This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KDNK: Tell me more about supporting the Africa Bureau [of U.S. AID].
Roseanne Casey: Sure. U.S. AID works in many countries across sub-Saharan Africa. Typically, they do a range of technical interventions that are education, health, economic development, power interventions, trade and health. So, there's a variety of projects that they do in most countries, and they rely on contractors to implement the projects that are designed and approved by the missions in collaboration with the [U.S.] State Department and others.
So, there's always a thought-out plan about what these interventions are. The budgets are approved by and appropriated by Congress, and so they're not just random interventions that have silly names as you might pick up from the news; they are well thought-out projects that form the basis of the United States’ collaboration and cooperation with African countries and governments.
For my contract, we recruited and hired technical and administrative staff who were either long-term staff or short-term technical advisors who implemented projects across the subcontinent. So maybe they were doing [outbreak or malaria] impacts or advising on minerals and mining in the Congo – things that are across those technical areas, but very relevant and also, I want to emphasize, very much in the United States self-interest.
So, the programs that the United States funds through U.S. AID are always something that is for the benefit of U. S. foreign policy. I recruited staff and I placed them and I managed them to work in countries around Africa and also in Washington, D. C.
KDNK: So tell me what happened to you. Tell me your experience with getting fired.
RC: My contract is a five-year contract, pretty big. It was the largest in terms of revenue for my company, and my company had five or six other U.S. AID contracts, so the balance of our portfolio of projects were U.S. AID. So, our latest invoices from December and January have yet to be paid.
And when we hear about this foreign assistance funding freeze, and the decision by the Supreme Court this past week about whether to unfreeze that money, most of that is really just to pay invoices for work that has already been completed. This is just basic contract law of should we pay the bills for work that was already done.
So I, I really failed to see any rationale [for] why four Supreme Court justices would have dissented about the obligation to pay bills that were work that was requested by and approved by Congress. I saw the writing on the wall when we first got a stop-work order that said there's going to be a 90-day freeze on all projects. And we're going to do a review of these projects and see where there is potential for cuts or improvement.
And instead of a 90-day review, which I knew was just a premise that wasn't true, within the next week, they were all terminated. So there's really no possibility that anyone did a meaningful review of any of the contracts that were terminated.
There were thousands of contracts terminated all within a week or two of all of this coming to light. So, really, it was just a way to create a fake premise around why they were cutting projects and then to just kind of wholesale get rid of U. S. foreign assistance projects.
KDNK: Was it arbitrary?
RC: Yes. Yes, it was arbitrary. I think possibly they started with U.S. AID because they underestimated how much the American public cares about our work abroad and the relevance of foreign assistance. And, really, the relevance of it is that it is the premise of how we maintain positive relationships with countries abroad. It's how we avoid war. It's how we avoid more conflict. So it's never been just giving out money and giving out water and blankets and food. It is about maintaining trust.
Anybody who worked on my project, we literally wrote them and said, “You're not allowed to work after today. You have to pack up your stuff and you have to be on a flight home within the next two days and you're lodging, your life assistance will not be paid after you can reasonably get on a plane and get home.’”
So people had to turn their lives over in a day or two. A lot of people who work for U.S. AID overseas, they have their kids in school, they've got their families, their dogs, their house, their life and you're there for a multi year tour. You don't necessarily have a home to come home to. So people have been uprooted and told to go home and [they] don't necessarily have the bank account to support that or someone who can take you and your three kids and your dog in the middle of February when kids are in the middle of a school year.
So, the impact this is having on families and Americans who are working abroad is outrageous.
There are people who weren't able to get medevacs, who had a legitimate reason to get medevacs, when they kind of just turned it all off and said, ‘No we won't do it.” So, there [are] people in very, very real, vulnerable positions and people who were on my project, who worked in the Congo.
The Congo happened to escalate to a very active conflict over the last couple of months. So people needed protection just to get to the airport. And you have people who are there to do work that is critical work, sacrificing their own security, and then being told “You've got two days to get out of the country and pack up your life and get home and not have a job.”
KDNK: Can you tell me what you know of general responses to all of this, like, the countries you were working in, the countries in which you were managing contracts? What's been the response?
RC: It's complex, as you would guess. My expectation is that a lot of people in these countries understand Americans as being a caring population. They know that the people they worked with and the people they've implemented projects with for decades support them and support what they're doing. I think they can differentiate between policy and the American people, the American people's support or intentions. But I would also like to say that The U.S. government, U.S. AID in particular, employed many, many, many people in the missions where we worked across the continent, across the world.
If there's a U.S. AID office, there's, you know, a handful of Americans, but then there's at least twice as many, or more, local staff, and that's a really important part about what U.S. AID does. We build capacity in the local population. We're not there to just, you know, throw out money and implement projects ourselves.
It is a partnership and there are always, you know, dozens and hundreds of local staff from that country who either work for the embassy or work for U.S. AID or work for implementing partners. We've left a lot of them without jobs. But with all the propaganda and all the rhetoric of saying that U.S. AID employees are corrupt and they're unqualified and that they were doing fraudulent projects, we have now also made local staff In the countries where they work, vulnerable to people accusing them of corruption or work that was fraudulent or that was wasteful.
And so not only are we disparaging our own American staff, but we are disparaging people in many of these countries who are now going to be vulnerable or their professional disparaged.
KDNK: Did you have a lot of contact with the Wagner Group ?
RC: It's a reasonable question. I worked in Afghanistan for three years. I lived in Nigeria for two years. So I've been present in conflict and post-conflict environments for much of my career. You run into everybody. When you live in these countries, you get to know people. It's mix and match.
It's, I think, a really interesting question because if you're a bad actor in one of these countries and you want to do something that hurts the United States, you don't differentiate between who's an aid worker or who's a government employee or who's military.
They're all just foreigners or Americans that you want to take action against. So there's really been a blurring of the lines across the sectors when you are in a conflict environment or a post-conflict environment. You're just an American. You're just a target – or not. I mean, a lot of times, you are a partner and the people in those cities and countries know you as a trusted partner. So you know, we can either choose to be a trusted partner or we can choose to be people who kind of left them and reneged on our promises, which is what's happened right now.
KDNK: Is U.S. AID gone now, or…?
RC: It's a very strange position to be in where I don't know if U.S. AID's gone. A lot of people think it is. I would put myself on that list because the dismantling that's happened, they have broken down the systems far enough that you can't just turn the lights on again and have it start working again, you know, even when unfreezing this foreign assistance money. They've broken the systems that allow payments to happen.
So there's a certain amount of destruction that I think means you have to rebuild. It's like the house is burned down. We're not just doing a remodel of the living room; the house has been burned down.
However, U.S. foreign assistance will come back and maybe in a slightly more streamlined way. I think there's so many professionals who have spent their careers dedicated to this and who will not let this be the end of U. S. foreign assistance. And so it will come back in some way.
But I think it's pretty severely broken right now and the reconstruction might be more difficult than it sounds.
