On Friday night, Peter Marocco — the director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance — sent a message to his team.
“I’m fielding [White House] calls on whether we’ve complied yet with the President’s order to stop all payments to Afghanistan,” Marocco wrote in an email, which was later obtained by Devex.
He then listed a series of questions relating to awards in that country, asking his team to confirm whether they had “stopped all payments of any kind” that go toward Afghanistan. Marocco also said that if there was any money obligated to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, “we’d want to claw the entire amount (or more) back from any future payments to the UN if confirmed.”
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About the authors
Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene reports on USAID and the U.S. government at Devex. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washingtonian magazine, among others. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for humanitarian agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
Sara Jervingsarajerving
Sara Jerving is a Senior Reporter at Devex, where she covers global health. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE News, and Bloomberg News among others. Sara holds a master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she was a Lorana Sullivan fellow. She was a finalist for One World Media's Digital Media Award in 2021; a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in 2018; and she was part of a VICE News Tonight on HBO team that received an Emmy nomination in 2018. She received the Philip Greer Memorial Award from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2014.
