‘A Gift To Our Enemies’: Ex-Top USAID Official Tells Fox’s Jennifer Griffin Why ‘It’s Insane And Cruel to Break This Agency’
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Fox News’s Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin spoke to Atul Gawande, the former USAID head of Global Health, over the weekend about Elon Musk’s gutting of the decades-old international development agency.
Griffin shared her conversation with Gawande on X in the early hours of Monday morning, which followed Musk’s operatives forcing out key officials who refused to hand over what they said were classified documents. The AP reported that “Musk’s DOGE crew lacked high enough security clearance to access that information, so the two USAID security officials — John Voorhees and deputy Brian McGill — believed themselves legally obligated to deny access.”
After the incident, Musk’s team of twenty-somethings moved to shut the humanitarian aid program’s offices and sent out an email on Sunday evening telling employees not to return to work.
Griffin reported that Gawande “confirms 50 top USAID officials removed. DOGE teams forced their way into USAID offices this weekend.”
“This is a gift to our enemies and competitors. This pause is not a pause. It’s the destruction of the agency,” Gawande further told Fox News, adding:
“Two weeks ago I was combatting diseases. We had 21 serious outbreaks at the time worldwide. Three are serious now: an Ebola outbreak in the capital of Uganda. Bird flu has broken out in 49 countries. Our efforts to contain them have all been shut down.”
In terms of HIV treatment and prevention: USAID was funding the treatment for 20 million people with HIV worldwide including 6.5 million orphans and their care givers.
“We were on the verge of ending HIV, TB, and malaria. That has all ended with this pause. It is a gift to our enemies and competitors,” Gawande said.
“We were funding demining operations in Vietnam to allow farmers to get back to their fields so people can farm.”
“The insanity and cruelty to break this independent agency…they (DOGE teams) took down the USAID Memorial Wall which honored employees killed in the line of duty overseas…Lebanon in the 1980s, USAID personnel killed during the bombing of the U.S. Embassy. Their Memorial torn down. These attacks are spurious and dangerous.”
Griffin further expanded on what Gawande said about attacks on USAID personnel and staff, whose primary missions overseas have long been disaster and poverty relief. Musk over the weekend made wild and baseless claims against the agency, which has long worked with Christian organizations around the world as well.
“Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people?” Musk wrote on his X platform. Griffin continued on her conversation with Gawande:
Those who have worked for USAID now and in the past: “They are being treated with enormous disrespect and fear. The top 3 layers of experienced employees have been removed. All contract employees have been or will be terminated…2/3 of the malaria staff, child immunization experts. This kills our capacity. It’s insane to break this. It’s cruel and it does our country enormous damage.”
“If you want to end foreign aid, let’s have that discussion, but this is a Congressionally statutorily created agency that President Kennedy signed into law. What is happening now is an unlawful shutdown and purge,” Gawande told Fox News.
“800 people work for USAID’s Global Health, 400 have been terminated. It’s not legal.”
“It’s an unlawful shutdown, purge and dismantling of the agency.”
“John Voorhees, our experienced security expert, was put on administrative leave for not letting unauthorized people from DOGE into classified systems. He was just following the law.”
“They have turned into a shell overnight an organization that reaches 100s of millions of people around the world. Our health programs added 6 extra years of life to children by eradicating diseases. That is all being decimated with spurious charges of corruption and mismanagement. It is a playbook coming to an agency near you.”
“Every administration does a top to bottom review of programs and whether they are working or wasteful. There is no need to shut down the agency to do a review. It’s like pausing a hospital or stopping a plane mid flight. You are pausing funding to hospitals where 100 malnourished children are being given life saving support. Teams have been hollowed out. You can’t just switch that back on. There will be large scale layoffs at U.S. companies that we have worked with for years to provide these services overseas. It is very dangerous and cruel.”
Read Griffin’s full post here.
