In early March, peace and security strategist Kevin Melton received notice that his division at the U.S. Agency for International Development was going to be cut — and with it, his job. He’d been working several stints at its Office of Transition Initiative, or OTI, since 2009, designing and managing stabilization strategies for conflict-affected states and serving in countries such as Afghanistan, Kuwait, and South Sudan.
During the first Trump administration, Melton had been brought in to help start up USAID’s Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization. Given the bureau’s work was closely tied to national security and foreign policy, he had hoped his team would be safe from this year’s cuts. But it became clear that “USAID was going down completely [and] if they’re not going to save OTI, they weren’t going to save anything.”
That weekend, during his kids’ naptime, Melton drafted the business plan for what would become Pax Strategies, the risk analysis consulting firm he later launched. He was sitting on two decades of lessons learned on how to engage with the military in development work. “We used to have USAID people sit next to four-star commanders. … That’s gone now [and] pretty much why Pax exists.”