I am 100% for sure going to hell for enjoying this New York Times article as much as I am. There but for the grace of God go I, I remind myself. But then, I would never have put myself in that position, devoting my professional life to making six figures off the taxpayer to work on "nice-to-haves" rather than creating actual, useful products that must survive in the marketplace.
Anyhoo, the article that is bringing me so much guilty pleasure is entitled "A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss." The subtitle tells the tale: "People have plowed through savings, cashed out retirement funds and moved in with relatives. Former U.S.A.I.D. workers estimate that less than half have found full-time work." Why, it's almost as if no one would hire them to ply their trade, so they must force taxpayers to subsidize it.
There follow over 2,000 words of dignified profiles of the victims of DOGE, punctuated by beautifully photographed portraiture of the stolid world-savers as they cope with the loss of their raison d'être.
Sadly, this masterpiece of turned tables is behind a paywall, but fear not: I can provide some tasty quotes here (although the entire piece is almost worth subscribing to the NY Times for).
As you read, perhaps you, like me, will recall the bad old days of the Obama regime, when this very variety of elitist Ivy League do-gooders swarmed the capital and NOVA to turn traditional energy workers out of their jobs. "Learn to code," they sneered at the coal miners and rig workers and their families whose lives they upended.
To them, I say, Sucks when it's you, don't it?
Let's dive into the first profile:
She was fired by email while on maternity leave, given 24 hours to clear out her desk and left with three days of health insurance and no severance pay. She had worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development or related groups for more than two decades. She made $175,000 a year.
That was Jan. 28, 2025. Today Amy Uccello and her husband, who also lost his job when U.S.A.I.D. funding for his nonprofit dried up, rely on food stamps, Medicaid and a supplemental nutrition program for women and children that helps with their now 19-month-old daughter.
The mortgage on their home in Washington was until recently in forbearance, meaning they negotiated to pay less than they owed each month. But the bank has now cut them off and suggested they apply for a low-income mortgage program. “We don’t know if we’ll qualify,” Ms. Uccello said. She and her husband have applied for more than 100 jobs with no luck. Most of their friends don’t have jobs either.
And, look, I feel awful when that happens to anyone. But this couple was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars, much of it paid by Americans poorer than they, to go meddle in the lives of people in other parts of the world. And we all know how leftist USAID and related NGOs — "soft power" — worked in developing nations: They only granted aid to countries that agreed to import the entire suite of first-world progressive virtues, such as abortion-on-demand, same-sex "marriage," and forgoing effective, reliable fossil fuel in favor of "green" energy contraptions that came nowhere close to facilitating a modern lifestyle. These are the same people who denied effective mosquito control methods to poor nations, leaving tens of millions of black and brown babies to die of malaria, while raising their own precious child in the pinnacle of Western healthcare.
"When the Trump administration dismantled the sprawling global aid agency last year, it wiped out virtually an entire industry — international development — that had been based in Washington since U.S.A.I.D.’s creation in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy," the Times reminds us. "Nearly all of the agency’s 16,000 employees were laid off. An estimated 280,000 contractors, partners and local hires worldwide lost their jobs as well."
And, "Former U.S.A.I.D. workers who have done informal surveys estimate that less than half have found full-time work, with many making less than before. An estimated third are unemployed. Others are in part-time work."
That's rough. I left my corporate life behind because I couldn't betray my conscience and my faith, and pretend the man with whom I had worked for two years was suddenly a woman on Monday. I couldn't stomach the corporate cop-bashing; I live in a law enforcement family. I didn't want to spend my entire life under soul-crushing pressure to stifle myself. Did I take a pay cut and part-time work? You bet I did. So whatever, wokesters.
"The District of Columbia currently has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, at 6.7 percent, in large part because of major reductions in the federal work force, including U.S.A.I.D., and cuts to government grants and contracts," the Times mourns. To this, I say, Thank you, President Trump! Countries whose governments grow too big and employ too large a percentage of the population tend to fail.
The few former U.S.A.I.D. workers who have landed similar or better jobs don’t like to talk about it in front of unemployed friends.
“I feel guilty, honestly, that of all my colleagues who I know are still unemployed, I’m the one who found something,” said Sara Miner, 42, who was a senior adviser in the agency’s H.I.V.-AIDS office and previously ran health programs in Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Now she helps manage health and human service programs for Fairfax County, Va.
Jobs are also gone at the many nonprofits and partner agencies once funded by U.S.A.I.D. “Everyone I know is also up the creek, all my bosses, my mentors, the people you would normally go to, the people providing me references,” said Catherine Baker, 36, who, as a contractor, made $127,000 a year recruiting staff and helping to start up U.S.A.I.D. projects. Ms. Baker now volunteers as a manager for OneAid, which helps former U.S.A.I.D. workers, and works nine hours a week as a companion for two elderly women.
And yet, there are still enough of them in the NOVA area to vote the otherwise conservative state of Virginia into gerrymandered left-wing tyranny. (And for the record, I have plenty of friends who work as aides to the elderly. It is honorable and worthwhile work, and it can provide a decent living, too — maybe not what these taxpayer-funded fancy folk are used to, but not impoverishment, either.)
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The Times does admit in passing that the agency was bloated, and that most of its budget went to D.C.-area contractors, not the needy overseas. But it is a minuscule admission in a sea of sorrow. Here are a few more snippets from the profiles in the article:
“I’m a queer, brown immigrant," said Adrian Mathura, 55, a Navy veteran and a former senior U.S.A.I.D. adviser in global health who was involuntarily retired last July and is still fighting for the retirement pay he is due. “I got to do all of this incredible stuff in my life and my career, and I spent all of my adult life touting how great the city on the hill was.”
In the end, he said, “I never even once imagined I would be so betrayed by my government.”
No agenda there, I'm sure.
And how about this woman's salary?
Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior vice president at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store near her home in Falls Church, Va.
Her take-home pay would not cover her mortgage, but said she was eager to do something other than spending down her savings and has applied for 60 jobs. She has since been called back for an in-person interview. “Aside from the salary, it would be fun,” she said. “I could do it for a little while.”
She has learned from online webinars on job hunting that her three decades of work in international development, including as the Peace Corps country director for Benin, need to be papered over on her résumé.
“Somehow, after 20 years of experience, you’re suddenly trying to hide the number because it makes you sound old,” Ms. Cowan said over lunch in her Falls Church townhouse. “I was writing in the blurb at the top of my résumé, ‘I have over 30 years of experience.’ No, no. And don’t put in the year you graduated from Bucknell.”
I, too, surfed off the prestige of my Ivy League degree as I grew my profession at one time. It matters to a lot of people in the high-paying white-collar world. Not so cool now, is it?
Story after story, the now-unemployed people had all been making salaries in the upper $100,000s to $200,000 and more. Yes, it is disruptive to lose that kind of income, but then again, they all had decades at that earning level to build up equity — that's more wealth than most Americans will ever have an opportunity to build.
Then there is Michael Nicholson, 51, who was working for U.S.A.I.D. as a foreign service economist in Mozambique when he and his wife, also a foreign service officer, were laid off. They have a 4-year-old daughter and have since moved to Nairobi, where Mr. Nicholson is running his own start-up, AfriqueU, that connects talented African student basketball players with American universities.
His business is still in the “pre-revenue” stage, he said, but he is optimistic.
He does not feel that way about America. He said he preferred living overseas, with other former American diplomats.
“I feel that the United States is not a welcome place for my family right now," he said. “We wanted to be around a group of people, Americans and others, that understand what happened to us.”
The pain, he said, still hasn’t gone away.
“It’s been over a year, and it still is as bad,” he said. “I’m just able to talk about it now. I’m going to carry this the rest of my life.”
JD Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy was an eye-opener to the elites who didn't understand the desperation their policies pushed onto once-proud and self-sufficient Americans — lost livelihoods and a flood of fentanyl. In New England and the Rust Belt, the landscape is littered with the shells of old factories, mines, and power plants. History is full of similar stories: When an industry dies out, local prosperity dies with it. And that's okay. Maybe there shouldn't be a McMansion mega-sprawl around our capital, inhabited by millions of people living high on the hog off the sweat of taxpayers. Maybe the things USAID was doing should go back under the auspices of charities, where each penny had to be raised, and passionate servants of the poor made do with less so they could give away more.
If all else fails, these people could also always consider moving somewhere cheaper. I hear it's pretty affordable in Appalachia.
I recommend you read this excellent piece by my colleague, Jamie Wilson, about her family's struggles with devastation wrought by leftist policies: 'Jobs Americans Won't Do': The Lie That Broke a Nation and the Economic and Social Devastation It Hid
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