June Is for...Whatever This Is
Brought to you by institutional collapse and potluck canapés
It’s June, friends. The sun is high (depending on where you’re posted), the fiscal year is long dead, and the champagne is warm because it’s being served at what is technically a goodbye party but emotionally a wake.
Across the globe, USAID folks are wrapping up their final to-dos, handing off long-term development programs to the abyss, and deleting their calendar invites for meetings that—let’s be honest—could’ve been an email. For those of us overseas, many of us are staring blankly at our suitcases wondering how, exactly, we’re supposed to fit years of our lives into two Samsonites and a carry-on.
It’s a weird time.
There has been a lot of talk about “efficiency” these days, usually by people who have never set foot in a rural health clinic or tried to hire a vendor in a language only spoken by a few thousand people. And while DOGE, now sans Elon Musk, continues its crusade to turn diplomacy into a budget line item, the rest of us are over here trying to figure out how to tell our locally hired staff—our coworkers, our friends, our in-country institutional memory—that “it’s not personal, it’s just a sweeping and irreversible dismantling of the last vestiges of U.S. soft power.”
To be clear, the tension between mission and machine has been there since the beginning. But there was always a kind of romantic stubbornness to it: the belief that, despite the bureaucracy and the bad coffee and the perverse joy of arguing over font size in a front office memo template, we were part of something good. Flawed? Sure. Frustrating? Inevitably. But good.
Now we’re packing it up. And we’re doing it the way we’ve done everything else—half sleep-deprived, overcommitted, in group chats filled with gallows humor and NSFW memes. We’re saying goodbye in awkward reception lines and half-hearted toasts, while trying to find the line between gratitude and grief.
Of course, this isn’t just about those of us out in the field. Our colleagues in DC—Civil Service, contractors, backstoppers, champions, skeptics, realists—are going through it too. They’ve been pushing boulders uphill for months, keeping programs alive with nothing but spreadsheets, stubbornness, and an inbox full of “five weekly bullet points.” And our implementing partners? Many of them have been doing the real work for decades, often with less credit and even fewer resources. None of this could’ve worked without them.
So what now?
We don’t know, exactly. Some of us are heading back to DC. Some of us are going to try the private sector. Some will go rogue and start weird NGOs with names like Impact Nexus or Forward Forward. And some of us will write Substacks with questionable emotional boundaries.
But here’s what we do know: the work mattered. You mattered. All the early mornings, the late nights, the cables drafted in airport lounges and the meetings where you translated three languages and one thick layer of passive aggression? That mattered. The people you served, the partnerships you built, the work you fought for—sometimes with little more than Microsoft Teams and moral indignation? They mattered.
And even if the lights are going out, there’s something sacred about being the last one to flip the switch. About bearing witness. About showing up, right to the end, for the values that got you into this mess in the first place. There’s a perverse honor in being present to witness the end of this chapter.
So here’s to us: the ever-optimistic, always idealistic, often over-caffeinated USAID diaspora. May our extra bag allowances be plentiful, our handover notes be short, and our TM-4s forever unflagged.
And when the last moving van comes to pick up your HHE and you collapse onto that lumpy embassy-issued mattress for one final night, we hope you feel this: you did the thing. You were here. You carved a path for values that still matter.
Now go make yourself a farewell cocktail. Just don’t name it “The Future of Foreign Aid.”
It’s too bitter. And we’re out of ice.
It feels like a death in the family.😭
I worked on just a couple of USAID funded projects, both in Timor Leste/East Timor, back in the late 90’s. They made a real difference to the future of the country and I’m proud of what we achieved and of the Timorese students who took what was offered and made their absolute best of the opportunity provided to them. We /they achieved a lot on a very small budget. My heart goes out to all of you losing your jobs now, and especially the local partners who are now facing a more challenging future. I wish everyone a large helping of good luck.