One year ago, I was in Jerusalem working to support the dedicated team of public servants who ran the U.S. Agency for International Development’s office there. I was on a tour of duty to help prepare the team to brief incoming Trump Administration leadership, but before that could happen, I was ordered to leave abruptly. Elon Musk threatened to cut all 15,000 USAID employees off from access to the agency’s systems, which would have stranded me and thousands of other American staff overseas. What followed were a few short weeks in which the administration dismantled USAID, the U.S. government’s largest and most impactful tool for building goodwill abroad.
