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Rob Cohen, M.D., a former USAID staffer, published an opinion editorial on Fox News.com Friday, and said Elon Musk is right to be cleaning house at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)… even if it meant the loss of his own job.
Below are excerpts from the op-ed: I’m a physician who was suddenly laid off from USAID last month after Elon Musk fed “USAID into the wood chipper.” I should be livid about what Musk is doing to my former employer. But I’m not; I’m a whistleblower who worked at USAID for eight years, and Musk is (mostly) right about USAID’s dysfunction.
As USAID’s fate to be shrunk and subsumed into the State Department seems all but sealed, once the Republican-led Congress passes a law to legitimize it, two predictable debate positions have emerged. Musk and the Republicans say “USAID is a criminal organization” full of “radical left lunatics” that wastes taxpayer dollars, while the Democrats and USAID staff say USAID nobly performs vital life-saving work. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, but nobody disputes the criticisms regarding waste.
Musk colorfully said of USAID, “It’s not an apple with a worm in it; we have actually just a ball of worms.” I suggest instead that USAID is better described as an apple that has become infested by worms. During my eight years at USAID, I worked with some wonderful colleagues and together we made real impacts, but we were too frequently undermined by a sclerotic and at times malevolent bureaucracy. USAID has many good apples, but also many bad ones who spoil the barrel, as I will detail below. In my opinion, the ratio of good to bad apples is approximately 1:1, so the decision to fire 97% of the workforce is overzealous.
USAID saves babies, but it also wastes taxpayer dollars at an unacceptable rate. To borrow another common analogy, it would be fair to say that USAID is a baby suffering in filthy bathwater that hasn’t been cleaned for decades. Musk’s overhaul of USAID therefore is a potentially valuable act of creative destruction. However, Musk’s exaggerations and minimizing of USAID’s real impacts suggest that he might go too far, so all stakeholders must now ensure that this moment is a net positive, rather than let the baby be thrown out with the bathwater.
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