Obama, Bush decry ‘travesty’ of Trump’s gutting of USAID on its last day

June 30, 2025
radmin

Former United States Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush have delivered a rare open rebuke of the Donald Trump administration in an emotional video farewell with staffers of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Obama called the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID “a colossal mistake”.

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Monday was the last day as an independent agency for the six-decade-old humanitarian and development organisation, created by President John F Kennedy as a soft power, peaceful way of promoting US national security by boosting goodwill and prosperity abroad.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered USAID to be absorbed into the US State Department on Tuesday.

The former presidents and U2 singer Bono – who held back tears as he recited a poem – spoke with thousands in the USAID community in a videoconference, which was billed as a closed-press event.

They expressed their appreciation for the thousands of USAID staffers who have lost their jobs and life’s work. Their agency was one of the first and most fiercely targeted for government cuts by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk, with staffers abruptly locked out of systems and offices and terminated by mass emailing.

Trump claimed the agency was run by “radical left lunatics” and rife with “tremendous fraud”. Musk called it “a criminal organisation”.

Obama, speaking in a recorded statement, offered assurances to the aid and development workers, some listening from overseas.

“Your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come,” he told them.

Obama has largely kept a low public profile during Trump’s second term and refrained from criticising the seismic changes that Trump has made to US programmes and priorities at home and abroad.

“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,” Obama said. He credited USAID with not only saving lives, but being a main factor in global economic growth that has turned some aid-receiving countries into US markets and trade partners.

The former Democratic president predicted that “sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realise how much you are needed”.

Asked for comment, the State Department said it would be introducing the department’s foreign assistance successor to USAID, to be called America First, this week.

“The new process will ensure there is proper oversight and that every tax dollar spent will help advance our national interests,” the department said.

USAID oversaw programmes around the world, providing water and life-saving food to millions uprooted by conflict in Sudan, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, sponsoring the “Green Revolution” that revolutionised modern agriculture and curbed starvation and famine. The agency worked at preventing disease outbreaks, promoting democracy, and providing financing and development that allowed countries and people to climb out of poverty.

Bush, who also spoke in a recorded message, went straight to the cuts in a landmark AIDS and HIV programme started by his Republican administration and credited with saving 25 million lives around the world.

Bipartisan blowback from Congress to cutting the popular President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, helped save significant funding for the programme. But cuts and rule changes have reduced the number getting the life-saving care.

“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work – and that is your good heart,” Bush told USAID staffers. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you,” he said.

More than 14 million of the world’s most vulnerable, a third of them young children, could die because of the Trump administration’s move, a study in the Lancet journal projected Tuesday.

“For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict,” study co-author Davide Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, said in a statement.

Bono, a longtime humanitarian advocate in Africa and elsewhere, was announced as the “surprise guest”.

he recited a poem he had written to the agency about its gutting. He spoke of children dying of malnutrition, a reference to millions of people who Boston University researchers and other analysts say will die because of the US cuts to funding for health and other programmes abroad.

“They called you crooks,” Bono said, “when you were the best of us.”

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WAPA Board Extends 2025 Budget, Expects Continued Deficit in 2026

The V.I. Water and Power Authority’s governing board failed to adopt an operating budget for the coming fiscal year Monday, opting instead to temporarily extend the current year’s budget plan amid board members’ concerns about the utility’s continued deficit.
The vote to extend this year’s budget came after a failed motion by member Maurice Muia to table the matter and the board’s subsequent failed attempt to adopt the 2026 budget. Members Cheryl Boynes-Jackson and Kyle Fleming voted in favor, and members Hubert Turnbull and Muia voted against. WAPA’s chief executive, Karl Knight, noted in response that “there’s not much for me to work on.”
“I’ve presented a very realistic spending plan that captures what I believe is public knowledge: that the authority still has its fiscal challenges and does not collect sufficient revenues through its rates to cover full operating expenses — as catalogued in our presentation today,” he said, adding that the fiscal picture improves once federal reimbursements are taken into account. “But… certainly, the management team remains at the whim of the board to reconvene to discuss this item at the board’s choosing.”
During Monday’s board meeting, which was rescheduled after a cancellation last Thursday, WAPA Chief Financial Officer Lorraine Kelly told board members that the 2026 budget anticipates $287.2 million in electric revenues at a cost of $313.9 million. Water revenues are expected to bring in $38 million against $34.1 million in outflow. Asked to describe other projected costs, Kelly listed: advertising and promotions; engineering services; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expenses; legal fees; maintenance; materials and supplies; office supplies; and others.
“And the total of that has a magnitude of approximately $26.1 million,” she said, which currently amounts to seven percent of the utility’s budget.
After the board failed to adopt the 2026 budget and before it voted to extend the utility’s current one, Knight reported that WAPA’s deficit is shrinking.
“Our rates do not cover our full expenses as a utility,” he said. “That has not changed with this budget proposal, although the budget deficit has shrunk by more than 50 percent since the beginning of the last fiscal year. So the budget deficit is closing, but there’s still some work to be done.”
After adjustments, he said, the deficit could be around $18.4 million.
“It doesn’t change our revenue forecast,” he said. “What it does mean is that some of the funding gap can be filled with federal dollars, whereas when we began the process of drafting the budget… those approvals had not yet been received, and so the budget — conservatively — was drafted without the anticipation of those budget approvals. Now that those are realized, that allows us to shrink what we had forecasted as a potential shortfall.”
During Monday’s meeting, the board also approved a largely federally-funded $864,550 trio of seawater intake screens to mitigate the impact of sargassum on St. Croix, an up to $16 million, two-year contract for debris removal and disposal with Hoagland VI, and a $225,000, six-month extension with West Peak Energy for work on the utility’s Wartsila generators.
Maxwell George, WAPA’s director of project management, said the extension was needed as the utility is “slowly getting to confident that we’ll be getting the Wartsilas back next month.”
The board also voted to close out advertising a request for qualifications to provide liquid propane gas for the Randolph Harley and Richmond power plants on St. Thomas and St. Croix, respectively.
Knight said the utility’s evaluation committee “is of the opinion that the solicitation process failed to meet the objectives of the RFP, and so that is their recommendation — that we close out the process with no award being made.”

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