Former USAID staff honored for their ‘constructive dissent’

“We were already one of the biggest proponents of America First,” said Randy Chester, a veteran of the U.S. Agency for International Development who was forced to retire early in the wake of the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID — an act ostensibly done because of the agency’s anti-America First ideologies. Today, Chester is the vice president and USAID liaison for the American Foreign Service Association, or AFSA, which is working to keep the mission — and memory — of what was once the world’s premier aid agency alive. It also doesn’t want to forget the people behind that mission. AFSA recently held its annual awards ceremony to honor exceptional foreign service work. That includes its constructive dissent awards, for those who challenged policies they disagreed with. “There is no democracy without dissent, and the U.S. Foreign Service must remain a leader in the encouragement of respectful yet provocative constructive dissent,” AFSA said. And with the Trump administration’s shuttering of USAID and the firing of most of its staff, there is no shortage of dissent within the Foreign Service ranks. Sam Kraegel is a former USAID contracting and agreements officer who was among 10 people honored for authoring and organizing a dissent memo opposing the Trump administration’s foreign assistance policies. He said it was “terrifying” to put his name on the cable, which was signed by roughly 700 staff, “because we were afraid of the risk, we felt like we were going to lose our jobs, and then we did anyway.” He echoed Chester’s point that USAID did not just benefit recipients abroad, but Americans at home, noting for instance that billions of dollars in food commodities were purchased from American farmers and that USAID trained aid recipients on American technology and equipment that countries would then purchase from U.S. companies. “We were spending taxpayer dollars reinvesting in America,” he said. “It's not a matter of a pie and if one person gets a bigger cut, then everybody else gets a smaller cut, right? We can expand the pie, and that's what we were doing.” “We always supported America First … because it was a mandate from the U.S. government for USAID to buy America first and if you can't, then you can apply for an exception or a waiver,” Chester explained. Both Chester and Kraegel — who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term — told Devex that their job was to implement policies regardless of the political party in charge. “I started out doing that, faithfully executing, reporting back to Washington for their asks,” said Kraegel. That included terminating awards he said seemed “in line with the new administration's priorities, whether or not I agreed with them” — which included axing awards related to green energy or diversity, equity, and inclusion. “I moved forward with that, but unfortunately, it continued to accelerate,” he said. “We saw what was going on because we were the people who were executing on these priorities and we realized … the damage that it would do to our government, to our country’s reputation overseas, to our relationships with other governments.” Chester said USAID employees were ready to carry out the Trump administration’s policies; they just never got the chance. “Every single president and every single administrator wants to change something, and so we were all expecting that. We were expecting budget cuts. But we were expecting to have a dialogue around those budget cuts and around what the agency would look like going forward,” he said. “We never got that opportunity.” Chester — who told Devex he feels free to speak out now that he’s no longer with USAID — has harsh words for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s management of folding what’s left of USAID into the State Department. “The one thing Marco did that was smart was realize how ill-prepared the State Department is to manage foreign assistance,” Chester said, arguing that as a result, Rubio has begun to hire some former USAID civil and Foreign Service officers back — but with a catch: They’re now brought in as contractors. “So all they’ve done by destroying the agency, they forced people into a new hiring category that has less job security, less long-term benefits, but costs the same amount of money,” he said. “They could have done the same thing through a proper dialogue of merging USAID into the State Department.” The State Department did not respond to requests for comment. Today, Chester said he spends most of his time as AFSA vice president helping members with individual problems, such as lapses in health insurance, instead of the larger policy issues he thought would form the backbone of the job. “So it really changed the focus of my work for these last eight months, in addition to having to deal with my own RIF,” he said, referring to the government term for a reduction-in-force notice of dismissal. “I had to give up my house in Washington, D.C., moved back to the West Coast, where I'm from, for financial reasons. … And I'm part of a tandem couple, so my wife is also a Foreign Service officer with USAID, so she was going through the same things I was going through professionally.” That, he said, compounded the stress of trying to “start a new life that we hadn't planned on doing because our careers weren't over.” He said that even if there is a changeover in administration or an effort to rebuild U.S. foreign assistance during this administration, “getting people to come back will be very hard, so you're going to have to rely on a new generation to come in and staff this up. Unfortunately, they haven't just destroyed USAID. They destroyed an entire industry. So … there are universities who this year canceled international affairs programs because they see no future, and no students signed up for those courses because they don’t see a future.” “Four years from now, you may get some people willing to come back and say, ‘Sign me up. Restart my career as a Foreign Service officer,’” Chester continued. “Honestly though, it’s hard to imagine. I think in four years, a lot of water is going to be under that bridge, and people are going to move or have moved on with their lives, and it’s just going to make it so much harder on the next administration to do anything overseas.” For his part, Kraegel believes more RIFs are coming. “That's just me, but I don’t think they're done yet,” he told Devex. “Anybody who’s worked on or done anything in climate change in the past 20 years, I worry for them. Anybody who’s done anything on other treaties that involve, you know, transboundary water rights or energy, I think they’re in for potentially a world of hurt.” The State Department as a whole could also be in for a world of hurt if U.S. foreign policy becomes purely transactional. “If we’re only going to focus on those countries that have oil or that we think are more amenable to a right-leaning government, then we’re shutting ourselves off from the vast majority of the world, and we’re limiting our expertise in our State Department,” Kraegel said. Kraegel said he still considers himself a dedicated government employee, even though he’s no longer a public servant. He recently put in an application to serve as a volunteer firefighter because it “seemed like an immediate way that I could help this community, in a small way, in a similar way to what I was doing as a Foreign Service officer.” “I went to business school, I got an MBA. I could have made, theoretically, a lot more money in the private sector, but I chose this life because I believed in what I was doing,” he added, noting that he also believed in the value of the State Department’s confidential dissent channel. “We could have caused a lot of hoopla. We could have grabbed headlines. We could have spoken out publicly … but we followed the rules. We did it the way that it was supposed to be done,” he said. As such, he called AFSA’s constructive dissent award “the honor of a lifetime.” “As a contracting officer, I signed many multimillion-dollar awards. I negotiated many, many contracts and grants in a career I think that was filled with interesting moments and momentous actions,” he said. “The recognition of this, of standing up for what I believed in, I think was my proudest moment in a career that spanned almost 20 years, and I will continue to stand up for what I believe in, and I hope that other people will as well.”