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USAID and Project 2025 converge because US foreign policy history should be erased [1]
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Date: 2025-02-04
Aside from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 wish list including banning contraceptives, the erasure of USAID in 2025 has many other specious and even illegal reasons.
However, the vast majority of that money was to fund mobile emergency hospitals and trauma centers and to send doctors, surgeons and other medical and mental health professionals to assist with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, according to IMC. This included water, sanitation and hygiene services and prenatal and postnatal care.
THE FACTS: Trump and his spokesperson appeared to be referring to a grant or grants that USAID awarded to a group called the International Medical Corps worth $102.2 million to provide medical and trauma services in Gaza. The State Department earlier Wednesday described this as an example of “egregious funding” not aligned with American interests or the president’s policies.
Project 2025, the expansive report initiated by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned conservative organizations, foreshadowed the actions that Pete Marocco has taken, including the decision to place almost 60 USAID policy-making career civil servants and foreign service officers on administrative leave.
Contractors representing more than 25 percent of the Agency’s workforce were furloughed or, in the case of many of those working for USAID’s Bureaus of Global Health and Humanitarian Assistance, outright fired. This means the White House and Marco Rubio’s promises to restore life-saving aid through a waiver system is ultimately an impossible lie: There’s no one left to actually deliver the aid.
This was followed by the administration’s embarrassing and now-infamous “Fork in the Road” email, a naked attempt to purge frightened civil servants with the empty promise of a deferred resignation and a pinky swear that they wouldn’t just fire us anyway. The email was strikingly similar to one that Musk once sent to Twitter employees, and suggested we “sign” the template resignation letter by replying simply with the word “Resign” — to the illegal and reportedly unvetted email server that federal employees allege was connected directly to classified OPM systems by Musk’s allies.
By the end of week two, the cuts got deeper: Any career civil servants with the word “gender” in their job titles or position descriptions were put on administrative leave — even those championing work started under Ivanka Trump’s pet project, the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative. USAID’s flag and logo were removed from offices in the D.C. area as rumors began swirling of an imminent — and illegal — absorption into the Department of State. They even took down the memorial wall at our headquarters honoring the USAID personnel who have died in service to our country. The USAID system for collecting the results of America’s investments, the Development Information Solution, was unceremoniously “terminated.” On Saturday, Feb. 1, the USAID website and its vast wealth of taxpayer-funded research and reports was taken offline.
www.rollingstone.com/...
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