I was managing a USAID-funded project in Haiti in January when the Trump administration shut down USAID. We were in the first year of a five-year project aimed at helping water utilities in Haiti’s towns improve the management of their drinking water systems, thereby enhancing both their service quality and coverage. While Haiti is an utter mess with gangs controlling the whole Port-au-Prince region, the water utilities have been a surprising success. I had managed an earlier project in Haiti, through which we helped several water utilities become profitable by focusing on customer service. We helped them realize that Haitians would pay for water service if that service were dependable. The goal of this new project was to expand the earlier success to a national level, thereby improving water service for at least a million Haitians.
When Trump took office, we expected scrutiny and changes. Each President wanted their priorities reflected in USAID’s activities. In his first term, President Trump sought to align foreign assistance with his vision of national security and to promote self-sufficiency. Under President Biden, USAID had a strong focus on climate change and diversity. Reflecting Biden’s priorities, my project included a component focused on transitioning water production away from diesel-generated power and towards solar power, as well as promoting the role of women in the water sector. We expected there to be a shift away from Biden’s priorities, but we didn’t expect how rapid and brutal it would be.
There were several ways the Trump administration could have enforced its new priorities in international development. The standard route would have been to announce a review of the international development portfolio and to state that all new projects would need to be aligned with the Trump administration's goals. A more radical approach would have been to freeze new funding for projects and to announce that any new funding would have to be aligned with the new goals. Instead, in Trump’s first week in office, his administration ordered all projects to immediately suspend all work and to wait while his administration reviewed every single one of them.
In the early days of this confusion, I was optimistic. The stated purpose of the stop-work order was to allow the State Department to review the projects and determine which ones were aligned with Trump’s priorities and could therefore continue. My project focused on improving access to water in Haiti by transitioning the water utilities towards a private sector-style management approach. With Trump’s top priority being reducing migration, improving basic living conditions in a “shithole” country like Haiti seemed a perfect fit. We crafted justifications for why the project should remain and sent these to USAID. However, the USAID staff were forbidden from talking to us.
As soon as we received the stop-work order, we had to instruct all our subcontractors and suppliers to immediately terminate their work. Three of our subcontractors had staff working in our offices. Their staff was fired without notice. One subcontractor had completed 90% of the design for solarizing the town of Les Cayes' wells. They were not allowed to complete the design. We had ordered the equipment to solarize the wells in Ouanaminthe and had to cancel that order. We stopped all technical assistance and cancelled all training programs. I hoped that this would be a temporary pause.
We had been invoicing USAID on a monthly basis for our work. Due to a change in personnel, USAID had not paid our November invoice in December as usual. When the funding freeze was announced in January, we were owed for both November and December. At the time, DAI had 95 USAID-funded projects. The US government stopped all payments for all of them. Since DAI was no longer receiving payments, they stopped sending money to us. We were fortunate to have sufficient funds to cover our January payroll. Most other projects were not so lucky.
As we entered February with still no funds, we wrote to all our subcontractors and suppliers to apologize for the delays in payment. I told my staff that their pay would be delayed. With no movement on receiving funds from USAID, DAI joined a lawsuit against President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and others. DAI’s CEO, Tine Knott, stated that it was unfortunate that DAI was compelled to sue the US government to force it to pay its invoices. Within a week of filing the lawsuit, the judge issued a preliminary ruling requiring USAID to pay its invoices, but the government was slow to comply.
On February 27th, we received a notice from USAID stating that our project had been terminated. There was no rationale given. It merely stated that the US Government had decided to terminate the contract. By then, DAI had begun to receive payments for its November and December invoices. We began the long process of dismantling the project that we had just started.
By the end of May, the project was completely closed down. We had canceled all of our subcontracts and procurements, laid off all of our staff, donated all of our laptops, vehicles, and furniture to the local water utilities, and even managed to pay most of our debts. It was a painful process that left a trail of broken promises behind. Cancelling our project is a small part of that $150 billion that DOGE claims to have saved, but it came at a steep cost. We were fortunate that we had not started any of our construction work; DAI had other projects that were forced to abandon half-built facilities. However, having spent 11 months starting up a project, only to shut it down after three months, meant that the US had little to show for the millions of dollars spent, except a lot of broken promises.
My favorite line about the Trump Administration is that they have all of the wrong answers to all of the right questions. Cutting off foreign assistance was the wrong answer to how the US can best protect its own interests in a globally connected world.
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