USAID Is Gone. And It Hurts.

June 27, 2025

Today, I’m thinking of the people.
The colleagues. The partners.
The mentors, grantees, collaborators, and quiet backstops who made the work possible—often against the odds.

For many, this isn’t just the end of an agency.
It’s the loss of livelihoods, continuity, identity.
It’s a gut-punch to those who built careers around service, global cooperation, and trying—imperfectly but earnestly—to make things better.

I’m also thinking of the people and communities who built progress with us—who opened their lives, their work, and their trust to partnerships that are now vanishing overnight.

Some are grieving.
Some are stunned.
Some are scrambling to hold together programs and promises that no longer have a home.

If you’re feeling that too—anger, heartbreak, uncertainty—you’re not alone.
And if you’ve lost your job, your team, your footing, or your sense of what’s next: please know this community still sees you. I still see you.

I don’t have a neat takeaway.
But I do know this: the people who’ve carried this work—at USAID and far beyond it—are the kind of people we need in whatever comes next.