What The Hell America!

In a closed-door meeting last Thursday with USAID Deputy Administrator–designate Pete Marocco, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) pushed back on some of the Trump administration’s claims about USAID’s work. The senator’s focus was on one claim specifically: the idea, pushed by Marocco, that less than a third of the budget for the global anti-AIDS program PEPFAR was going to life-saving care. Marocco, speaking with a group of senators, payments USAID was withholding from grantees, saying he had determined that a good chunk of what PEPFAR was doing was not actually “life-saving.” The lawmakers gathered there wanted to know if the deputy administrator–designate even knew if things are or are not working.

“PEPFAR is a program that is recognized for doing a lot of good,” Ricketts told me on Tuesday. “We’re in a phase of just pausing everything. There’s always gonna be opportunities to improve programs. I don’t think that means we’re necessarily gonna get rid of them.”

As for his back-and-forth with Marocco, which was detailed in a readout of the meeting obtained by The Bulwark, a spokesman for Ricketts did not respond to a request for comment.

But the pushback Marocco received foreshadowed a larger reality: The prospect of ending these far-reaching programs—like PEPFAR and, on a much larger scale, the foreign aid administered by the USAID—remains distant. Beyond that, DOGE’s haphazard cuts are difficult to codify because they have a weak legal foundation and are hard to explain, let alone justify (hence the repeat un-firings).