Daniel O'Neil

Trump closed me down

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. 

 

 

 

 

A Sad 10th Anniversary of the Haiti Earthquake

A first responder stands near the rubble that was a children's hospital in Pétion -Ville. The Royal Oasis Hotel is in the background.

I am sadden that so many of the articles on the 10^th anniversary of the Haiti earthquake seem to blame the mess in Haiti today on the earthquake response. Sometimes I feel that Haiti is like a drug addict. You can provide them with all the help in the world, but in the end, they have to take responsibility for the choices that they make.

I’m a civil engineer and had worked on disaster management in Haiti before the earthquake. The engineering community knew that Haiti’s building code was not only decades out of date, but never being enforced. A couple of years earlier, a school had collapsed killing scores of children. There were plenty of warning, but nothing was done.

During the earthquake response, I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of generosity. The US was just coming out of its financial crisis, but both private and public donations were incredibly generous. Of course the response was messy and inefficient. But the response to a large disaster is always messy and inefficient. The goal is to move quickly, not to carefully consider each decision. As I wrote earlier, I thought that the Haiti earthquake response was just as effective as the response to the Ebola in West Africa. Yet, the Ebola responders were hailed as heroes and the earthquake responders were scorned.

During the years after the earthquake, Haiti continued to grow quickly. All the major hotels expanded, the Marriott and Best Western built hotels. The streets were paved not only in Port-au-Prince, but in every major town. By 2015, Haiti looked better than it had before the earthquake.I felt that the earthquake response was a success.

Then Haiti flubbed its national elections. The government was forced to cancel the second round of the presidential elections and President Martelly handed over power to a caretaker government. The scandal broke over the handling of the Venezuelan government’s program that allowed Haiti to obtain fuel on credit (the Petro-Caribe Program) which provided the government with around $1.7 billion for projects, many of which were never completed. On top of all of this, Haiti was hit by a Category 5 hurricane.

I returned to Haiti in May and have been sadden by what I see. The economy is in shambles and the government’s attempts to remove a fuel subsidy resulted in wide spread protests. There is little investment happening and little hope that Haiti can pull itself out of this crisis. There seems to be such deep mistrust between the government and the opposition that no comprise appears possible. The international community seems to be adopting a policy of tough love: “We won’t bail you out of this one.”

When I left Haiti in May 2010, I figured that I was done with Haiti. I knew that if I stuck around, it would break my heart. I love Haiti and love the work that I am doing. But when I lift my head and look around, my heart breaks. In the end, outsiders can only do so much. For Haiti to move forward, the Haitian politicians need to figure out how to work together. Without political stability, there we will be stuck in this viscous circle of no private investments, a declining economy, and growing civil unrest.This time it is up to Haiti to solve this crisis.

Three easy reforms to our health insurance system

Last month my son had a major operation. As we checked him in, I asked the person processing the paperwork for an estimate of how much this would cost. She replied, “I don’t know, but don’t worry your insurance covers it.” We are now receiving a steady stream of bills from each different doctor, the anesthesiologists, the hospital, and on and on. There are currently 29 separate insurance claims related to this visit. Naturally, most show up as fully covered but others do not. This is a crazy system.

I’m lucky. I have good health insurance. I understand enough about the system to know that if a charge isn’t covered by my insurance it is likely due to a mistake. I am fluent enough in English and bureaucracy fighting that I am confident that I will get it resolved.  

I would like to suggest three different reforms that we could do to our health insurance system that would not involve doing away with all private insurance but could make things better:

1. Require health care providers to offer the same price to everyone: One of the biggest benefits of insurance is that it is a discount club. Each of the hospital or doctor’s bill comes initially with a very high amount which is then marked down to the insurer’s negotiated rate. An initial bill might be $1500 that is marked down to $500. So who has to pay the higher amount? The uninsured—the people least able to pay. How does this make sense? Do we really expect the uninsured to subsidize the cost of healthcare for the rest of us? Instead, why not require hospitals to fix their prices and publish them. Everyone pays the same price for the same service.
2. Require all insurance companies who sell insurance to the federal government to offer the same plans to everyone: We get our health insurance through our employers since that is an easy way to lump a lot of people together. Some companies have given me good insurance and others have given me poor insurance. I do not like being dependent on my employer for this choice. Since, the federal government is one of the largest purchasers of health insurance. Why not make this same insurance available to anyone who wants it? Small businesses would not need to negotiate their own deal. Individual employees could opt to buy from the government list instead of from their employer. This would give us many more options than we got from the Affordable Care Act and would not require any extra government funding.
3. Offer Medicare to anyone who wants to buy it: Medicare is supposedly the least expensive health coverage. Why not offer this bare bone insurance to anyone who would settle for it? It should be priced to fully cover its cost. If it works as well as some of the democratic candidates think it will, then people will switch to it. But no one will be forced to switch.

I’ve always suspected that the most vocal defenders of our current system are those who either don’t use it or profit from it. Reform is hard but if we can continue to make incremental progress we can slowly make this work better without risking breaking it all.

My favorite productivity hack

Just over two years ago I was looking for a new way to get organized. I had tried many different systems but none seemed to work. I followed the philosophy of Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Effective People such as Begin with the End in Mind, Think Win-Win, and Sharpen your Saw. I tried to maintain the discipline of David Allen's system of Getting Things Done by keeping detailed lists of tasks. But I never found a means of tying it all together. My "to do" list was spread across my emails, outlook task list, and handwritten notes. I tried to keep organized by using an iPad Mini for writing down notes, but didn't keep it up. I knew that I needed something different. That is when I found the concept of bullet journaling.

 

Bullet Journaling is an analog system for a digital world. At its most basic, it is simply using a blank notebook to plan and track your days. Everything goes into a single notebook--annual, monthly, weekly, and daily plans; meeting notes and reflections, collections of ideas, trackers for following progress, and of course all the "to dos." Through daily logs and monthly reviews, it is easy to keep up on what you should be doing. By writing down notes, I tend to remember them better (and am amazed to see how I sometimes have misremembered events compared to what I wrote). While my bullet journal is pretty basic and utilitarian, there are beautiful examples of what can be done.

 

When Steve Caroll, the originator of Bullet Journaling came out with his book, I preordered it as a thanks for how his system had helped me. Two years into Bullet Journaling, I was a bullet journal devotee and had my system down. But I was curious to get his perspective and see what tips I could pick up. His book is divided into three sections. The first is a nice overview of bullet journaling. I picked up a few tips as to how to improve my system. I liked the presentation of the book which included frequent examples of what a page from a bullet journal might look like. The middle section is the soft side--why we should be organized. I didn't find this as helpful, but I have read dozens of self-help and business books. The final section had examples of extras--special lists and examples of how other people had used bullet journals. I love how different the systems can be. I think that it would be easy to make a book with nothing but fun ideas for how to use bullet journals. 

 

Steve's book is a great overview of bullet journaling. It is a handy guide for someone just getting started or a good reference book for someone already using this system.

 

Side note: My favorite journal is the Rhodia Dot Grid (solid cover, thick pages that don't bleed) and my favorite pen is the Pilot Metropolitan fine tipped fountain pen.

 

 

What I wish our politicians would say about the border

Our government has been shut down now for four weeks ostensibly about border security, but really because both sides like the fight. President Trump is acting like there is no barrier at the border and the Democrats act as if walls are immoral. I wish we could have an honest discussion of what is needed. Here is what I would like to hear a politician say:

 

"We are a nation of immigrants but we are also a nation of laws. We welcome legal immigrants. But we welcome them badly. By law, we allow refugees to resettle in the US. In practice, they remain stuck in a legal limbo--not knowing if they can stay or not. Our immigration courts are backed up so badly that people can spend years waiting for their day in court--years waiting to find out if they are legally allowed to remain. With our legal immigration system so overloaded, it is no wonder that there are so many people here illegally. We have 10 million people living and working here without legal permission. These include students who overstay their visa. Tourists who don't return home. And the hundreds of thousands of people who sneak across our southern border every year. These are 10 million people who live in fear of deportation. 10 million people who are ripe for abuse. 10 million people who can't vote for a government to protect them.

 

To combat this problem, we will undertake the following four-pronged approach:

1. We will double the number of judges reviewing immigration cases. Within a month of being picked up or applying for asylum, an immigrant should have his or her case resolved. We need enough judges to be able to conduct hearings fairly and quickly. We will work quickly through the backlog and establish a fair system to ensure that we can sort through those who are allowed to stay and those who are not.
2. We will increase the security on the southern border. We have made great strides to reduce this number, but haven't solved it. Before 9/11, we had 1.6 million people coming across our southern border in a single year. We built fences and barriers and have reduced that down to 400,000. But that is still too many. Some of the barriers we built have fallen apart and people have found new routes across the border. To increase border security, we will increase electronic surveillance, hire more border guards, and reinforce weak points along the border. We want to be sure that we know what is coming through our border crossing points and what is trying to cross outside of those points.
3. We will continue to improve vetting at our consulates around the world: Anyone is welcome to apply to come to the United States, regardless of their race, nationality, or religion. However, we get to choose who we allow to receive those visas. We will carefully vet each applicant. If we have any doubts about a person or their application, we will reject it. We recognize that this makes it difficult for people from countries with weak governments to satisfy our requirements. However, we have to keep our country safe.
4. We will limit chain migration: Anyone born in the United States is a US citizen. However, anyone with a US relative is not entitled to US citizenship. Relatives of US citizens can apply for visas and citizenship in the same way that anyone else can apply. Their claims will be processed as will any other applicants.

Finally, we will continue to defer deportation of children who were brought here illegally but have lived their lives in the United States. We recognize that our immigration system is broken and that these people fell through the cracks. By taking the four steps outlined above, we won't allow this to happen again. However, we have invested heavily in educating these Dreamers. We want them to stay. We will begin reviewing the people registered for DACA and will issue green cards to those who meet the legal requirements. With a green card, they will be eligible to apply for citizenship in five years. 

 

We also recognize that strong walls and strong laws will not end the problem of migration alone. We need strong neighbors. We are significantly increasing our commitments to helping our neighbors to grow their economies through trade and increased assistance.

 

By taking a comprehensive approach to improving our immigration system, we hope to reduce the population of those living here without proper paperwork. We will continue to welcome legal immigrants, tourist, student, and business travelers. We are proud of our country and understand why people want to come here. However, we will manage the flow of migrants to protect the jobs of our citizens."

Liberia's Paths to Prosperity

I first came to Liberia four years ago—just as the Ebola epidemic was starting to spread. The classic image of Liberia’s roads was that of a four-wheel drive vehicle stuck in a sea of mud. Today, the situation has dramatically improved. I spent the last week driving around Bong, Nimba, Lofa, and Grand Bassa Counties inspecting the roads that we have improved through the USAID-funded Feeder Roads Alternative and Maintenance Program (FRAMP). I drove on nearly 400 km of these small roads and probably twice as much on the primary and second network to reach them and 90% of the time I was on good roads! The main roads from Monrovia through Bong County and up to Nimba County and over to Grand Bassa are all paved. The road from Bong County up through Lofa County was nicely rehabilitated (we helped with that). Even the feeder roads that were fixed several years ago under a different program remain in good condition.

That last point surprised me. When we talk about the work that we do, we talk about how we “rehabilitate” rural roads and how maintenance is critical especially since Liberia can get over three meters of rain a year. Of course if you don’t maintain these gravel roads, they will just wash away again. But I’ve learned a new narrative. These roads that we are improving were just tracks. They never had a proper driving surface or side drains. If there were any cross-drains, they were built out of rough timber and prone to collapse. When we work on the road, we install culverts and bridges so that water does not need to pass over the road. We build a proper road surface with side drains so water stays off the roadway. We compact the road surface so that the gravel (really a mixture of clay and small pebbles) does not wash away with the rain. Although the road condition will deteriorate over time—especially if the improved road ends up with significant traffic. However, it will never again be as poor a road as it was before we started.

The biggest challenge that we face in maintaining the road is the sudden growth in traffic. Although we designed these roads to be feeder roads—to feed traffic from small villages to the secondary and primary roads—some road segments have become popular shortcuts and now have significant car and truck traffic. Several of our road segments ought now to be upgraded to be secondary roads—given wider carriageways and more gentle curves to allow for faster driving speeds. This is another nice success of our project—helping Liberia to grow.

The four counties that I visited have about half of the feeder roads in the entire country. I understand that there is still much to be done in the rest of the country and especially in the southern counties. I am proud that we were able to play our part in helping Liberia on its path to prosperity.

Eight years of Hope

Shortly before Obama took office, I wrote a post with the title What will the world look like after this economic crisis? I saw the big economic crisis of the time as an inevitable correction. The US had been living too big for too long. I saw that Africans were taking over international jobs once reserved for expatriates. The rest of the world was catching up to America in terms of the ability to get tings done. I said that American would come out of this recession poorer than it went in--the glory days were gone.

After Obama's inauguration, I changed my mind. He convinced me that I had been thinking too small. I remember almost titling that post Slapped down by Obama. 

Trump won because I was right. For much of America, we did not recover from that economic crisis. Last summer, we drove through Indiana and I saw the communities that never recovered. I think Obama did a great job. He brought hope and change to many. However the world has changed. Whereas in the 1950s, a blue color american could support a middle class family, that will never be true again.

There are great jobs for well educated people. There are plenty of opportunities for those with the right skills and in the right place. This is a golden age for entrepreneurship. But what do you do for those who are unwilling or unable to to take advantage of those opportunities? 

So what do you want to do with your life?

Chris Guillebeau is back with a new book on managing your career. After he wrote about how to live the life that we want (The Art of Non-Conformity), how to start the business of our dreams (The $100 Startup), and how to create and chase our dreams (The Happiness of Pursuit); he is now tackling how to create the career of your dreams.

If you are set on starting your own business, stick with The $100 Startup. If you are working for someone else or unsure of which path to take, this is a great overall guide. Chris starts off by helping you figure out how to align your work dreams with your life goals--revising your script so that your actions actually lead you to be happier not just higher up the ladder. He covers the pros and cons of working for yourself, working for someone else, or figuring out how to do both.

 

This is an ideal book for someone either early in their career or feeling stuck. Chris does a beautiful job of showing the incredible range of opportunities that are out there and provides solid advice no matter which way you might want to jump.

Note that Chris was kind enough to send me a copy of the book in exchange for this unbiased review. However, since I am a fanboy of Chris', he knew that I would love it! 

 

Yes, Muslims should try to root out extremists in their midsts

... and so too should anti-abortion activists, environmentalists, political activists, Christians, and all other groups. The United States is founded on the belief that all men [women and children] are created equal and have the inalienable  right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have to work together to protect these rights, protect our neighbors, and build the country that we want to live in. Can you imagine the shame of knowing that a neighbor had imprisoned women in his house for years and you did nothing to help? That your talk encouraged someone to open fire on a health center that offered abortions? Or that you had a friend who became such an extremists that he shot innocent people in the name of your religion? Are we not our brother's keeper?

What would I do if I was in charge of the American Red Cross?

After I published my post last week on the American Red Cross (ARC), a few people have asked me what I would do if put in charge of it. Given all of the bad publicity that they have generated with their response to each major disaster, they certainly need to change their approach and to rebuild trust. The ARC plays a critical role in disaster response. They have an incredible ability to raise funds and are part of a broad international organization that has branches in nearly every country. They are perfectly placed to provide leadership on disasters all over the world.

So how do they pull themselves out of their deep hole and reestablish their leadership? I would suggest focusing on the following three areas:

1. Figure out what they are best in the world at doing and focus on it: The ARC seems to try to be all things to all people. They provide emergency kits, build shelters, feed people, finance grants, rebuild communities, and on and on. Sometimes they work through the local Red Cross, sometimes they set up their own organization and work around the local partner. Instead, I would have the ARC keep only a small number of high level experts who would implement only through the local Red Crosses and other partner organizations. The role of the ARC team members would be similar to the role of the OFDA staff. They would provide technical assistance to their partners and review grant requests. By being in the field and focused on implementation, they could help their partners be flexible in their approach. Given that the ARC is an NGO, they ought to be the most flexible of the funding organizations. By having highly trained people in the field, these experts could be trusted to guide the funding decisions.
   
   
2. Embrace Radical Transparency: Since the ARC will be subcontracting out most of the work, it will be easier for them to be very transparent. Their management costs should be around 10-20% of the donations that they receive. This would cover all of their home office costs and the costs for their field teams. The rest would be given out in grants. They can require that all funded proposals are published and have an open database that tracks the results. Financial data should only be published at the line item level (showing for example how much goes into all salaries but not showing how much an individual is paid). In this way, it will be clear not only what the ARC is doing but how their money is spread around. After all, the money being spent isn’t really the ARC’s money—it is money donated through the ARC to help the disaster victims. By having the funded proposals published, other organizations can see what is being done and better understand both how to coordinate with the implementer and how to learn from the funded approaches. This would encourage learning by doing and improve the quality of proposals over time.
   
   
3. Publish Evaluations Consistently: Because the ARC is focused on being the best in the world at what they do and on being radically transparent, it only makes sense that they conduct thorough evaluations and publish the results. Yes, these will highlight mistakes and shortcomings and will sometimes be embarrassing both for the ARC and for their partners. Implementing projects in a disaster or post-disaster environment is tough. You have to move fast which means making mistakes. But we shouldn’t be repeating the same mistakes. If the ARC committed to conducting thorough evaluations and publishing the results, the ARC could help share best practices and prevent repeated mistakes. Besides, as most politicians have learned, the best way to avoid a public scandal is to own up to your shortcomings.

The ARC ought to be a very powerful force for good and a key actor in every major disaster. Instead, their brand seems to be continually weakening. Each scandal hurts not only the ARC but every NGO who ends up painted with the same brush.