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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Bush and Obama fault Trump’s gutting of USAID on agency’s last day
By Associated Press
Updated:
6:18 PM EDT, Mon June 30, 2025
Source: AP
Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush delivered rare open
criticism of the Trump administration – and singer Bono held back
tears as he recited a poem – in an emotional video farewell on Monday
with staffers of the US Agency for International Development.
Obama called the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID “a
colossal mistake.”
Monday was the last day as an independent agency for the six-decade-old
humanitarian and development organization, created by former President
John F. Kennedy as a peaceful way of promoting US national security by
boosting goodwill and prosperity abroad.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered USAID absorbed into the
State Department on Tuesday.
The former presidents and Bono spoke with thousands in the USAID
community in a video conference, which was billed as a closed-press
event to allow political leaders and others privacy for sometimes angry
and often teary remarks. Parts of the video were shared with The
Associated Press.
They expressed their appreciation for the thousands of USAID staffers
who have lost their jobs and life’s work. Their agency was one of the
first and most fiercely targeted for government-cutting by President
Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, with staffers abruptly locked
out of systems and offices and terminated by mass emailing.
Trump claimed the agency was run by “radical left lunatics” and
rife with “tremendous fraud.” Musk called it “a criminal
organization.”
Obama, speaking in a recorded statement, offered assurances to the aid
and development workers, some listening from overseas.
“Your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come,”
he told them.
Obama has largely kept a low public profile during Trump’s second
term and refrained from criticizing the monumental changes that Trump
has made to US programs and priorities at home and abroad.
“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s
some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,”
Obama said. He credited USAID with not only saving lives, but being a
main factor in global economic growth that has turned some
aid-receiving countries into US markets and trade partners.
The former Democratic president predicted that ”sooner or later,
leaders on both sides of the aisle will realize how much you are
needed.”
Asked for comment, the State Department said it would be introducing
the department’s foreign assistance successor to USAID, to be called
America First, this week.
“The new process will ensure there is proper oversight and that every
tax dollar spent will help advance our national interests,” the
department said.
USAID oversaw programs around the world: providing water and
life-saving food to millions uprooted by conflict in Sudan, Syria, Gaza
and elsewhere; sponsoring the “Green Revolution” that
revolutionized modern agriculture and curbed starvation and famine;
preventing disease outbreaks; promoting democracy; and providing
financing and development that allowed countries and people to climb
out of poverty.
Bush, who also spoke in a recorded message, went straight to the cuts
in a landmark AIDS and HIV program started by his Republican
administration and credited with saving 25 million lives around the
world.
Bipartisan blowback from Congress to cutting the popular President’s
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, helped save
significant funding for the program. But cuts and rule changes have
reduced the number getting the life-saving care.
“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work –
and that is your good heart,’’ Bush told USAID staffers. “Is it
in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died
now live? I think it is, and so do you,” he said.
Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, former Colombian
President Juan Manuel Santos and former US Ambassador to the U.N. Linda
Thomas-Greenfield also spoke to the staffers.
So did humanitarian workers, including one who spoke of the welcome
appearance of USAID staffers with food when she was a frightened
8-year-old child in a Liberian refugee camp. A World Food Program
official vowed through sobs that the US aid mission would be back
someday.
Bono, a longtime humanitarian advocate in Africa and elsewhere, was
announced as the “surprise guest,” in shades and a cap.
He jokingly hailed the USAID staffers as “secret agents of
international development” in acknowledgment of the down-low nature
of Monday’s unofficial gathering of the USAID community.
Bono held back tears at times as he recited a poem he had written to
the agency and its gutting. He spoke of children dying of malnutrition,
a reference to millions of people who Boston University researchers and
other analysts say will die because of the US cuts to funding for
health and other programs abroad.
“They called you crooks. When you were the best of us,” Bono said.
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