Native Land Pod is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with Reason Choice Media. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Hello everybody, Welcome home, y'all. This is Angela Raie with Native Lamppod. Every Tuesday, I do a solo podcast, and that is what we're doing today.
Now.
I wish I were coming to you on better terms, but as you all know, there is so so much going on throughout the world and of course on these shores of these United States, and so what we're talking about today is I know many of you all were recalled just a few weeks ago we talked about the federal funding freeze. We know that there was a temporary pause of agency grants, loans and other financial assistance programs, as issued in a January twenty seventh memo from OMB
from the acting director at the time. Since then, the man who wrote the OMB portion of the memo in Project twenty five has been sworn in. His name is Russell Balt. He is now the director of O and B and he has not stopped on these temporary pausings of grants, loans and federal funds, including firing and laying off federal workers who work every single day with our taxpayer dollars right to make life much easier for us
here on these shores and those abroad. And so I wanted to just dive into the many ways in which folks have been hurt so far. You guys, we are twenty eight days into this administration and it feels like a month of Sundays. It feels like it is a NonStop flow of trauma, of tragedy, and we are still looking for the triumph, but we're gonna hold on to hope. So today we're gonna talk to three people who are either government employees, have been funded through government by contracts,
or from grants. And I want you all to hear these very human stories so that you understand what is at stake. I think what we have gotten accustomed to is hearing stories on the gram, seeing people do an instructional on TikTok, and we divorce ourselves from the empathy and the compassion needed as humans to really ensure policy change. So today I want you to hear from folks who are directly impacted. First, I'm going to bring into this
conversation Miss User, who is in the DMV area. She is the former Operations Assistant at International Organization for Migration under the United States Refugee Admissions Program also known as us RAP, which is an inter agency entity that was supported by HHS, State and so many others in its work with United Nations. So we're going to bring in misuser first and let's have this conversation.
Hi, thank you for having me.
Thank you so much for being here. I am so sorry about what you've ex experience. I want our listeners and the folks who are tuned into YouTube today just to hear from you about what your experience was. When did you learn of the funding for your program being cut? How many people were impacted, and how are you feeling now.
I think I actually kind of knew when Trump got elected that there was a possibility that my program was going to be downsized, But I don't think any of us imagined for him to completely cut it. I think we all knew downsizing was coming across all US funding because that is what happened last time, but we none of us expected him to come in and just stop
the funding. So and I think it makes it worse because it's like he's not stopping the funding for my program, only he just he paused, everything humanitarian world is in shambles right now. The only way to find a job is for me to switch careers. And I think for me that's really challenging because it's like, I don't do this for the money. I love the work I do. I love working with people. I love working with the refugees. So to have this person come in and just take
it away. I've spent so long just trying to get into this field and getting into the federal workforce or international development or humanitan world. It's already hard as it is, so for somebody to make it in, especially somebody like me who's like Muslim, black and I'm a woman, it's just it's like really saddening, and I'm also really angry at the same time because I feel like it's just been taken away from under me.
And can you take a step back and talk a little bit about you said it was hard for you to break into this work. Give us an example of your day to day or one of the highlights from the type of work you were doing before the funding stream was cut off by the Trump administration.
I think just working with the refugees and also my colleagues, the office that I work in is very, very diverse, which I love. So usually, like in other spaces that I've worked in, I'm usually either the only black girl, usually the only Muslim, or sometimes even the only girl. So this was the one place where I felt like all parts of me were accepted. And it's like I work with people who enjoy the work they're doing. I'm meeting new people every day. But also I think hearing
these refugee stories kind of helps me connect. I love connecting with me and it helps me connect with them because my parents immigrated here, so it's like I understand the challenges of coming to a new world and having to relearn everything and like being torn away from your family. And I think having this funding taken away, I think it breaks my heart because it's like these families are now being torn apart, and it's just like we can't
do anything. We're not allowed to like answer the phones, we can't answer emails. And at the same time as I'm worrying for these refugees, I have to worry about finding a job right and it's like I think I struggle every day because it's like the workforce right.
Now is terrible, so it's on a snap just for a moment. You're talking about receiving emails that you're not able to respond to. Can you give us an example of something that's come up where it's breaking your heart to not be able to respond to the need of a refugee family.
I think getting calls on the hotline. For the first couple of days, we were receiving calls on the hot line. And we do work with multiple agencies, and one of the agencies, a lot of the agentries we work with, our resettlement agencies, and the people that we work with, they're all they were all fired within they order. When in Friday Monday all of them are gone.
How many so.
There we work with about seven agencies and they think about one thousand to two thousand people got fired there. That was Monday. And I think I started to worry because I'm like, I'm gonna get I'm gonna get cut. It's just a matter of time of win. And you know, I knew cuts were gonna come, but I didn't expect all of us to get cut. Yeah, my company alone fired three thousand people and we don't get we don't
really get severance. A lot of us don't get severance, and because we work for the international organization, we all so don'tet unemployment. So it's like once we got let go, money stopped coming in, and obviously you need money to survive. And it's already hard enough to see. And I think every day I'm walking into apply for jobs, I'm also seeing people say I got for a load, I got let go, And it's so challenging because the workforce is
already terrible. So now I'm going against not only the people who've let go under US RAP, but the people who let go of USAID, Department of Education, people, government workers who were on probation. And I think it just really breaks my heart because it's like I'm questioning where are our leaders? Because I see everybody coming together, all of us are coming together, we're trying to help each other, But where are.
Leaders When you're saying where are your leaders? What are you asking leadership to do? And where are you looking for leadership in this moment.
To step up to do something?
But who I called? Who are who do you want to do that?
Like?
Who are the people that Congress? Congress? Congress?
They need to step it up because this isn't just affect us in the US, this affects people globally. The companies that we work with have people all over there in the world. So these people are being let go all around the world. And as an American, I think a part of me feels guilty because eventually I will find a job and I will be okay. But that's not the same thing for other people who might live in Ghana or Sudan or Palestine or anywhere around the world.
And it's like these fundings they do save people's lives. They provide medicine for people, they give educate access to education. And I'm a big education advocate because I know I wouldn't be here without my education, and so I think it's really heartbreaking to see these people struggling and not having access to their medicine. A lot of them potentially could die. And I just feel like Congress is not
doing enough. They're not standing up, They're not doing anything, and I just don't understand why.
Yeah, I thank you so much for your time and for your story. I agree with you. We do need Congress to step it up, but we also need to make sure that we got the same heat for folks on both sides of the aisle. The Republicans are in the majority, and they are just being a rubber stamp for everything that Trump administration is doing. So I'm hopeful that there will be change and that somebody in the
Trump administration will comply with the corridor. But thank you so much, mister, use your fair time, thank you for having me, making me absolutely I want you all to hear some of these stories some of us are reading about different people, how they're being impacted, their families, who they're responsible for financially, the kinds of work they did within the federal government. We have our tentacles, the American people. The American government has its tentacles in so many different
spaces across the globe. And I don't even really, I don't know if we realize yet just how impactful these cuts, these funding freezes really are. And so I want to bring another person in who is a government contractor. His name is Justin Rogers.
He is.
A former project associate with RTI International, and that work they were doing fell within USA. I D and you all have mostly probably heard about everything that was happening at us AID and how expansive those cuts have been. The lives that have been already lost in this short time frame from cutting off the fundings figot, you know, in places like the Philippines and others. So we're going to bring in Justin now to talk about his story. Hi, Justin, how are you?
Haianzel? Good?
Well?
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for being here. I know that it takes courage. We're asking you all to step forward and talk about what is happening in your world. When did you learn about your fund's being cut off? And what is the impact at your company and for you personally.
So our work started being impacted day one, honestly, January, Martin Luther King day in the day after that, we started receiving stock work orders, we started receiving notice that we were not going to be able to pay certain costs from a subcontractor. And then recently a few days ago, I got a termination notice on one of my projects.
And so on Friday, we've been having these ongoing leadership meetings in our leadership at first said we might reduce hours that staff work, some of you will be for load and come back. They were just looking at all kinds of different options, and so on Friday, I received the news that I was one of the three hundred people for my department to be for load.
Were you surprised that you were for load?
I wasn't surprised at all. I had seen it coming and hearing. I think what surprised me the most how faster king and when they said this was going to be an aggressive one hundred days. It has been a month of Sundays already and it hasn't been one hundred days. So I can only imagine what they might be getting to by day one hundred and what law or book they're back there unraveling. I was very surprised that how fast it came. I think it moved very quick. I
didn't expect it to come this quick. I thought to myself, Okay, you have a good two maybe three months before things start working its way through the judiciary system. But Trump Trump worked fast and his administration they worked very quick. But I was not surprised that my work was going to come to it. And I felt like with Project twenty twenty five being out there and the rhetoric that's been out there about international development in the field I
work in, I saw shifts coming. And I know Republicans are very big on localization, which is problematic in and of its off because you can't have local organizations competing when they don't even have the resources to compete. So again, I definitely do see this trend coming.
When you describe the work that you were doing, how would you describe it? What was the nature of the work you all did with USAID?
The nature of the work was very It was very much business like. So although I worked for a nonprofit, USAID was our client and they were paying us to go implement a project, So we had to abide by their regulations, their stipulations, and we had different types of contracts that we would work with them. Certain things on a project we could build USA for, we couldn't build them for. I will say we had a very decent
relationship to company with a client. We had a good relationship because we we get tons of USA funded projects via our organization versus other competitors.
But when you think about the type of work that you were doing, if you were to describe your impact at your organization, what is the nature of the work, like, what do you all do for USAID or did you do for USAID?
Okay, right, so we do the whole vertical of what it takes to implement a project. So I worked closely in the operations and logistics. I worked on procurement, and so if we were looking for a new subcontractors to carry out capacity building or dissemination or stakeholder engagement in a certain country, we would go with a local partner. We go through the procurement process, we on board them, and then they would kind of carry out some of that work and they'd check in with the technical team
and country. And so our team was split. I worked on the home office side in a project management unit, and then you have the technical side who worked in the field or in the country in these projects. And so people who worked on the technical side more so had more expertise. But I think to answer your question, I felt very wholesome, and I would say everyone that we did we put to other large scale projects.
We changed curriculums, suggestin what I'm trying to do here, and I know is hard. I can tell like I love this conversation with you because I can tell your very logistics focus. There are people at home that one don't know what USAID does and two when you're talking about technical assistance and stakeholder engagement. What does that look like for you know, a project surrounding HIV AIDS in South Africa, or like, what are the types of projects
that you all were working on. One thing that I hear that is really significant about what you said kind of shifting shifting through a little bit is you all would find local businesses that could do the work for you all on the ground, and that's ensuring that you're supporting economic development in certain regions. But give me an example of something that is going to be hit really hard because you all are no longer funded and able
to see a project through to fruition. Like, what is an example of one of those projects.
So there's a project in Senegal that I actually worked closely on and it was an international education and we worked in health, international education, we worked in governance, we helped girls, we helped the disabled, We did every sort
of scope of work here. And so with this project in Senegal, we were working with the ministry and we were working on bringing bilinguisms, so French and then whichever was the most locally spoken second spoken language in Senegal, and those were going to be the leading languages in curriculum. And we were piloting in five regions at first in Senegal, and we were going to expand to the whole country, and so we were working with organizations site the Gates
Foundation to change this curriculum. We're working with teachers on the ground, principles ministers, and we're working with the education department. So it was this holistic development of not just coming in and building the water pipe, but actually telling people, you know, this is where you get the this is how you form the plastic, this is how you drove for the water, and really helping people foster community amongst one another.
I love that. I think it's so important and I was asking you even when we before we started today. There are certain things when we work in environments where we're in the weeds on it, and we do it all the time on the podcast. For throwing out acronyms, I say today OPM or omb and people don't know what that is, and so we have to bring them into our world so they understand this. You know, the far reaching impact of and the devastation that will come
because of these cuts. So justin I'm so grateful for your time. I hope that you will continue to spread the word on this and that you find philanthropic entities like you talked about the Gates Foundation that will continue this work because it is so important. We just you know, we're up against an entity and administration that talks about America first, but they don't understand what it means to
be a global partner and a global citizen. So if you would for a minute, what would you say to folks who may be in the comments and say, hey, I don't care about this stuff about anybody's clean water overseas. We don't even have clean water here. What do you say to them?
I studied this in school, and so immediately I'll say realism as a realist, cool, you don't care about it as an American? The Chinese do, the Russians do, our competitors do. So then what then America is not this leading military superpower that it paints itself to be and that it wants to be. So, I mean, we don't have clean water in Michigan. They still have that issue up there, and so I hear people's problems with that.
But I think when you set up a hegemony and you set up a national state like America, you have to sort of be involved just like you said, you got to have a little tentacles everywhere because everything comes back to you, and you are sad to say, controlling that master role. And again if America does not control it. Just like I read an article or they were contemplating if America was going to leave the World Bank, America left the World Bank, China was just coming by their shares.
And so now you have kind of China moving onto the global stage. And I don't think that's what America wants. So I think a lot of these things will be reevaluated.
I really appreciate your time justin thank you so much for being here. Thank you, thank you. Wow. So again, I think it is so important. Initially I really wanted you all to hear from folks who only work for the FEDS. But I think what is so significant about what we've heard so far is that this has this
broad sweeping impact. It has this broad sweeping impact. If you work for the FEDS, work for a contractor that has federal grants, you work for a small business that has a small business loan, you work for an intergovernmental agency on the state, local level, you are impacted by this. So I think one of the things that we can note is that sometimes changes happen and we are hit regardless of who's in charge. We know that programs are eliminated,
they're cut, they're revamped, they're redone. But I think that the way that the Donald Trump administration, Elon Musk administration, the Department of Government Efficiency has moved is with reckless abandon without doing any real due diligence, and it's causing so much more harm than good. And so I think it is important for us to take note of the number of people who have been impacted by these cuts. I am hopeful that we will continue to press on
to fight. As we heard from Misuser earlier, Congress, we're calling on you, right. We need to be calling our members of Congress at two zero two two two four three one two one. Let them know how a program being cut impacts you. Let let them know that you've
lost your job. Go onto these different committee websites, whether it's financial services or education, or the budget or appropriations or Government Oversight and government Reform, all of these different sites to the judiciary, complain, send in your whistleblow or complaint, and let folks know how you've been impacted and how they must help you. That is our most reasonable service. So I don't know if we have any questions today, but if not, we will go ahead and in early
and we're going to keep this going. We want to keep these conversations moving. We want to hear from folks who have been impacted directly or indirectly by the federal funding freeze, by these layoffs, by the mass firings and the force resignation. So thank you all so very much for your time. I am going to tell you, as we always do on our main show that drops every Thursday on YouTube and on iHeart wherever you get your podcasts,
Welcome home, y'all. I'll see you soon. Native Lampard is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with Reason Choice Media. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.