Waivers were supposed to be a lifeline to surviving the 90-day U.S. foreign aid freeze. Instead, they’ve come to epitomize a system in shambles.
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Also in today’s edition: The aid freeze has a chilling effect on global health. Plus, it’s one thing to be shown the door. It’s quite another to be shoved out of it with no warning.
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When the new White House administration dropped the bombshell that the U.S. was shutting down new and existing foreign assistance spending pending a 90-day review, the aid sector had the collective wind knocked out of it. However, when it learned that the State Department would exempt certain lifesaving assistance and issue waivers for qualifying programs, it took a collective breath, hopeful that at least some money would keep flowing.
Those hopes were apparently premature, at least based on the utter fiasco that has come to define the waiver system.
USAID was inundated with waiver applications, but after a mass staff purge, almost no one was left to process them. And for the chosen few that were granted a waiver, it quickly proved worthless because the payment system was down, and you can’t exactly pay bills or staffers with a vaguely worded piece of paper.
“With USAID not paying its bills, we simply can’t carry the costs anymore,” says the head of an organization working in Syria, which had to lay off 50% of its staffers in that country. “There’s a complete lack of confidence in the U.S. government’s ability to repay.”
It’s a sharp contrast from how U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the exemptions when he suggested, without evidence, that organizations were “deliberately sabotaging” the waiver process for “purposes of making a political point.”
That’s not what my colleagues Elissa Miolene and Adva Saldinger uncovered in their in-depth report that exposed a convoluted mess of disappointment and frustration.
Among their findings: The program that was once stemming the spread of cholera in Haiti — no waiver. The mental health initiative that supported women who were raped while fleeing from the Democratic Republic of Congo — also had no waiver. And the project that once provided food for 135,000 displaced Syrians — one that did receive a waiver, is shutting down due to a lack of funds.
“We need a waiver, but we also need funding,” says a staff member at the latter organization, the Virginia-based nonprofit Blumont. “Neither the waiver on its own nor the funding is going to let the work continue — it’s both.”
Read: The mess inside Rubio's 'lifesaving' waivers
The ire is not just being directed at the U.S. government. There’s plenty of frustration aimed at private contractors that have razed entire swaths of their workforce. For one contractor, it was the way employees were unceremoniously sacked that added insult to injury.
Credence Management Solutions LLC, a private technology and services company, was the prime recipient of the Global Health Training, Advisory, and Support Contract, or GHTASC, which employed the majority of the institutional support contractors in USAID’s Bureau for Global Health.
Amid the flurry of forced departures at USAID, GHTASC workers had an even more abrupt exit, my colleague Sara Jerving writes. USAID direct hires were put on paid administrative leave or unpaid furlough, which allowed them to maintain benefits. However, GHTASC employees were immediately terminated with no severance, and their health insurance was cut four days later — even though these contractors functionally served as USAID employees.
This setup, dubbed “perma-lancing,” is increasingly common in the United States. It allows employers to reap many of the benefits of treating employees as direct hires while contractually keeping them at arm's length in terms of benefits and legal protections.
The Trump administration is expected to expand the trend of privatizing the workforce with fewer direct hires who have access to federal benefits.
That doesn’t sit well with some.
“It's a specialized workforce that matches skills and talent with dedication, empathy, and lived experience,” one former GHTASC contractor says. “An assembly line mentality to this work where you think you can just exchange the workers, switch the parts, or cut back the inventory will not only be ineffective but detrimental to communities around the world.”
Read: Unceremonious sacking may preview the future of privatizing US aid
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Experts warn that the reverberations of USAID’s diminished stature will hit global health particularly hard, citing immediate effects on areas the agency has prioritized, such as HIV, nutrition, reproductive health, infectious diseases, maternal and child health care, and neglected tropical diseases.
However, as Sara writes, the damage won’t stop there. Noncommunicable diseases, or NCDs, such as cancer and diabetes, have been surging in lower-income countries, though they often don’t get nearly as much attention as infectious diseases.
While USAID hasn’t played a significant role in funding the response to NCDs, the halt in funding is expected to have “a ripple effect on all different health issues,” Katie Dain, chief executive officer of the NCD Alliance, told journalists at the organization’s conference in Kigali last week.
When governments in low- and middle-income countries look at the new holes in their budgets, they will likely prioritize areas where investments have been made in recent years, such as HIV, maternal health, and infectious diseases, pushing NCDs further down the list, Dain said.
“NCDs have already been under-prioritized. Anything on the bottom of the list is going to get even further de-prioritized.”
Read: How USAID's dismantling could impact noncommunicable diseases
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Women and girls may be especially vulnerable to shifting political winds in Washington, D.C.
Organizations working in family planning and reproductive health already knew they would take a hit because of the Mexico City Policy, also known as the “global gag rule,” which prohibits the U.S. from funding organizations involved in any abortion-related activities, even if they are using non-U.S. funds to provide counseling or post-abortion care. When Democrats are in power, they rescind the rule. When Republicans are in office, they reinstate it.
But reproductive health organizations were caught off guard by the stop-work order, issued on the same day Trump reinstated the global gag rule. It was a double whammy.
Local NGOs in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malawi, and the Philippines described how they had to close down clinics, send staffers home with no assurances if they’d have a job to come back to, or let employees go without pay. Some of these NGOs also had to stop other services, such as cervical cancer screening, HIV testing, or child malnutrition, my colleague Jenny Lei Ravelo writes.
“U.S. taxpayers [are] giving life to a mother and child, and that's taken away from them,” Seema Ghani of the Afghanistan Family Guidance Association tells Jenny, saying she doesn’t know what will happen next.
“But the concern we hear is from our staff and midwives — that people are still coming and knocking on the door of the clinic, hoping that it’s open.”
Read: How Trump’s aid freeze is gutting a lifeline for women and girls
NGOs that rely on U.S. aid are in a world of hurt right now. But in reality, development assistance has been on a downward trajectory for years, argues Lukasz Bochenek, deputy CEO of Leidar, in an opinion piece for Devex.
That’s why he says NGOs should look to the private sector for inspiration.
“The opportunity arising out of this apparent crisis is to have a major reset,” he adds. “And the start point of that is for each organization to reexamine its unique value proposition — its North Star. This requires a hard and critical look at what you want to achieve, to ensure the organization is fit for purpose.”
Opinion: NGOs need to start operating more like commercial businesses
Sexual violence against children in the eastern DRC is surging, reporting 170 cases of children having been raped in a single week, between Jan. 27 and Feb. 2, amid escalating conflict. [The New York Times]
Over 25 people were arrested after a U.N. peacekeeping convoy attack in Lebanon. [Al Jazeera]
Brazil will host the BRICS summit in Rio on July 6-7, focusing on global governance reform and global south cooperation. [AP]
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