors to account. Others argue that the framework struggles to address conflicts involving violent non-state actors, placing legal obligations on states that extremist organizations routinely ignore. These critiques are understandable. International law has always operated within political and practical constraints, and its application has become increasingly complicated as modern conflicts involve both states and transnational armed groups.

What I question is not the critique of international law itself, but the conclusion that follows from it.

The conclusion assumes that the principal purpose of international law is to prevent atrocities. When atrocities occur despite legal norms, it is taken as evidence that the system has failed and that documenting abuses has become an increasingly futile exercise.

Contact Congress Now

I think that is too narrow a way to understand what documentation is for.

I spent two years working alongside the White Helmets with a small, creative team of colleagues. Together, we initiated one of the first direct USAID awards to a local organization operating in an active war zone. It was a $30 million award for lifesaving emergency response in northwest Syria, including women’s health services, after the Assad regime systematically targeted and destroyed hospitals, health facilities, and labor and delivery wards across Syria.

The funding I think about most, however, was much smaller. Roughly $2 million that my colleagues and I assembled through multiple competitive application processes. That funding supported the White Helmets’ documentation of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law.

At the time, there was no realistic expectation that the documentation would soon become part of a formal accountability process. This was 2022 and 2023. Bashar al-Assad remained firmly in power. More than half a million people had been killed since 2011. Entire cities had been reduced to rubble. Violations were visible, widely reported, and seemingly without consequence.

We funded the documentation effort anyway because we understood something simple. If an opportunity for accountability ever emerged, it would be too late to document those crimes after the fact.

That decision had little to do with confidence in existing institutions. It had everything to do with preserving future possibilities.

The common criticism that international law applies only to the weak has enough truth in it to be taken seriously. What I think that criticism overlooks is that it treats today’s distribution of power as if it were permanent. Political orders change, regimes fall, alliances shift, institutions evolve, and new opportunities for accountability emerge in ways that are often impossible to predict.

By choosing not to document abuses because accountability appears impossible today, we eliminate future options based on a present-day assumption that may prove wrong. None of us knew whether political conditions would change in Syria. We did know that if we failed to document those crimes while they were occurring, no future court, truth commission, reparations program, or historical inquiry would be able to rely on evidence that had never been collected.

History offers this lesson repeatedly.

In Bosnia, years of documentation by local organizations, journalists, and international monitors became the foundation for prosecutions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, even though accountability appeared impossibly distant when the photographs were taken and the testimonies were recorded.

In Argentina, families of the disappeared documented abuses throughout the military dictatorship and preserved evidence for years before prosecutions became possible. Those efforts stalled, only to resume decades later as political conditions changed.

The lesson is not that accountability always arrives. It plainly does not. Nor is it that international institutions consistently function as intended. They do not. The lesson is that opportunities for accountability often emerge long after the abuses themselves, and when they do, they depend upon evidence preserved by people who had no way of knowing whether their work would matter or when it might.

That principle extends well beyond criminal prosecutions. Documentation supports truth commissions, reparations programs, institutional reform, historical scholarship, and efforts to counter denial. It establishes an accurate factual record. It acknowledges victims. It makes it more difficult for future generations to erase, deny, or distort what occurred. Even where criminal accountability never materializes, documenting atrocities and preserving evidence serves important public purposes.

I think about those months spent securing funding for the White Helmets’ documentation work. It required explaining, repeatedly, why preserving evidence of human rights abuses was worth investing in when the impact was uncertain and impossible to promise. At the time, it felt like a small contribution against an overwhelming catastrophe.

Today, some of that documentation is becoming part of Syria’s own effort to establish facts and support a process of transitional justice. That does not mean justice is complete, nor does it suggest that the international accountability system suddenly worked as intended. It does mean that when an unexpected political opening emerged, documented evidence was available to support at least an attempt at justice.

The broader lesson extends beyond Syria. Decisions about documentation are always made in the present, under conditions of deep uncertainty and in the face of seemingly overwhelming power. Precisely because we cannot predict when political conditions will change, documenting atrocities and preserving evidence becomes even more important. Today’s seemingly immovable regime may not remain so forever. Today’s impossible political transition may become tomorrow’s reality. The opportunity for accountability may come through a court, a truth commission, a reparations process, institutional reform, or simply through an accurate historical record. We cannot know in advance which path, if any, will emerge.

What we do know is that evidence that is never collected cannot be recovered later. By choosing not to document abuses because accountability appears impossible today, we eliminate future options based on a present-day assumption that may prove wrong.

We cannot control when openings for accountability emerge. We can control whether the evidence exists when they do.

That is why the record is not optional.

****This essay reflects my own experience and perspective. The work itself belonged to many people, especially the extraordinary Syrian volunteers and professionals who risked their lives every day and who continue to help shape Syria’s future through their commitment to truth, justice, and public service.****

Today, I want to share an article by Kevin Kane, Director of Christian Outreach at A4AL. Kevin has been working with pastors across the country to turn that strong polling data into real sustained pressure for global development.

You can help make the case for humanitarian aid in every congressional district at https://givebutter.com/A4AL

Support the Fight for USAID

Faith in Action: The Christian Case for Humanitarian Assistance

By Kevin Kane

At the core of Christian advocacy for development assistance is a fundamental theological truth: every human being carries inherent dignity as an image-bearer of God. In the scripture verses Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus made clear that serving the poor, the hungry, and the stranger is equivalent to serving Him directly.

“‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’”

We see examples of American churches doing their part, like Willow Creek Community Church reaching 15,000 refugees globally: delivering emergency medical and basic needs supplies to conflict and disaster zones. Saddleback Church has mobilized 26,000 church members for international relief and development projects to all 197 countries in the world, helping orphans and providing other areas of support.

American churches give between $12 billion - $13 billion toward international aid and disaster relief each year. But it’s not enough. Myal Greene, the President of World Relief, has spoken directly to the responsibility of the U.S. government to help its neighbors: “The Church has long played a role in alleviating suffering, but we cannot do it alone. Our government must uphold its commitment to protecting human dignity and aiding those in greatest need.”⁠

Support the Fight for USAID

When USAID was dismantled last year, faith leaders, especially those associated with progressive Christianity, responded by writing an open letter denouncing the cuts. Signers of the letter also included Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan and Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a Trump supporter who spoke at his 2017 inauguration.

The late Rev. Billy Graham frequently spoke on the moral and spiritual obligation Christians have to help the poor and needy, both domestically and abroad, given our nation’s own problems:

“Have you ever looked into the eyes of a mother whose child is starving, or a father whose family is homeless because of war or natural disaster? If you had (as I have), I seriously doubt if you’d even be asking this question. How can we condemn them to death by refusing to help them?... Yes, many people in our nation face enormous problems today... but God loves the whole world—and so should we.”

Rev. Graham also said: “As Christians we have a responsibility toward the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the many innocent people around the world who are caught in wars, natural disasters, and situations beyond their control.”

When asked, the average American believes that 25% of our budget goes to foreign assistance. The actual amount, before the dismantling of USAID in 2025, was less than 1%. The Alliance for American Leadership believes we can do better: we are calling for 2% of our budget to fund international development and diplomacy, which would bring the level up to where it was during the Reagan administration. That’s what the Alliance for American Leadership is calling the Two Penny Pledge.

Sign the Two Penny Pledge

While many advocates for foreign assistance focus on the benefits to American themselves—citing the national security, soft power, and economic tool of international aid—other Americans are more compelled by the moral and ethical argument. When lives can be saved by .12 cents a day for HIV medication or for a $2 bed net, it is impossible for Christians to look away.

For those who care, there is something that can be done. Join us in the Two Penny Pledge to restore foreign assistance.

“‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

And we’re asking YOU who we should endorse next. You know your district - if there’s a candidate who will stand up for diplomacy, development, and peace, tell us. It takes 2 minutes:

Click Here to Recommend an Endorsement

For too long, politicians have written off Gen Z. We’re changing that. Our generation believes in peace, and we’ll work hard for leaders who share that vision.

We’ve built an army of interns and volunteers who believe America leads best through diplomacy, not war. Every day, we hold multiple phonebanking sessions.

Here’s the thing though: our interns have bills to pay too. And to recognize the leaders who organize our call sessions every day, we want to pay them stipends.

For every $100 donated, our interns and volunteers will make another 1,000 calls.

Chip in to mobilize the next generation

And, for a limited time, we’ll ship a USAID flag to every donor who chips in $100 or more.

Get Your Own USAID Flag

This week, we’re making calls for Lois Frankel, Elijah Manley, and Shevrin Jones.

I asked Lois Frankel at a candidate forum whether she would fight to restore USAID. This is what she said.

“You know, you’re going to make me cry. One of the reasons I ran for Congress is because my son Ben joined the Marines. I saw him go into two wars - Afghanistan and Iraq. Those were the worst moments of our family’s life. And he came back, and you know what he did? He went into USAID. That was the soft power agency before our president depleted it. So I don’t know if we can get USAID back right now. But I’ll tell you what I will do, because I’m going to chair that committee. I’m going to make sure that we preserve the funding for humanitarian assistance, development assistance, and for diplomacy. Because I don’t want any more children to go to war.” (Watch the video of Lois on our Instagram)

Get Your Own USAID Flag

Lois Frankel is the Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee responsible for USAID and the State Department. We could not be more excited to continue to work with her to restore funding for diplomacy and development.

In Solidarity,

Asher Moss

Founder | Alliance for American Leadership

P.S. - 1.1 million calls before the midterms only happens with you. Chip in $25 to power 500 calls, and take 2 minutes to tell us who we should endorse next.

Chip in to mobilize the next generation

P.P.S. - If you’re interested in advising our team on political strategy or are already in touch with a candidate or their staff, you can email us directly at politicalstrategy@A4AL.org.

During my tenure as a Policy Analyst at the Alliance for American Leadership (A4AL), I introduced the concept of the isolation-intervention pendulum: the recurring sociopolitical swing between expansive intervention and calls for isolation, driven by short‑term electoral incentives that abandon prior commitments and undermine long‑term stability. In that article, I noted that it was time for a durable foreign policy framework balancing security, human rights, and multilateral cooperation instead of the swinging pendulum.

Since then, A4AL has developed what is called the Two Penny Pledge, which calls for two percent of the federal budget to be spent on diplomacy and development.

Sign the Two Penny Plege

Even with less than one percent funding, according to The Lancet, USAID saved an estimated 90 million lives over the past two decades through global health, famine relief, and anti-poverty programs. Now, the possibilities are endless for what two percent could accomplish: containing outbreaks like Ebola or screwworm, slowing climate change, or just further implementing a foreign policy plan that breaks the pendulum that I have discussed.

For me, I am particularly passionate about the 2 Penny Pledge because of how the United States could use this funding to support the rights of Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriacs (a Christian ethnoreligious group indigenous to Northern Iraq, Southeastern Turkey, Northwestern Iran, and Northeastern Syria, with a global population of 3-5 million). I use these three terms hyphenated in unity because of debate on whether these groups are affiliated with each other and if they descend from the Assyrian Empire alone or are more sectarian, with many Chaldeans arguing they descend from the Neo-Babylonian Empire and many Syriacs arguing they descend from the Arameans, as minorities in the Middle East.

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In Syria, the country is in a transitional period after the fall of the Assad regime, where minority rights are a concern; Turkey where Turkish nationalist sentiment enshrined in the state; and in Iran, where the United States and Israel attacked the country, escalating a regional war and civilian casualties (including in Urmia which is a part of the Assyrian homeland). In the past, the community faced violence from war and genocides, especially recently by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The choice of Iraqi Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriacs was limited: flee their homeland, pay the jizya (non-Muslim tax), convert to Islam, or be killed. Families were displaced, including members of my extended family. Homes were marked with the Arabic letter Nūn (ن), marking them as “Nazarenes” (the Quranic word for Christians, which members of the community consider pejorative), and churches and historical artifacts were destroyed.

Currently, in Iraq, the Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriac community faces a range of issues: land grabs through land titles by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), vandalism of graves, and a lack of minority rights, which include an unfair quota system where non-Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriacs can elect politicians in the five given Christian (not Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriac) seats out of a total of 329 seats. This ends up resulting in the election of politicians and parties (e.g., the US sanctioned Rayan Al-Kildani’s pro-Iran Babylon Brigade) that go against minority interests.

In the ancestral homeland, churches and militias play a significant role in local laws and, at times, in which large-scale projects are completed; for projects that require local government approval, such as schools or water accessibility, the approval can be dependent on how the local government, church, and/or militia wants to be seen. This can lead to them denying approvals if they feel the project will engender locals to charities and not traditional or local authorities, or result in locals questioning why a charity is doing work the government should be doing.

Sign the Letter

This is of great matter to the United States. In Michigan alone, as a swing state, both Democrats and Republicans need to win elections; it is home to at least 187,000 community members who, despite their small number, contribute $17.6 billion to the state economy as of 2024. The benefit of Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriacs in the wider ancestral homeland is of benefit to both those in the diaspora and to Americans outside of the ethnic group. Diaspora communities maintain connections to their home countries and donate to charities. This fosters good sentiments toward the US and ideals we may aim to promote abroad, including trade and foreign policy.

Though one may ask: Why not let diaspora communities support their ethnic group without government support? The problem there is that the diaspora can only support so much. Members of the Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriac community in Michigan, like Americans as a whole, also need to put food on the table and fill their gas at the pump, and help further promote the economy in the state and country they live in. Not to mention, the United States helps create ease for non-governmental organizations to further projects and initiatives that they otherwise couldn’t accomplish.

In addition to this, in December of 2025, the United States inaugurated the US Consulate in Erbil with the KRG, which to date is the largest worldwide. This is significant as previously mentioned because of the KRG’s land grab belonging to Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriacs through land titles. The combination of US support for the KRG in Iraq and Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriacs being minoritized in their homeland creates a high impact on what funding brings. Impacts are high, as it allows KRG actors to have a greater say in how funding/economics and resources are shared, and to whom. This in turn affects local governments and trickles down to communities like mine.

Join the Fight for USAID

When America backs KRG leaders and has the sole power of making economic decisions, it leads to minoritized villages being underfunded, causing the issues mentioned – land grabs, project approval issues, power dynamics, and, at times, militias trying to take control.

But one may ask, doesn’t this go against my entire argument in favor of foreign assistance and A4AL’s Two Penny Pledge? No, because as mentioned in my previous opinion article discussing the isolation-intervention pendulum, I called for reform where the US avoids complicity and refuses to provide financial or military assistance to countries and other actors that commit or worsen global atrocities and humanitarian emergencies.

We, as the United States, need reform in which we can both defend our national security and promote human dignity. Reducing our influence globally and reducing foreign assistance goes back to perpetuating the pendulum swinging in favor of isolation instead of having a new long-term foreign policy. American foreign relations, such as the US funding of the consulate in Erbil, help establish better relations with local communities, which helps combat terrorism at home and abroad; however, this shouldn’t entirely be at the expense of minoritized communities who live there and also simultaneously worsen the relations of other members in the local community and their diaspora.

The United States should pressure the KRG and Iraqi Central Government in how they treat communities like the Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriacs while combating terrorism. The United States should also be stern in how they support the KRG, as funding for the consulate, blanket support for the KRG, and waning support for the Iraqi Central Government due to Iranian support helps create an argument in favor of Kurdish independence and legitimization from Iraq (entirely disregarding the dynamics of possible Kurdish independence and autonomy in Syria, Iran, and Turkey). This impacts non-Kurds who live there and further destabilizes a region already facing instability, which impacts more than just minoritized communities and their diasporas. It affects the Middle East and its diaspora, who may decrease support and partnership with the US on fronts like the military and economy at home and abroad, and it affects the American people who have to pay more in lives through troops and in national security through preventing terrorism like what we saw on 9/11.

Plus, the United States can support non-governmental organizations, and has supported such organizations through USAID, that work with Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriac communities (e.g., the Shlama Foundation) and other minoritized groups (e.g., Nadia’s Initiative and Yazda, which pertain to the Yezidi community in Iraq).

From my perspective as a Chaldean-Assyrian American, what does two pennies bring? Revitalization. On the Chaldean-Assyrian side, it revitalizes an ethnic group that has suffered the consequences of the pendulum at home and abroad; it makes efforts to revive endangered languages like my native Sureth (a Neo-Aramaic language with Syriac and Akkadian influences, commonly known as Chaldean and Assyrian) from the brink of extinction at the source. It revitalizes the Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriac people and other minority groups like the Yezidis from being minoritized no longer and achieving further rights in Iraq, and away from the consequences brought upon by ISIS and the pendulum.

On the American side, the Two Penny Pledge revitalizes our standing in the world after constant faults in foreign policy, preventing the pendulum and its consequences; it helps create a positive outlook on the American Government and its people. Revitalization promotes stability, partnership, democracy, and self-governance for the community, which, in the long term, wouldn’t rely on the US giving aid. Instead, more money would benefit Americans in pursuit of the American dream and livelihood, promoting the economy they take part in and infrastructure. As an American, two pennies help promote a stronger border, countering irregular migration of people who otherwise wouldn’t leave their place of origin. Two pennies counter the influences of foreign adversaries like Iran, China, and Russia, who grapple for their hold on the Middle East, while increasing our soft power. Finally, it revitalizes minority groups across the globe, creating a connection to American values like freedom of religion and personal expression that many Americans, including myself, hold dear to our hearts.

—-

Mark Jamil is a graduate of Michigan State University and a Policy Analyst for the Alliance for American Leadership.

Join Mark and Sign the Two Penny Pledge

The full text of the Two Penny Pledge is included below:

_____

Dear Chair Collins, Ranking Member Murray, Chair Cole, and Ranking Member DeLauro,

We write to urge you to commit two percent of the federal budget to diplomacy and development in the Fiscal Year 2028 (FY28) appropriations bills. We call this commitment the Two Penny Pledge. The first penny strengthens longstanding national security programs. With less than one percent of the federal budget, U.S. international assistance has saved more than 90 million lives and helped lift more than one billion people out of poverty through famine relief, healthcare, education, and economic development.

The second penny would double the first’s impact. While existing programs target ongoing challenges, the additional funds would help address rising threats, including climate change, geopolitical competition, refugee crises, epidemics, and terrorism. From Ebola outbreaks to screwworm invasions, most crises are unpredictable, and Americans must be prepared.

Diplomacy and development are some of the most cost-effective investments taxpayers can make in our national security. Every $1 spent on activities that spur economic growth and political stability can avert spending of up to $103 on a future conflict. Strategic competitors, terrorists, and drug cartels move into the vacuum created when weak states collapse.

Ultimately, this commitment pays for itself. Before 2025, the U.S. government purchased roughly $2 billion a year in American-grown crops through Food for Peace, money that went straight to farmers across our country. Building stronger allies creates jobs for Americans: thirteen of America’s top fifteen export markets were once recipients of international assistance.

With America’s abandonment of decades-long partnerships, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has filled the gap. The CCP is bankrolling ports, power grids, and rail networks across the developing world through its Belt and Road Initiative. In 2025, global approval of China’s leadership surpassed America’s by the widest margin in nearly two decades, while disapproval of U.S. leadership hit a record high of 48 percent. We started investing in international assistance through the Marshall Plan to strengthen our allies and counter the Soviet Union. Today, different actors and an equally complex environment demand similar investments.

Americans understand the necessity of soft power. A June 2026 poll found that seven in ten Americans support increasing international assistance to two percent of the federal budget.

We urge you to support the Two Penny Pledge in the FY28 appropriations bills, and thank you for your leadership in strengthening American diplomacy and development.

Sign the Two Penny Plege

If you have questions about the letter or suggestions for how we can make this pledge a reality, please contact outreach@A4AL.org

Today, I want to ask you to sign the Two Penny Pledge - a letter asking our elected representatives to dedicate a mere two percent of the federal budget to diplomacy, development, and humanitarian assistance. Two pennies for peace.

I have included the text of the letter below and a place to sign. Twenty five members of Congress - including Democrats and Republicans - have already expressed support for the pledge. I believe that as we mark 250 years of American history, it is time we join together to restore thoughtful American leadership to the world stage.

Sign the Letter

_____

Dear Chair Collins, Ranking Member Murray, Chair Cole, and Ranking Member DeLauro,

We write to urge you to commit two percent of the federal budget to diplomacy and development in the Fiscal Year 2028 (FY28) appropriations bills. We call this commitment the Two Penny Pledge. The first penny strengthens longstanding national security programs. With less than one percent of the federal budget, U.S. international assistance has saved more than 90 million lives and helped lift more than one billion people out of poverty through famine relief, healthcare, education, and economic development.

The second penny would double the first’s impact. While existing programs target ongoing challenges, the additional funds would help address rising threats, including climate change, geopolitical competition, refugee crises, epidemics, and terrorism. From Ebola outbreaks to screwworm invasions, most crises are unpredictable, and Americans must be prepared.

Diplomacy and development are some of the most cost-effective investments taxpayers can make in our national security. Every $1 spent on activities that spur economic growth and political stability can avert spending of up to $103 on a future conflict. Strategic competitors, terrorists, and drug cartels move into the vacuum created when weak states collapse.

Ultimately, this commitment pays for itself. Before 2025, the U.S. government purchased roughly $2 billion a year in American-grown crops through Food for Peace, money that went straight to farmers across our country. Building stronger allies creates jobs for Americans: thirteen of America’s top fifteen export markets were once recipients of international assistance.

With America’s abandonment of decades-long partnerships, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has filled the gap. The CCP is bankrolling ports, power grids, and rail networks across the developing world through its Belt and Road Initiative. In 2025, global approval of China’s leadership surpassed America’s by the widest margin in nearly two decades, while disapproval of U.S. leadership hit a record high of 48 percent. We started investing in international assistance through the Marshall Plan to strengthen our allies and counter the Soviet Union. Today, different actors and an equally complex environment demand similar investments.

Americans understand the necessity of soft power. A June 2026 poll found that seven in ten Americans support increasing international assistance to two percent of the federal budget.

We urge you to support the Two Penny Pledge in the FY28 appropriations bills, and thank you for your leadership in strengthening American diplomacy and development.

Sign the Two Penny Plege

If you have questions about the letter or suggestions for how we can make this pledge a reality, please contact outreach@A4AL.org

Then 150 people RSVP’d. Seventy-four of them are congressional staffers, from both parties.

So we’ve moved to the largest room in the bar, and we now owe Bullfeathers $3,500.

Chip in here → https://givebutter.com/A4AL

Sponsor the Party for USAID

Most receptions at Bullfeathers are paid for by a trade association with its logo on the napkins. This one is being paid for by teachers, veterans, students, farmers, and USAID employees. Nobody is writing us a five-figure check, which is the point.

Tonight is the next chapter of USAID Flag Day. Over the past several weeks, 581 Americans from all 50 states bought more than 1,000 USAID flags for their Members of Congress. We delivered one to every congressional office, along with a briefing showing exactly how foreign assistance benefits each state. Members of Congress were surprised that those tokens of American leadership came not from billionaires, but from their own constituents.

Tomorrow morning, 74 more staffers will walk into work carrying a flag somebody back home paid for. Members of Congress act when they know their constituents are watching.

Keep the Pressure Up

For less than one percent of the federal budget, USAID has saved more than 90 million lives. It has helped feed families with crops grown by American farmers, strengthened allies that became major export markets for American businesses, and projected American leadership around the world.

Then, Washington pulled the plug. Researchers estimate that more than one million people have died since those cuts began. Meanwhile, China has expanded its influence across the developing world as the United States has stepped back.

Members of Congress from both parties have told us they want to rebuild America’s development programs. But they’ll only act when they know people back home are paying attention. That’s how movements grow. There are no billionaires writing checks for us, just hundreds of ordinary people who decided USAID is worth fighting for.

If you’re in Washington, doors open at 5:00 p.m → https://forms.gle/jx5twWtqfTj7W2af6

Help us cover the room tonight → https://givebutter.com/A4AL

P.S. We’re at $820 of $3,500 as of 2:05 pm.

Sponsor the Party for USAID

P.P.S I’ve also shared a few photos from USAID Flag Day below.

The flags were purchased by 581 Americans from all 50 states.

When we delivered the flags, Members were amazed by the fact that they really were purchased by their constituents.

One office told us they had never received anything like it. Another asked for a second flag. Staffers stopped our interns in the hallway to ask who we were and where the flags came from. That happened because you paid for it. Not a corporation. Not a billionaire. You.

Now those flags hang on walls across the the Capitol. Every day, a Member of Congress walks past a reminder that people back home want America to lead again.

USAID Lives: Support the Alliance

Elizabeth Wayongo

Elizabeth, a recently widowed mother in Western Kenya, was the sole provider for her family. With no income, the 49-year-old fell into depression, became bedridden, and stopped taking her HIV medication regularly. Then Elizabeth met Violet, a health worker with the USAID-funded AIDS, Population, and Health Integrated Assistance (APHIAplus Western) Kenya project. Over the course of three months, Violet joined Elizabeth on clinic visits to pick up her medication and nutrition supplements for her family. Elizabeth is one of over 800,000 Kenyan women who have benefited from USAID-funded programs, reshaping their lives and communities.

Millions of people across Sub-Saharan Africa face challenges similar to Elizabeth’s. Although the region only accounts for 10% of the world’s population, it is home to more than half of the global extreme poor.

Stanley Kimeli

Stanley, a 35-year-old father of three, was a small-scale farmer in Kenya, where his family had long depended on agriculture for both food and income. Many family farm owners like Stanley live far away from busy markets where they can turn a profit selling their crops, making it impossible to compete with bigger farms. After Stanley received agricultural training from USAID, he transformed his farm, increasing crop yields and building lasting food security for his family.

Buy a Flag

Baby Shikari

Baby Shikari was a rice farmer in Bangladesh. After she refined her agricultural practices with training and technological support from USAID, her family enjoyed a more nutritious and reliable diet. With larger harvests, she could share food with her relatives and earn additional income by selling the surplus at the local market.

Baby Shikari is not alone. According to the UN, women comprise almost half of the global agricultural workforce, yet they face barriers to owning land, getting loans, and securing farming tools and technology. USAID uplifted communities by enabling women to take charge of their own economic power and provide a better future for themselves and their families.

Desh Rani Chaudhary and Sona Devi Chaudhary

In Nepal, lentils have great economic value, and growing them improves soil quality, provides an essential source of protein, and enhances farmers’ access to markets and government subsidies. With training from Feed the Future, a USAID-funded program, Nepali farmers Desh Rani and Sona Devi nearly doubled their lentil harvest, yielding enough to feed their family and sell surplus in bulk at a nearby market.

These stories are why we’re marching flags up to the Hill.

The USAID flags we are handing out depict two hands, clasped together. Stanley, Elizabeth, Baby Shikari, Desh Rani are one hand. We are the other. When we ask a Member of Congress to put that flag in their office, we’re asking them to remember that the debate in Washington was never really about a logo.

And if you’re in DC, join us at 11 AM on July 21 in the Longworth Cafeteria to help hand them out.

RSVP To Deliver USAID Flags

Tomorrow, we will deliver over 1,000 USAID flags to members of Congress and their staff. You still have time to buy a USAID flag for your members of Congress at https://givebutter.com/usaidflags

Buy an $8 USAID Flag for Your Senator

Over the past 12 days, 462 Americans have bought USAID flags for their members of Congress. Join them and show Congress what our country should stand for.

We’ll let your members know the flags are from you. Buying USAID flags for your members of Congress is like writing them a letter they will see every day.

Today, I want to share with you some of the points we’ll bring up tomorrow with Senators who may be skeptical of foreign aid.

Six Purely Selfish Reasons to Support USAID

By William Alexander

Much has been written about the benefits of USAID. In the developing world, USAID has saved lives (an estimated four million per year), prevented and treated disease, fought crime, supported a free press and free elections, and built stable, resilient economies, among many other benefits. USAID did this all for significantly less than one percent of the federal budget.

But even from a purely selfish standpoint, USAID has reaped enormous, lasting benefits for the United States. It has made our country safer, richer, more popular, and stronger. Hare are some of the ways foreign aid is a good investment.

1. USAID Identified and Fought Pandemics.

The Ebola virus is one of the deadliest pathogens in the world, with a nearly 90% fatality rate. Ebola outbreaks have occurred in Western and Central Africa on a regular basis over the past 50 years. In every case so far, those outbreaks have been identified and contained thanks to leadership and expertise from USAID programs and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When Ebola outbreaks were reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda this May, the World Health Organization and dedicated healthcare workers in both those countries had to cope with a disjointed, massively reduced response from their former ally.

Ebola is a recent example, but it’s not the only one. USAID programs have been a key partner in identifying and responding to the Zika virus, cholera, COVID-19, and other diseases, helping to keep them from crossing borders and entering the United States. The vast majority of programs to monitor these and any future unknown outbreaks have been suspended.

Buy an $8 USAID Flag for Your Senator

2. USAID Kept Grocery Prices Down and Bolstered American Agriculture

In addition to protecting humans, USAID programs also played a major role in monitoring diseases among poultry and livestock. Now that these programs have been suspended, cases of bird flu, flesh-eating screwworm, and other pathogens and parasites are more likely to raise grocery prices, disrupt the global supply chain, and cause massive economic harm to the beef and poultry industries.

Foreign aid has also brought lasting benefits to farmers across the United States by funding research into drought- and fungal-resistant crops. The grain sorghum is grown both across Africa for human consumption and in the United States as a popular cattle feed. USAID-funded research that led to the development of a genetic strain of the grain sorghum that was resistant to the parasitic weed striga, both reducing famine and preventing what would have been devastating crop losses to sorghum farmers across the U.S.

And of course, each year, USAID bought $2 billion worth of crops from American farmers through the program Food for Peace. The food was distributed to countries facing famine, war, and natural disasters.

3. USAID Grew Our Economy.

The health of our economy depends on a healthy supply chain and the mass exportation of U.S.-made goods and services. Foreign aid directly helps with both by building stable markets and economies within the developing world. USAID programs built prosperity and stability by treating the sick and feeding the hungry, but also through direct stimulation of the economy--stimulating investment, educating the population, promoting open and fair markets, and reducing poverty.

Throughout the 21st century, the fastest-growing market for U.S.-made goods has been the developing world--particularly for countries whose people and economies have benefited from foreign aid. Roughly two-thirds of growth in U.S. goods exports through the 2010s was to major USAID partners. This growth was directly responsible for bringing the U.S. out of the 2008-2010 global recession.

Buy a USAID Flag for Congress

4. USAID Helped Keep Drugs Off Our Streets

USAID funded some of the U.S.’s strongest and most effective campaigns to identify, fight, and disrupt drug trafficking. Programs in Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and other countries worked alone and with local authorities to keep fentanyl from entering the United States, destroy the chemical precursors to fentanyl, prevent cartels from expanding into illegal mining, and build bases of operations for anti-drug units. All of these projects have been suspended since 2025, allowing drug trafficking operations greater freedom to manufacture and distribute illicit drugs and counterfeit prescription drugs.

5. USAID Kept Us Safe.

Foreign aid makes Americans safer, both abroad and at home. Sometimes it does so directly. USAID’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program provided support and assistance to help allied countries locate and disrupt al-Qaida and other extremist groups, reducing the influence of those groups within their borders, regionally, and globally.

USAID also funded programs to help young men in impoverished countries have access to stable In addition, career support programs indirectly made the United States safer by providing career options to young men who would otherwise turn to gangs, terrorist groups, or cyber scam operations in countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Cambodia. These programs have since been scrapped.

6. USAID Boosted our Popularity and Soft Power

Politicians from across the spectrum have often listed USAID as the most cost-effective public relations tool for the United States. USAID and foreign aid bring countless, substantial benefits to the developing world. Every box of rice brought to a hungry village, clinic offering medical care and vaccines, or pick-up truck bringing agricultural supplies bearing the USAID logo acts as an advertisement for the generosity and competence of the United States, making those countries friendlier to our interests and more likely to become our allies. Russia and China are already expanding their influence in Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia, with the goals of building alliances and gaining access to critical minerals, oil, and other resources at a low price.

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Tell your senator the truth! Buy a USAID flag for your members of Congress at https://givebutter.com/usaidflags

Buy an $8 USAID Flag for Your Senator

Over the past 11 days, 439 Americans have bought USAID flags for their members of Congress. Help us reach our goal of 1,000 flags.

We’ll let your members know the flags are from you. Buying USAID flags for your members of Congress is like writing them a letter they will see every day.

The Agency That Had to Be Lied About

By Bryce Smedley, former Foreign Service Officer at USAID

I remember the elevator more clearly than I remember receiving my reduction in force notice.

The notice had arrived only hours earlier. We all knew it was coming, but part of me still believed the United States would never dismantle an institution that had served American interests for more than sixty years. I had spent my career helping children whose education had been destroyed by war. The idea that USAID itself could simply disappear seemed unimaginable.

Later that afternoon, I stepped into the elevator of my apartment building in Bangkok. An older American got in beside me. We exchanged the kind of small talk strangers do. He asked what I did for a living.

“I work for USAID.”

For the next fifteen floors he unloaded everything he believed about the agency. We were destroying America. We were wasting taxpayer money. We were corrupt. We should all go get real jobs.

I let him finish.

Only when the doors opened did he ask the question he should have asked first.

“So...what do you actually do?”

“I help children whose education has been destroyed by war.”

He stared at me for a moment. The certainty disappeared from his face. The villain he had spent fifteen floors shouting at had become a person.

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I have replayed that conversation many times over the past eighteen months. What stays with me is not his anger. Democracies have always had angry people. What stays with me is how completely someone could despise an institution he could not describe. He knew the accusations. He knew exactly who deserved his contempt. What he did not know was what the agency actually did.

By January 20, 2025, tens of millions of Americans had reached the same verdict without asking the same question. The agency did not have to fail before it could be dismantled. Americans first had to believe it already had.

So it was lied about. Systematically, repeatedly, and on the record.

On February 7, 2025, the White House released a statement titled “At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep,” listing twelve examples of alleged misuse. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker examined every one. Eleven were misleading, wrong, or lacked context. Only one was accurate. Three of the four projects Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt held up before cameras that day were funded by the State Department, not USAID. FactCheck.org confirmed the same finding independently: of the four programs Leavitt presented as proof of waste, only one had anything to do with USAID.

Americans heard that USAID bought condoms for Hamas. The International Medical Corps stated that no U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms in Gaza. Americans heard about a $47,000 transgender opera in Colombia. The State Department, not USAID, awarded a $25,000 grant to a Colombian university for a production of an American opera that had debuted to critical acclaim in 2014. Americans heard about a transgender comic book in Peru. It was a State Department educational comic featuring a gay character, not a transgender one. It won two awards.

Elon Musk called USAID “a criminal organization” and suggested its administrator, Samantha Power, had enriched herself by $23 million while in office. FactCheck.org found no evidence supporting the claim. Her financial disclosures showed the range of her reported wealth stayed roughly the same from the time she entered office to the time she left. The accusation was constructed by comparing the low end of one filing’s range with the high end of another’s.

None of these corrections traveled as far as the original accusations.

Perhaps that was always USAID’s greatest political weakness. Its successes looked like nothing at all. A famine that never happened. An epidemic that never crossed an ocean. A child who quietly stayed in school instead of picking up a rifle. A refugee camp that never became a recruiting ground for extremists. Prevention leaves few monuments because it leaves behind ordinary days. That makes institutions built on prevention unusually vulnerable to politicians who can replace decades of quiet work with a single outrageous headline.

Quiet work leaves an enormous record once someone bothers to look. Between 2001 and 2021, researchers estimate USAID supported programs saved roughly 92 million lives. PEPFAR, launched under President George W. Bush, helped save more than 25 million people from HIV/AIDS and enabled 5.5 million babies to be born HIV free. The President’s Malaria Initiative helped drive malaria deaths down dramatically. Meanwhile, USAID’s own administrative costs remained about eleven percent of its budget, and the agency consistently passed its audits. The caricature that dominated political debate bore little resemblance to the institution described by its own record.

Ninety percent of USAID’s budget was earmarked by Congress. The agency administered Congressional appropriations. It did not invent them. The money went to organizations like World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, Project Hope, and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. The whole enterprise cost the average American household about ten dollars a week.

None of that mattered once the decision had been made.

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On July 1, 2025, Secretary Rubio announced that USAID would officially cease implementing foreign assistance. By November, Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols’ modeling estimated that the collapse in health services may already have contributed to roughly 600,000 deaths, about two thirds of them children. The Lancet documented broken supply chains, interrupted HIV treatment, and shuttered clinics across multiple continents. Educational programs worldwide were slashed from 165 initiatives to 2. Food and medicine purchased with taxpayer dollars before the freeze spoiled in warehouses because the organizations contracted to distribute them had received neither permission nor payment to do so.

The dismantling of an agency that consumed less than one percent of the federal budget left a vacuum measured not in budget savings but in human lives. The man in the elevator never saw any of it.

I do not remember his anger nearly as clearly as I remember his silence. That brief moment when he realized he had spent fifteen floors shouting at someone who helped children, and that the story he had been told was not the story that was true.

I wish more of us had asked the question before we believed the answer.

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The Flag that Fed Me

By Anne Ralte

I began my USAID career in 1996 in the Office of Food for Peace, where I led development of the first Title II emergency food aid strategic plan and results framework. Joining the Office of Food for Peace brought my life full circle. From 1963 to 1971, as an orphan in Calcutta—now Kolkata—in West Bengal, India, I received USAID food aid at a school for disadvantaged children sponsored by the Old Mission Church, the first Protestant church in West Bengal. USAID food helped me survive: bulgur wheat; milk for breakfast porridge; milk and bread for a mid-morning snack; and rice and dhal for lunch and dinner. Bags bearing the familiar handshake and the words “From the American People” arrived at my school through USAID’s implementing partner, CARE/India.

That nourishment helped me succeed in school in ways that drew the attention of a New York family participating in the Christian Children’s Fund—now ChildFund—sponsorship program. Education became the path that changed everything. After my mother died when I was ten, the school connected me with Drs. Donald and Sally Hoople, music and English literature teachers from Mamaroneck, New York. They became my sponsors and provided monthly support so I could remain in school. Without them, I would have returned to my hill tribe in northeast India, where educational opportunities, especially for girls, were limited.

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Although sponsorship rules limited what Don and Sally could provide, they found ways to do more. Nearly every month, they sent books—English literature, U.S. history, and more—and funds for a sitar and Indian music lessons to complement my piano studies, unaware that I had little interest in the instrument. They stretched the rules again when they arranged for me to come to the United States for further study. Only later did I learn that Sally had spent more than a year corresponding with my former high school principal, who had mentored me. Sally, and my birth mother, are my role models: strong, fierce, and determined.

Sally’s determination brought me to the United States on June 4, 1971, and that initiated my lifelong career in international development. After college, I joined UNICEF, which led to years of overseas work and adventure in service of greater good. Yet my work with USAID meant the most because it connected me back to my beginnings. The USAID flag reminds me of that journey. My difficult early life gave me the courage to confront complex challenges and the ability to build lasting alliances to advance USAID’s mission.

Not a day passes without my gratitude for having been part of the USAID family. The flag reminds me of the millions of lives saved and of our commitment to meeting urgent needs based on need, not political ideology. It also reminds me of USAID colleagues, past and present, who shared my journey of service and discovery. With technical expertise, determination, and innovation, we solved problems, grounded new ideas in policy needs, built coalitions, and passed knowledge forward. USAID’s legacy endures in the lives it touched, the systems it strengthened, and the empathy and collaboration that defined our work.

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Because the USAID flag is closely tied to my own survival, education, and life of service, what has happened to USAID feels deeply personal. I remain deeply grateful to Sally Hoople, who demonstrated for USAID long before I found the courage to speak out. At ninety-five, Sally attends a political protest every Saturday in Freeport, Maine, as recently reported by the Portland Press Herald. To me, the USAID flag stands for the generosity of the American people—people like the Hoople family.

Today, the flag also reminds me of the unnecessary suffering caused by the reckless dismantling of USAID—the beneficiaries abandoned, the harm done to staff and their families, and the cruelty with which the process unfolded. It reminds me, too, that gratitude for USAID’s legacy must be matched by a national commitment to protect it. That is why I believe we must elect lawmakers committed to rebuilding and safeguarding USAID as legally established, rather than allowing it to be dismantled by political whims.

I remain an optimist. The flag calls to mind our founder, President John F. Kennedy, who understood that even in moments of disappointment and despair, our mission and values endure. Like any journey, ours has suffered a setback—an unimaginable one. Yet the meaning of that flag cannot be dismantled. It lives in the children who were fed, the communities that endured, the systems that were strengthened, and the people who carried its mission forward.

If anyone ever wondered whether USAID’s work mattered, know that it did. I am living proof. A flag can be lowered, an agency can be wounded, but a life transformed cannot be undone.

My Mother’s Flag

By Eliza

In my early childhood, I, like most kids, didn’t really understand what it was my Mom did for work, and I never really cared to ask. As I grew older and more aware of the world around me, I started asking her more questions and trying to understand what she did. She would explain to me that her job helped children suffering from life-threatening disease in Ghana, empowered women’s financial independence in Jordan, and battled the HIV crisis in Tanzania. The more I understood, the more grateful I felt to have such an incredible role model. I was able to tell my friends at school that my Mom helped make the world better in the seven countries we’ve called home in my lifetime.

When I see the USAID flag, I think of my Mom. I think of the work she did for years to help suffering people around the world. To me, the USAID flag is a symbol of empathy, hope, and care. Amidst the many crises and horrible things going on in the world, my Mom showed me that there will always be hope, people who care, and those that want to help. I could see that for my Mom, international development wasn’t just a career, but a genuine passion.

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Yet, the dismantling of USAID added a new emotion I feel when I see the flag: fear. I recall the faces and stories of people that I saw USAID lift up; I can not help but feel an intense fear for the people associated with these stories. I think of the Iraqi and Syrian refugees I met while in Jordan, reliant on the support of NGOs and our government to shelter them from the wars waged back home. I think of the Ghanaian tribe leaders that held me when I was just a few months old, expressing their gratitude for USAID and the new well installed in their village. I think of the impoverished streets of New Delhi and the children that relied on USAID for clean, running water.

Despite over 95% of USAID workers losing their jobs, including my Mom, the community continues to persevere. They continue organizing, gathering, raising awareness, and stepping in to support those in need. So while the new fear associated with that flag is still undeniable, the USAID flag also represents sheer determination to better the world despite the incredible hardships and obstacles faced in recent years.

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While most programs have been defunded, there are many volunteers vying to fill the void that USAID left: to deliver life-saving vaccines, to ensure struggling farmers are able to avoid falling back into poverty despite sudden drought, to give young girls the chance at an education.

To me, the USAID flag has evolved from hope to fear to persistence; it proves that even in the darkest times, genuine goodwill show up time and time again.

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Today, I want to share with you some stories from individuals across our nation who have stepped up to buy USAID flags.

Help us reach our goal of 1,000 flags by buying a flag at https://givebutter.com/usaidflags

Buying USAID flags for your members of Congress is like writing them a letter they will see every day. When we distribute flags on July 21st, we’ll let your members know the flags are from you. You can specify who you want us to give your flags to on our donation form.

These Flags Are From The American People

“As a retired senior military officer, I understand the value of foreign assistance for national security. In addition to the inherent good in the humanitarian mission, which is consistent with the values of every major religion, American foreign assistance improves stability worldwide and reduces the influence of adversary nations. A more stable world generally means less armed conflict, which is far more expensive with much deeper and more dire consequences. While USAID was not perfect - no federal organization is - the agency was not only our best face abroad, but also one of our greatest sources of intelligence and global impact. I wholeheartedly support its reinstatement as soon as possible; its dissolution has already resulted in rising Chinese operations and a loss of trust in America, and in hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

• Colonel Anne Johnson, Maryland

“I purchased a USAID flag for my representatives from Alabama because, to me, it represents the hope America has offered millions of people around the world through decades of bipartisan leadership and service. Having served under that flag, I saw firsthand how it came to symbolize America’s commitment to reducing poverty, preventing conflict, responding to crises, and building lasting partnerships. I hope it serves as a reminder that our greatest strength has always been our ability to unite across political differences in pursuit of a safer, more prosperous, and more compassionate world.”

• Guy Martorana, Alabama

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“USAID promotes humanity - period. By doing what is possible to keep disease from causing hardship around the world, USAID may be our best way to put America first.”

• Irene Domenica, Illinois

“I purchased flags because I believe that USAID represents the best of the American people. Using only about 1% of the U.S. budget, foreign assistance is in the American interest. USAID promoted American values and goodwill between the United States and more than 100 partner countries. It provided more than 50,000 American jobs and invested billions annually in the American economy. It promoted American business overseas and educational and research partnerships that enhance American productivity. USAID’s work helps keep Americans safe by managing public health risks overseas. It promotes American security by providing economic opportunities as alternatives to migration or terrorism. Again, USAID’s work represents the best that we are as American people.”

• Debbie Grieser, DC

“I was a dedicated public servant and USAID Foreign Service Health Officer. I spent my public health career serving the USG as both an implementer of USAID programs and then as a designer and manager of those programs. USAID was not just a humanitarian organization that saved lives, but a key pillar of US good will and diplomacy. The arm of the USG that provided support to countries without asking for something in return. I have now been unemployed for a year and still search for a job that will allow me to serve people using my public health experience and passion. I also watch as the people we served suffer and, in some cases, die due to a lack of funding to provide access to high quality health care workers, medicines, and clinics. Please help to bring back USAID so that I can return to the work that I loved so much”

• Robin Keeley, Rhode Island

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“We are a nation of generous, hard-working individuals. We want to do what is best for our country and for our neighbors in need. USAID’s work encompasses these values, values which extend beyond today’s political divisions. USAID is for the people and of the people. It is what it means to be American. To share our fortune globally. To save mothers and children from death. To prevent diseases from reaching our shores, and to protect our nation while showing leadership abroad.”

• Ashyln Gudmundson, Utah

“I worked for USAID in some capacity for 18 years. I deployed with urban search and rescue professionals in Haiti; met with community leaders in the Kordofan region of Sudan, managed our global budget, and worked to make our award-making processes more efficient and effective.

No place is perfect, and no government agency is perfect—that is sure. But my colleagues were the smartest, most dedicated people you could imagine. These were the best of us — working hard for the rest of us—especially the marginalized and oppressed around the world. USAID staff all deserved so much better than to be maligned as we were—the lies were as hurtful as the actions against us. But the cost to those around the world was one borne in lives lost. We will also bear a huge cost in the lost faith in the U.S. among the general public here and abroad.

There are reforms to be made. But those should be legislated, not chainsawed into existence.”

• Anonymous, Maryland

“USAID represents the best of America to the rest of the world: goodwill, compassion, collaboration to make the world a better place for all of us. In many parts of the world, it’s the only presence of America the general public will experience, when they open that USAID-funded teacher training manual, bag of rice, or antimalarial bednet. And that humanity we demonstrate and the goodwill it generates comes right back to us in new trading markets, strategic partners, and political alliances that help us advance U.S. strategic priorities in the world. It’s a fundamental tool of national security and its absence is one China and Russia celebrate every day. Please ensure there are adequate in-country experts prepared to engage in the long-term relationship building, strategic coordination and oversight taxpayers deserve for foreign assistance investments which need to be so much more than the lifesaving pieces of disaster response and health security. Please don’t hamstring a core tool of America’s national security and influence on the international stage by letting this strategic tool be mismanaged or downsized prematurely.”

• Anonymous, Washington

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