Unemployed USAID Schadenfreude

USAID commissars fired by DOGE shed tears with NYT while cringe flexing on LinkedIn

Last week, The New York Times published a sob story called “A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss - People have plowed through savings, cashed out retirement funds and moved in with relatives. Former U.S.A.I.D. workers estimate that less than half have found full-time work.”

DOGE cut all of USAID’s 16,000 employees, 280,000 contractors, and $35 billion budget. NYT interviewed 30 of them. I voted for this schadenfreude, but we will never get the wasted taxpayer funds and demoralization back.

Predictably, every person featured in the story is a LinkedIn flexer. I have screenshotted their elite human capital profiles along with spicy commentary on the NYT article below. Several patterns emerge:

• They all have multiple useless degrees, likely subsidized by taxpayers

• Almost all have pronouns in their bio and several vague virtue-signaling commissar titles like “Peace Builder”, “Public Health Strategist”, and “Sustainable Development” - #opentonetwork

• Despite decades of cushy 6-figure salaries, they have no savings.

• Several are geriatric parents, having one child in their mid-late 40s

• None of them have the self awareness to realize that they are unemployable and wasted decades on bullshit jobs that served no purpose other than lining their pockets with our money

• Even flattering NYT photos do not make them look better or sympathetic

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She had worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development or related groups for more than two decades. She made $175,000 a year… Today Amy Uccello and her husband, who also lost his job when U.S.A.I.D. funding for his nonprofit dried up, rely on food stamps, Medicaid and a supplemental nutrition program for women and children that helps with their now 19-month-old daughter.

The mortgage on their home in Washington was until recently in forbearance, meaning they negotiated to pay less than they owed each month. But the bank has now cut them off and suggested they apply for a low-income mortgage program…. She and her husband have applied for more than 100 jobs with no luck… “I can’t sleep because of our own situation. I can’t sleep because of what I know what’s happening around the world. I can’t sleep because my former colleagues and friends are also suffering.”

Imagine being a hard-working American and seeing that this gender/equity “expert” makes $175,000 a year from your labor. Her husband was in on the grift too. Why didn’t they reveal how much he made? Did she funnel money to his NGO? How did they not save enough money approaching age 50 to provide more of a cushion?

Now they will continue to leech off the taxpayer through welfare programs. While their daughter should benefit from spending more time with her parents, she has a high risk of being groomed into a he/him. I can’t sleep because people like this stole so much. Learn to code - oh wait…

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“I feel guilty, honestly, that of all my colleagues who I know are still unemployed, I’m the one who found something,” said Sara Miner, 42, who was a senior adviser in the agency’s H.I.V.-AIDS office and previously ran health programs in Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Now she helps manage health and human service programs for Fairfax County, Va.

Fairfax County is Zimbabwe now, glad she can use her skills to assist in its destruction. CIA Girlboss Governor Spanberger won thanks to DC swamp bureaucrats like Sara flooding the county. She will raise taxes to give patronage in the form of make-work jobs to these folx.

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Jobs are also gone at the many nonprofits and partner agencies once funded by U.S.A.I.D. “Everyone I know is also up the creek, all my bosses, my mentors, the people you would normally go to, the people providing me references,” said Catherine Baker, 36, who, as a contractor, made $127,000 a year recruiting staff and helping to start up U.S.A.I.D. projects. Ms. Baker now volunteers as a manager for OneAid, which helps former U.S.A.I.D. workers, and works nine hours a week as a companion for two elderly women.

DOGE didn’t cut enough. For every full-time USAID employee, there were 20 contractors. Who is funding the OneAid NGO? How much taxpayer funds will be stolen by these new “home healthcare” and learing center positions? We need to eradicate these organizations like AIDS.

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“I’m a queer, brown immigrant,” said Adrian Mathura, 55, a Navy veteran and a former senior U.S.A.I.D. adviser in global health who was involuntarily retired last July and is still fighting for the retirement pay he is due. “I got to do all of this incredible stuff in my life and my career, and I spent all of my adult life touting how great the city on the hill was… I never even once imagined I would be so betrayed by my government.”

Queer brown DEI hire. Our government has been betraying Americans citizens for decades. Adrian can join the club now that he is no longer on the gravy train.

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Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior vice president at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store near her home in Falls Church, Va. Her take-home pay would not cover her mortgage, but said she was eager to do something other than spending down her savings and has applied for 60 jobs. She has since been called back for an in-person interview. “Aside from the salary, it would be fun,” she said. “I could do it for a little while.”

She has learned from online webinars on job hunting that her three decades of work in international development, including as the Peace Corps country director for Benin, need to be papered over on her résumé. “Somehow, after 20 years of experience, you’re suddenly trying to hide the number because it makes you sound old… I was writing in the blurb at the top of my résumé, ‘I have over 30 years of experience…. Did I really do all those great things? Was I really good once?”

$272,000 a year. No way a psychology major with a 3.3 GPA from Bucknell would even get hired in today’s job market thanks to people like Sheryl voting for open borders. Doubt she can manage a spice store and anything she did was great.

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Alysha Beyer, 53, who had a 25-year career as a U.S.A.I.D. contractor and ran reproductive health programs in Africa, is a single mother of two teenagers who moved in with a neighbor last year so she could rent out her home in Rockville, Md., to cover the mortgage. She has since moved back but said because of complications with Medicaid she has delayed getting a biopsy for what her doctor thinks is non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“We were running these large programs looking for vulnerable populations, trying to help support them, and then you find yourself a user of the system. She said she feels a stigma relying on social welfare programs, “having to tell people you’re unemployed all the time and going to the doctors and saying Medicaid. It’s a humbling experience to have to ask all the time for help.”

Alysha was so busy aborting black babies in Africa that her marriage fell apart. Margaret Sanger would be proud. Perhaps she can pursue MAiD to rid herself of the stigma of relying on social welfare programs. Stolen valor to say she went to Yale when she took an online certificate in climate change and health.

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Courtney Blake, 47, was working last year in Geneva in U.S.A.I.D.’s bureau of humanitarian assistance. Today, she is staying with her sister and her sister’s family in New Paltz, N.Y. “I’m living with family all over again like I’m 22 and just out of college,” she said. She has applied for more than 40 jobs, and remains angry about losing a calling that since 2012 has taken her to war zones in Iraq and Ebola outbreaks in Liberia. “I spent the last 13 years of my career and also personal life turning up to work every day in service to my country. Doing work that, at the core, I believed in. But suddenly, and on a whim, all of that is forgotten.”

Courtney will be forgotten. Iraq and Liberia are worse shitholes because of do-gooders like her. She should be grateful she has family members who are willing to support her.

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Don Niss, 56, spent 21 years at U.S.A.I.D., including three years managing the agency’s billion-dollar budgets for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year he was making $195,000 annually as a U.S.A.I.D. development adviser at the Pentagon. He has 12-year-old twin sons and the tension over his impending job loss was particularly tough last year.

“There was a period of time, like between February and March, where every other day my son would get home from school and say, ‘Daddy, have you gotten fired today?’ It’s kind of a gut punch.” His wife works as a schoolteacher but as of last month he had depleted his savings and dipped into his 401(k). “I pulled out enough money to cover expenses for the next six months, just not knowing what to expect.”

The CIA thanks Don for his service. Where did the billions in Afghanistan and Pakistan go? Again, hope this helps him enjoy more time with his sons who are far more important than anything he did abroad.

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Jacqueline Devine was one of the very few to talk to The Times on the record a year ago about losing her job as a contractor in the agency’s office of HIV-AIDS. Ms. Devine, 66, is a behavioral scientist who worked largely in sub-Saharan Africa on H.I.V. treatment. She spoke out, she said at the time, because “I have nothing to lose.”

A year later, her $200,000 income as an agency contractor has been replaced by $9,000 for teaching two courses in public health at Towson University in Maryland. She has made ends meet with some income from investments and an annuity from a previous job at the World Bank. But she said what amounted to a sudden, forced retirement had left her at a loss. “I feel invisible professionally,” she said. She was not ready to stop working full time and had not thought about what she would do next. “I feel paralyzed in some way.”

Of course a Canadian would have a cover photo featuring black art while crediting the artist and her photographer. Towson and all universities need a DOGE too. The World Bank is a piggy bank for useless globalists.

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Guy Martorana, 44, was a U.S.A.I.D. foreign service officer in Ivory Coast and is now back home in Birmingham, Ala., with his wife and infant daughter. He spends half of each day applying for jobs — he is up to 100 — and at other times volunteers for a nonprofit that is continuing some of U.S.A.I.D.’s work in peace promotion in northern Ivory Coast. He stays in touch with former colleagues, but it’s difficult. “We’re all applying for similar jobs,” he said.

Why not help people in Birmingham and Alabama instead of the Ivory Coast?

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Samuel Port, 32, an Army veteran who worked at a nonprofit helping manage U.S.A.I.D. projects in South Sudan and Indonesia, has applied for more than 60 jobs. He said he was so discouraged at one point last year that he went alone to Great Falls Park in Virginia. “I sat down by the river and I cried a bit,” he said.

Rivers of salty tears.

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There are some success stories. Jackie Ndebeka, 39, who worked as a contractor on the administrative team that arranged travel for top agency officials, including Samantha Power, the U.S.A.I.D. administrator under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., now has a job as a contractor arranging travel to Antarctica for the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Program. “I got very lucky,” she said. In her spare time she volunteers for OneAid.

You don’t need 3 degrees to book travel. AI can do that now. The hideous coat, shoes, and glasses must be her attempt to copy Sam Power.

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Alicia Contreras-Donello, who was working for U.S.A.I.D. as a foreign service officer when she was laid off while in Tunisia with her two young children, is now running for Maryland’s House of Delegates.

The Maryland House of Delegates is no different from Tunisia. DC destroyed the state long before it metastasized south of the Potomac. Would Alicia agree that Islam is right about women and gays?

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Then there is Michael Nicholson, 51, who was working for U.S.A.I.D. as a foreign service economist in Mozambique when he and his wife, also a foreign service officer, were laid off. They have a 4-year-old daughter and have since moved to Nairobi, where Mr. Nicholson is running his own start-up, AfriqueU, that connects talented African student basketball players with American universities.

His business is still in the “pre-revenue” stage, he said, but he is optimistic. He does not feel that way about America. He said he preferred living overseas, with other former American diplomats. “I feel that the United States is not a welcome place for my family right now. We wanted to be around a group of people, Americans and others, that understand what happened to us… It’s been over a year, and it still is as bad. I’m just able to talk about it now. I’m going to carry this the rest of my life.”

Michael hates America. He prefers to be around other leftist Americans who he can virtue signal about his African charity with. As one of the few straight white men profiled, he has spent his entire life working for people who hate him. Why does he have a fetish for human trafficking sportsball scholars?

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Many said they were still dealing with mental trauma and a loss of confidence in their professional abilities after brutal job hunts. All mourned the loss of a mission in working for an agency that has contributed billions of dollars every year for decades to global humanitarian assistance. Some cited studies estimating that cuts to the agency’s H.I.V.-AIDS programs could lead to millions of deaths, including young children.

Others acknowledged that there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion it managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure.

But all of those interviewed said they were still incredulous that an agency that amounted to less than 1 percent of the federal budget had been so quickly obliterated and reduced to a skeletal operation within the State Department. U.S.A.I.D. workers who once thought of themselves as ambassadors for American “soft power” said they worried about the trust in the United States that was lost overseas. They said they were still burning from President Trump’s characterization of them as “radical-left lunatics.”

Break out your tiniest violins, comrades. Rejoice that we are no longer paying for their subversion. Their hubris was their downfall.

How does the NPR CEO still have a job?