Former United States Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush have delivered a rare open rebuke of the Donald Trump administration in an emotional video farewell with staffers of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
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 organisation, created by President John F Kennedy as a soft power, peaceful way of promoting US national security by boosting goodwill and prosperity abroad.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered USAID to be absorbed into the US State Department on Tuesday.
The former presidents and U2 singer Bono – who held back tears as he recited a poem – spoke with thousands in the USAID community in a videoconference, which was billed as a closed-press event.
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 cuts by Trump and his billionaire ally 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 organisation”.
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 criticising the seismic changes that Trump has made to US programmes 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 realise 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 programmes 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 revolutionised modern agriculture and curbed starvation and famine. The agency worked at 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 programme 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 programme. 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.
Bono, a longtime humanitarian advocate in Africa and elsewhere, was announced as the “surprise guest” and was wearing shades and a cap.
He jokingly hailed the USAID staffers as “secret agents of international development” in acknowledgment of the nature of Monday’s unofficial gathering of the USAID community.
Bono recited a poem he had written to the agency about 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 programmes abroad.
“They called you crooks,” Bono said, “when you were the best of us.”
