Latest / The TalkBlock Show's Podcast / "My Wife Was Kidnapped": Ex-USAID Chief Breaks Silence on Foreign Aid & Corruption

Transcript

"My Wife Was Kidnapped": Ex-USAID Chief Breaks Silence on Foreign Aid & Corruption · The TalkBlock Show's Podcast

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: What was USAID main job when what when it worked well?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: The purpose of the agency grew and evolved.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: In the early 70s, they were quite concerned about population growth, and they thought it was getting to be a threat to humanity.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what they were doing.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: They were spying on me, and I guess they didn't appreciate me talking about this corruption.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: So that night, um uh, and when she came out of the hairdresser, three boys with guns jumped in the car, took her out of the city, tied her up, and put her in a ditch, uh irrigation ditch, and uh they told her, Elder sister, we're not going to hurt you, but your husband.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: We had already purchased the protective equipment that the people needed to bury the bodies, and that was sitting in a warehouse in Nairobi, which is about a six-hour drive over to Kampala.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Elon Musk and his boys wouldn't even let us move that stuff over there.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: They said, nope, that's up to the World Food, uh the World Health Organization, they can do it.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Let them let them try.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: And today we look closely at a very important and debated group in US foreign policy, USAID, the US Agency for International Development.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: My guest today is Clifford Brown.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: He did not study foreign policy in school classroom, he grew up on farms and on train tracks, before becoming a top lawyer in Beverly Hills.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: In 1987, he left that high-paying job to spend 27 years working in foreign aid.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: He served as USAID mission director in Guinea and Sierra Leone.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: He was a legal advisor in Haiti, Guatemala, and Kyrgyzstan.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's the author of the book Inside USAID, an Odyssey of Foreign Assistance.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Califford, welcome to the show.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: Happy to be here, happy to spread the word.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: Let me correct one thing yet, a couple of things.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I was a legal advisor in several posts.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh started in in Kenya and then I moved to Central America.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but then I became a manager in in uh I guess it was 2000 2001, and I I was uh in the management side of the agency, but I had been a legal advisor in many countries.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: The job was always regional, so I was flying all over Africa and Central America.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: It was in management.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: In Kyrgyzstan, I was the country representative there.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Got it.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And um Clifford, you were a top lawyer in Beverly Hills making big business deals.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Why leave that job in 87 to uh to take hard, risky government jobs in places like like Nairobi and You know that it it's a long story.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: I I I I actually wrote another book about that called called Dilettante, and I'll tell you in a minute why I gave it that title.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: But I I grew up in eastern Washington state, and uh I in high school I debated the uh foreign aid was one of the topics we debated the one year I was on the high school debate team, and then in college I was on a debate team also, and that year they debated another aspect of foreign aid.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I was always thinking about foreign aid.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: I had been an economics graduate in college, and economic development was a subject that I was keenly interested in.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: I got a job on a ship halfway through college.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: I dropped out for a year, and I ended up working on an oceanographic ship that sailed out of Seattle.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And uh on that uh trip that it came up the coast of South America, and I was so fascinated by the people on the ship that could speak fluent Spanish that I had tried to learn another language in school, and I just thought I don't have what it takes.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: But I was so determined to do it.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: When I got back to college, I studied very hard to learn Spanish, and then I was lucky enough to win a fellowship to spend an entire year down there after right after college, between college and law school.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I had had a cousin who was in the Peace Corps in Chile.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, when the ship arrived at the port in Chile, the officers came to the to the ship's office where I was working.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: I was a typist on the ship, and they said, Cliff, your cousin is at the gangway.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, I don't have any cousins in Chile.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he says he's your cousin and he looks like you, he talks like you.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: And sure enough, I I had a cousin I'd never met, but our mothers knew that my ship was coming to Chile, so they they got him to come meet me.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so a couple years later, when I had that fellowship, I would I went down and I ended up living with his father-in-law.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: By then he had married and moved back to the States, but her dad was still there, and I lived with him for the the year I was down there.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: And by the end of the year, I was quite fluent in in Spanish.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know how how you feel, but but uh when you learn another language, in my mind it's almost like you've grown another soul.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: You feel like a different person.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um 100%.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Some things are funny in the language that aren't.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it was an experience that I always relished.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: I I wanted to do it again, and in commercial law, I that was never a possibility.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I I practiced uh corporate, high-level corporate law, securities work, and corporate bankruptcy.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: But in 1984, I got involved in a huge case that took me just 100% of my time was on this, it was a commercial bankruptcy, completely different story.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: But when it ended, I had a lot of time on my hands.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I was reading the Wall Street Journal, and they had an advertisement in the paper they wanted attorneys who spoke another language who might be willing to go overseas to work in economic development.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, well, that sounds interesting.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: I flew back to DC.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: I interviewed with the general counsel, they were in the main State Department building then, and uh he had a world map on the wall with little red dots all over, and I said, What are those dots?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: He says, That's where our attorneys are.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: And something in me said, I gotta have this job.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um the real trick then was explaining it to my wife, because she was also a practicing attorney, but ultimately we we took we took the opportunity, we took our kids to Nairobi, we had a wonderful time.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: We lived like colonials there.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was fantastic.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So and most people think USAID only gives like food and emergency help.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: But in your book you talk about building illegal systems, uh fixing court rules and helping local businesses grow.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what was USAID's main job when w when it worked well?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: What exactly it was?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: You have done your homework, Vladimir.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Kudos to you for to prepare.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the agency was created in 1961, and and at the time John Kennedy f felt that we needed some sort of tool to compete with the Soviet Union because they were offering all sorts of assistance and particularly to the third world, and he wanted an agency that could make offers to try and uh you know compete in that arena.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: But the the the purpose of the agency grew and evolved.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um in the early 70s, they were quite concerned about population growth, and they thought it was getting to be a threat to humanity.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of effort went into family planning projects and and uh uh then later they became very concerned about food productivity.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: There was a sense that we were losing the battle against population growth, and we needed to drastically increase the food supply, so our scientists studied ways to do that, and and we claim responsibility for the Green Revolution that that vastly increased productivity of food.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: But it it then climate change became one of the priorities at one point, and we had lots of projects that taught communities how to do ecotourism and and preserve the forests, uh preserve biodiversity, then HIV AIDS became a major concern.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: We had a big program in particularly in Africa to combat HIV AIDS.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: But I now tell people that we were the tool that the U.S.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: government used to do anything overseas that did not involve a military response and was not something that pure diplomacy was going to accomplish.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: So uh when I say we did these things, it's not w we we gave grants and contracts to other institutions that were long-term instruments, and they would bring people to these countries and they would the the goals were always negotiated by both governments, and it it was something that we thought made sense and would help would help everybody.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, foreign aid is a fairly historically it's a fairly new phenomenon.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: It the idea that any government is going to start spending its resources to change living conditions in another country it would would have been a strange concept before the last say 100 years.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: We there are some examples of it that predate, say, World War II, but right after World War II, we had a huge program to help rebuild Europe, and we did the same thing in Japan, and the whole world, the whole planet is safer and more productive because of what we did.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't I I I I I'd give no credit to people that think this is a total waste of money.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: This was a win-win situation.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: If we help our neighbors develop economically, and these days the whole world, they're our neighbors, so when when our neighbors develop economically, they become customers, they become suppliers, everybody wins.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: And almost every religion in the world will tell you that the giver benefits as much as the recipient, and this is living proof of it.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: In Central America, we created entire industries that drastically reduced the pressure to emigrate northward.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: We, for instance, I we brought in a contractor in Honduras to teach farmers in the mountains how to grow onions.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: And we shipped one container over to Miami to see if it would if it could sell at a time when we weren't harvesting onions up here.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Ten years later, half a million people are making their living growing onions.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: Then we did that with snow peas with in in Guatemala, with strawberries throughout Central America, with melons and onions in in Salvador and Honduras, with shrink farms throughout the Gulf of Fonseca, which is part of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and flowers in Costa Rica, flowers in in um Colombia.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And many countries graduated from our programs, like South Korea.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: South Korea is now one of the most successful trading partners we have, and it was USAID assistance that made that was an important part of making it happen.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: I won't say they were the only reason, obviously, but it was a win-win situation.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the point that so many people miss.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: It was a fraction of our budget.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: Less than one percent.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: And i if if any of that assistance helped prevent a war, then it it far more than just paid for itself, because in during a war you're gonna spend vastly more than you will on any kind of economic development.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you uh you want to say uh the whole USA program was less than one percent?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, more like 0.7% of our federal budget.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: But let me give you one example.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: In in uh 1989, two planes went down, one in B-1 bombers, one crashed in Texas, and one crashed in North Dakota.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: Each plane cost about$312 million to build.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: All of our assistance, all of our foreign aid to Sub-Saharan Africa that year was$570 million.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: So those two planes together exceeded all of our foreign aid to the entire subcontinent of Africa of any kind.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing people miss is that most of the we're not just giving money to people.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: We what we're paying for are people, their time and their travel.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes there are some supplies involved, but most of the time it's convening groups in a given country to discuss a problem that both governments believe needs a solution, and the solution is typically a management change of some sort.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: So it's this is soft power.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: We we bring people together, we pay for meetings, we we pay for a lot of meetings, we we rent rooms and bring the refreshments and bring people together to solve problems.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: And those problems may be how do we better fight corruption in this country?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: It might be how do we better collect taxes, it might be what's a what's a a better way to manage uh your your healthcare system, what's a better way to teach kids you know how to read, what's a better way to control your game parks and and prevent prevent poaching.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: It goes on and on and on.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: The lists is is enormous, and and that's why I called my first book Dilettante, because I really felt lucky.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: I could come to work and you know, there was the legal side.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of special law that only applies to foreign aid, but at the same time, I got to pick what I wanted to think about.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was I could think about one of a hundred different topics and and learn things in in different areas.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was dabbling in in hundreds of different areas simply because we that's where we had our projects.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so um critics often say foreign aid is a waste of money.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: They say like US tax dollars are stolen by corrupt leaders in other countries.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, Clifford, from your time on the ground, how did foreign governments or or local groups steal or misuse USAID money?
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Have you witnessed anything?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there were times when we would discover that say commodities had gone missing, and when we when we did discover that, we issued a bill of collection to the organization.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: We did not give commodities just straight to any other government.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: We always ran our commodities, if there were commodities, uh they went through U.S.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: organizations.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: So if like CARE or Mercy Corps or Doctors Without Borders, if we found that some food had gone missing, we would issue a bill of collection to the organization and they had to pay us back.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: But the we our projects were not cooked up by us alone.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: They were they were vetted with the White House, with the Office of Management budget, with the Congress, and in fact, many times the projects were actually invented or dreamed up by Congress people who would tell us what to do, and they'd write it into the law, the so-called earmarks.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing is we had many people watching us.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: We had auditors, we were always dealing with auditors.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: We had the general accounting office, we had our internal inspector general, we had project-specific auditors because projects had to have audits built into their budget, they had evaluations, and then sometimes there would even be the host government's uh auditors that were that were looking at the project.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: So there were a lot of eyeballs on anything we were doing.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: And as I said, most of the budget was travel time and people's time and and you know, uh renting facilities and and bringing uh refreshments to people and making sure that people at attended the meetings, perhaps paying for lodging that people had to come from another country.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there were f they're really w when Trump and Elon Musk announced that we were a corrupt organization, and that's what they said.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: They said we were lunatics, and that's why I got so outraged early in 2025 to to put the rest of my stories together in the in the second book, the one it called Insight Usaid.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: We were the opposite of crooks.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: We were there to help.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: And the people were very dedicated professionals that could have earned far more in the private sector um as I had done myself before I joined.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And we had many people, former uh Peace Corps volunteers, they were very committed to this effort.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: And they didn't tolerate theft.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, uh I won't tell you it didn't happen, but when it happened, we would go after the the thieves.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: You worked uh in Colombia and Peru on anti anti-drug programs.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why did USAID fail to stop the illegal drug trade even when trying to help farmers grow real crops instead of coca?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: More evidence that you you've done your homework.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: I I write extensively about this, not only in that book, but on my Substack.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the problem with the illegal drug trade is the demand.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the demand is going to create the supply.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you can go into a country and you can offer assistance to say, teach a farmer how to grow chocolate beans, cacao, or hearts of palm or anything else, and and he'll take the assistance, but he'll send his brother over the hill and they'll have a coca crop on the other side because the coca traffickers they will bring you the seeds, they will bring you the tools, they will bring you the fertilizer.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's all free of charge, and then they will show up at harvest time and take your crop so you don't even have to market it, and it's way more profitable than the chocolate will ever be, or the hearts of palm.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: So they're gonna produce it somewhere, and we can't teach it, we can't prohibit it from being grown.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: We just that's not our job.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: We are not a law enforcement agency.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: So offering people assistance to grow something on the side like chocolate, that that they'll still they'll take that help, but that the coca is going to get grown somewhere.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: And the proof is that uh 30 years after I was in Colombia, at the time it was one of the biggest programs we had in the world.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: We had spray planes that were spraying the fields, killing the coca and whatnot, but Colombia is still the biggest supplier of cocaine in the world.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: And another example, and when I was in West Africa, a single Cessna could fly over there from Brazil loaded with cocaine and land in, say, Guinea-Bissau.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that plane has more value on it in terms of street value in Europe than the entire national budget for the entire year for the military and the police.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it's no wonder that they have bribed the uh, you know, they've bought off the law enforcement and the military and the governments there.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Those are narco-states that are are unable to tolerate this kind of um this kind of value that passes through, that that it's just out of control.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: The real solution is either legalize it and take away the monopoly from the criminal groups and then start taxing it, or have a massive program to cut back on demand.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the supply problem is that you can't get you can't win that one.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, true.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Clifford, you wrote about USAID lawyers refusing to print parts of uh of the Quran that banned suicide suicide bombing.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: They they feared it broke US religion's laws or something.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: How did this fear inside USAID stop effective work against violent groups?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: It has a doctrine called separation of church and state.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: We have a First Amendment that says two things about religion uh that are relevant to this issue.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: One is there will be no restriction on the free exercise of religion in the United States.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, just stop there for a minute.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: Foreign aid has nothing to do with full free exercise of religion in the U.S.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing it says is that Congress will make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: There will never be a national church, there will need be no law that says you have to be a member of this faith or that faith in order to serve in government.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's what the Constitution says.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: In the 1970s, there was a Supreme Court decision.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: It comes up in many contexts, like when school administrators want to put the Ten Commandments on the walls of a school, or when some of you you may have noticed that our dollars say, In God We Trust.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Every coin we ever printed says in God we trust.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: In the can in the Senate and the uh and the House of Representatives, they open their sessions with pastors there to say a prayer.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the the lines are not crystal clear at all.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: But in any event, the Supreme Court in 1970, the Lemon v.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: Kurtzon test, the Supreme Court said in in dicta, that's lawyer talk for not the critical part of the decision, but they did say that they a law cannot create excessive entanglement with religion.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: So we got sued when I was still a lawyer in USAID, we got sued once by the American Israeli Jewish Congress for assisting in some schools in Israel that were teaching Christianity.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: But we our products well the what we were helping them with was the curriculum for other subjects like mathematics and and but because that group was offended that they were we they were helping these Christian schools, they sued us.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we breeding we went to to the district court with a motion to dismiss the case using the arguments that I just told you that hey, this has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't restrict the religion.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: And the the the uh The court denied the motion and wanted to have a trial.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: So we appealed it to the Second Circuit.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: And the Second Circuit said, go back and have a trial to determine whether this is excessive entanglement or not.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, we just gave up.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I call it, in my book, I call it preemptive capitulation.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't have the trial.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, we just wrote a regulation that said, we won't come near it.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: If it has to do with religion, we're not going to come near it.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so that's self-imposed.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's not required by the First Amendment.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's not required by any U.S.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: law.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's our own internal regulation.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: So when the University of Montana came to me and they wanted to translate parts of the Quran that say suicide is a sin against Allah, I thought, this is a good idea.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: We need to get this word out and not in Arabic.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: It needs to be in Kyrgyz and in Uzbek so that they are the Wahhabis are unable to attract these people to this very extreme version of Islam.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: And the Useid lawyer, much younger than me, in a job that I had had, was telling me, nope, you can't do it.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that that remained the case.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: So now when somebody asked me, wouldn't that be excessive entanglement?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: I said, how about being at war or being attacked by Islamic terrorists?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: I call that entanglement.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: We're already entangled.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: The issue isn't how to avoid getting entangled.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: The issue is how to get unentangled.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: And one way we could do it is to start talking about their theology in our foreign aid material, instead of saying it's legal to use a gun that the U.S.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: government paid for, that a taxpayer paid for, and you can shoot the man, but you can't just, hey, hey, buddy, you've got it wrong.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: You've under misunderstood your own religion.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: I can't print that.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: I can't spend money to do that because I'm gonna get entangled when I'm already in a war.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's insane.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: I could beat that person I did beat it for 20 years and I've got nowhere with it.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting, yeah.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: So you noted that uh internal job reviews lacked honesty and accountability.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: How did office uh politics and the bad management hurt real work on the ground because of that?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the civil service has a problem, and this goes way beyond USAID, and and it it's probably common to other governments too.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: When you start giving people seniority and job, if you don't allow managers to remove the people who don't perform, and that in government you can't do it.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: It just doesn't happen.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, at the highest levels, yes, it happens, the political, the political levels, but in the civil service, the people with career jobs, they have a much different system, and you have to base it on these evaluations.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: And if the evaluations, indeed, if they are negative over and over and over, yeah, then the person will get removed.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: But the but the the human dynamic is such that, especially in the Foreign Service, when you're moving around a lot, and so you never know whether you're gonna be with that same person two years from now or not, and in any event, you're pretty sure they're gonna be gone or you're gonna be gone.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: So nobody writes an honest evaluation about poor performers.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody gets wonderful evaluations, and you have to read between the lines to see if you really think that this person was deserving a promotion or not.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: And and it's very, very rare to read any kind of employee evaluation in the civil service where they say this person is is is a disaster, they're treating their people poorly, they need to go back to school and and learn some new skills about how to you know deal with subordinates.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't happen.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: So yes, I I that's one element of uh not just USAID, but the entire federal bureaucracy I criticize on that level.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think they I made a suggestion that that uh they do what some Navy ships have done.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I had a brother who was a captain in the U.S.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Navy, and quite often the officers, all of the officers on a ship, were required to rank order, including themselves, all of the other officers, not in terms of what their ranks were, but how well they did their job.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: And and that was in that that was an effective way to see if somebody is consistently ranked at the bottom of the list, even though they're serving on different ships here and there, then you know the proof is in the pudding.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what the solution is, but that's one suggestion I made.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um it wasn't adopted.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, unfortunately, yeah.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk a little bit about uh you witnessing social collapse.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you worked in uh Haiti, Guatemala, and Kyrgyzstan during times of um like political violence and uh revolutions.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: How fast can country break down and what warning signs should we watch for?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: The answer to the first question is easy.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: They can break down incredibly quickly, uh faster than anybody can imagine.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I was in Guatemala the very day that the president decided to arrest the Supreme Court and the Congress, and he did.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: And and for about a week there was total chaos there until we made clear to the military that if they let that stand, they won't they would not be doing business with us, so they they hustled him out of the country.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was in Kyrgyzstan the night of the so-called Tulip Revolution.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: There were these, I call them rena crowds.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: There were crowds of young men who were paid for by wealthy donors on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: And the president, uh President Akayev, Oskar Akayev, he had he was a very enlightened fellow and he didn't want the soldiers to have ammunition, so their guns were empty.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the uh the crowd figured that out.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: So both sides got over the fence, invaded their White House, and he got in a helicopter and flew to Al Mahdi in Kazakhstan, and then later went to Moscow, where he's he remains to this day as a math teacher.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: That night the whole city fell apart.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Young men, groups of young men rampaged through the city, burning, breaking into shopping centers, burning up shops.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was complete chaos, and the country's never been the same.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um it happens very fast.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it happened in Guinea when I was the I was there when La Sana Conte died.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: He'd been the dictator there for over 20 years, and all of a sudden people in the military started fighting with each other because each one wanted control.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: They had not uh they had no succession plan.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they did, but the Army disagreed with it.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I now fear that the kind of polarization that I often saw in the third world, I now see right here at home in the U.S., I see uh an incredibly polarized society, and I don't think it's out of out of the realm of possibility that we could have some incredibly crazy act that tips the scales.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: And if for instance they call out the soldiers and tell them to take possession of poll, polling booths or something like that, or if they're ordered to invade Greenland or something, you know, and then the people in the military start disagreeing with each other.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think people take it for granted that that society is the way it is, and and they don't they don't realize that it doesn't take much to tip it over.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's very fraudulent.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Very frame.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Your book talks about trafficking and bride kidnapping in Central Asia.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And your own wife was kidnapped, right, in Kyrgyzstan to stop you from reporting corruption?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: She was, yeah.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what happened and uh how did you stay safe?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, then the night of the marine ball, every embassy has a big party in November.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's the birthday of the Marine Corps, and they all have Marine Guards, so they have this dance and they have this big party, and it for me it was a command performance.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: I was the agency head in that country, so I had no choice.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: I had to go to the party.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And my wife was looking forward to it.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: She had gone out to a hairdresser, uh, and when she came out of the hairdresser, three boys with guns jumped in the car, took her out of the city, tied her up, and put her in a ditch, uh irrigation ditch, and uh they told her, Elder sister, we're not going to hurt you, but your husband owes our boss money.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I didn't know anybody anything, nobody ever asked me for money, but I had been quite outspoken about very high-level corruption in the energy sector.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: As you know, uh when when the Soviet Union came apart, the borders weren't there.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the and electricity was the easiest thing in the world to smuggle that just goes through the wires.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody can see it.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: So these in the energy department in Kyrgyzstan realized that they could take money under the table and let people in Kazakhstan pay for it under the table.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: I knew the details because I had a uh a beautiful Uzbek woman working for me who learned it by you know talking to guys in the energy sector, and they were quite willing to tell her about it, and it went all the way up to the prime minister.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I was telling other donors about it, I told the World Bank about it, I told the AD the Asian Development Bank.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: I now know after the fact that my phone was bugged, they were listening to my phone calls, they the the meetings with the World Bank were in the central bank, so the office was probably bugged.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: The KGB fellows had nothing to do after the bro after the breakup of the Soviet Union, at least the local guys, except spy on donors.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what they were doing.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: They were spying on me, and I guess they didn't appreciate me talking about this corruption.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that night, um, she uh a little boy came by with a cow and she saw him through the weeds and she hollered at him and he came, he came over and untied her feet.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: She walked into the toward the city, she found some people with uh cell phones.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: They were picking strawberries and she called me.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's a much longer story, but that night, in the morning, they took us to Almaty, and that was the end of my career, my stay in Kirchstan.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: They got us out, so that's how we stayed safe.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: They just got us out.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: And nothing bad happened to her.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I affected the hell out of her, but and and she's still traumatized, so I don't even use her name in the book, but um it was a very traumatic experience.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's more I could say about it, but that's that's the story in a nutshell.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: They got us out of the country.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: We never came well, she's gone back, but I have I've been back once, and I without without a dip passport, I won't do that again.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, yeah.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: So the USAID was recently shut down by the US government, and you were critical of USAID's mistakes, but you disagreed with uh calling the whole agency corrupt.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what are the big global risks of ending US foreign aid?
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well the the most apparent one and the most uh most obvious risk that it's not a risk, people are dying because our programs saved lives.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: Many of our programs were s keeping people alive.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: And and there's a there's a group in Boston that's counting, it's an estimate because nobody really knows, but the the estimate is now north of 700,000 people have died because a stop work order went out worldwide to stop everything.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: No matter what it is, just stop.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna figure it out later.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: And they they did a week later, they said, well, we're gonna keep the life-saving stuff alive.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they didn't.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Some of it, very, very small part of it, got moved over to the State Department, but the damage was done because they didn't restart it, many of those programs for several months, and the people were gone.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they shut the they shut everything down, commodities were left where they were.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: There was an Ebola epidemic breaking out in Kampala the same week when the stop work order went out.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: We had already purchased the protective equipment that the people needed to bury the bodies, and that was sitting in a warehouse in Nairobi, which is about a six-hour drive over to Kampala.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: Elon Musk and his boys wouldn't even let us move that stuff over there.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: They said, nope, that's up to the World Food, uh, the World Health Organization, they can do it.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: Let them let them try.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: But it didn't happen.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, a lot of people have died.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: But the other thing is we don't have this tool to do anything overseas now that we used to have, other than, you know, the the the things we could we have the military, sure, we can bomb things, but we don't have this tool to send implementers out to accomplish something.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's crazy.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: And do do they want to replace it with some other program or there's just nothing?
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't see that coming out of the White House, but I do I do think that uh I'll know a lot of congressmen would like to see something like this reinstated, whether they restart the agency in its old form or not, that's probably unlikely.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: But I think when another administration comes along that they will be reinstated in some fashion.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's just too many things that we'd like to accomplish overseas that we need an agency that would be able to uh fund whatever effort it is that that wants to accomplish, you know, the the purposes that the the the goals have not disappeared that are still important to the U.S.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and of course the private sector, the philanthropy organizations, the NGOs, a lot of them have some of their own funds, but we were by far the biggest bilateral donor.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: But the staff is is moving on.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Most of the people that were all of the people that work for USAID are looking for jobs.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh some of them have found may have found a job with, say, the State Department, but uh to do similar work, but most of the programs are are long gone, especially if they had nothing to do.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: When they made that decision to s to save lives, they they they had a meeting and a better story about the end of USAID is is a book called Into the Wood Chipper by Nicholas Enrich.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: And he was there.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: He was the acting head of the Global Health Bureau, and he was trying to get permission to use this material over in Nairobi to fight the Ebola epidemic.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: They decided, no, it's a life-saving project if you can prove that they would die in the next 30 days if we don't continue the program.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: Never mind that the staff is gone.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: They've all been let go, right?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: So to restart a program, you can't get it started in 30 days most of the time.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of these are are spoiled by them.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: If there were medicines, they're they're probably expired or ruined because they're not being refrigerated.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: So they they they did not continue to do anything to do with, say, child survival programs or maternal health programs that help mothers who have very difficult deliveries.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: They stopped a lot of the feeding programs for refugees in Southern Sudan.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was only the infectious diseases that were would cause a death within 30 days.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: So that meant if you're gonna order medicine and it's gonna take 45 days to come, nope, that doesn't qualify because obviously uh some pills that arrive 45 days from now are not gonna prevent a death in the next 30 days.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: So they they really had a very restrictive idea, and they s their stated goal was to end the agency.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: They they they said that very plainly.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: You have written that the idea of the national or the nation state is failing.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what's the system do you propose to bring uh peace and stability instead of that's uh uh a deeper question, but you're right.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um what what I came away with from almost 30 years overseas is that people are not all that different everywhere.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean uh I I said at the beginning that when you learn another language, it's like you've grown another soul, but at the same time, you recognize the commonality that we that that people have in so many places.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: They all want the same thing for their kids and and themselves.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: And what these borders are doing right now, they are enabling very large militaries to respond to the whims of a single individual.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: The war in Ukraine was started because Vladimir Putin decided to start it.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_02: The war in Iran was started because one guy, Donald Trump, decided to start it.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: Now, he had Bibi Netanyahu clapping, uh applauding that decision.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: But uh you might see it yet in Asia if Xi Jinping decides they want to take Taiwan.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: And and these borders, you know, if you go back way back in history, every border was always created initially for selfish reasons.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: They just stay out of here, this is my land.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want you here.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, that it they grew and grew and grew to the point where we've got these very large nation states now that command incredibly big militaries that all of which take their instructions from one person.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's that's not good for humanity.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think the Swiss system, where uh my daughter is is Swiss.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh she has Swiss citizenship, she's lived there for years, and um in Switzerland, every province makes its own rules about who can become a citizen of the whole country.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: So she started the process when she lived in Basel and she was almost there, almost a citizen.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: She moved to Interlock in a different province, she had to start all over again.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Now, it it's not very efficient, but at least it's a decision made by a small political unit where people know each other, uh, rather than you know casting a vote for some guy who's attracted the attention of the media and happens to come across with a fairly you know uh persuasive demagogic pitch to to all of the citizens that voted for him or her.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and they don't have the these small units won't have these big militaries.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of economists have studied the impact of national borders, and I'm not the first one.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: Angela Merkel said that the nation state has outlived its usefulness.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's uh it's a topic I think that needs to be seriously examined.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: We wouldn't need foreign aid if we didn't have these borders.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: People would naturally migrate to where they can be, you know, successful and make make the most of the opportunities available there.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, it would be disruptive to people to have a a lot of very poor people immigrate to their to their place, but eventually the inequality would even out.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, everybody would be a winner.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's an idea that I think humanity needs to get serious about.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: I realize it's a political non-starter.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: I that's plain as day.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: But at some point we need to rethink these borders.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're enabling single individuals to do some really stupid things.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, true.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what pretty much is happening now, like in in Europe they have this migrant crisis crisis, that's what they're trying to do to uh how to say yeah, to bring more people from poor countries into the Western world, that's part of the plan, or how to say it, or their version of of the economic South, it's uh you know, just to the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, there's a lot of people that are la in poor circumstances, but but what they may not realize is if if you didn't have these national borders, the the opportunities would open up within Africa for investors from Europe, there would be opportunities, people could move in both directions.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: And some of the climate might be more interesting down there than it is in Europe.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, it would be very disruptive for at least one or two generations, but at some point the the you would have a much more homogeneous economic situation and it would be more efficient.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: You wouldn't have these barriers that just restrict trade and restrict the productivity of resources, and you would have a better exchange of ideas.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: The way the world makes progress is by ideas having sex.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: These ideas get together, and if you're telling the people they can't go one way or the other, you have less of that.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: You have less growth in productivity.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I yes, I do make that point.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_02: I I tell the story of when I was 13, I I took my first trip to an international border, my family went down to the Mexican border, and I stood there as as a young teenager looking on one side of this fence, and I said, Why is that fence here?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't understand it.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, sixty-two years later I still don't understand it.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, Clifford, thank you for joining us today and sharing a clear, real look at foreign aid from behind the scenes.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: And also, guys, uh Clifford's book uh you can find on Amazon.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: It calls uh USAID an Odyssey of Foreign Assistance.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the webpage if you're yeah and also CliffordH Brown.com is your website, correct?
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: There's another Clifford Brown up there who's more famous than me, but he was a black American jazz trumpet player.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a jazz fan, you might know about Clifford Brown, but that's not me.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: So my w that's what my website is Clifford H.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: Brown, the H cancer cameras.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: But you can find links to my to both both that book and the earlier one on that site.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and also you're at uh Clifford Brown.substag.com.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't have the H should have, but it doesn't.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and all the links how to contact Cliff and by his book will be in the description down below.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: Please like, subscribe, and leave a comment.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Bye bye.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.