The end of USAID was among the biggest early controversies of President Donald Trump’s second term. The world watched in horror as Elon Musk’s DOGE took a chainsaw to U.S. foreign assistance, placing millions of lives at risk with brutal across-the-board cuts.
But few people realize how much has changed since then. Behind the scenes, aid money was largely restored—for now. And instead of making grandiose fraud accusations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has begun embracing aid in public, laying out promising plans to address problems long recognized by technocrats.
Rachel Bonnifield is a leading global health expert and proud member of the NGO ecosystem denounced by Trump officials—yet she admires much of their new strategy. She joins The World Unpacked to make a surprising case for many Trump reforms, while also warning of risks, including the potential for more disruptions in the coming months.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Jon Bateman: What happens when one of the biggest global news stories suddenly drops off the headlines and everything that you thought you knew quietly begins to shift? I'm talking about the Trump administration's brutal assault on U.S. Foreign aid, those heady early days in the beginning of Trump's second term when Elon Musk was the most powerful figure in the U.S. Government, and he successfully made it his personal mission to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Back then, there were daily front-page headlines of protests, fired workers, and millions of lives hanging in the balance. But since then, most people have lost track of the story. And yet, what's been happening behind the scenes has been quite surprising. A lot of the aid has been quietly turned back on. And the Trump administration's narrative about what's right and wrong with U.S. Aid has drastically shifted to a more technocratic conversation. With a lot of interesting and provocative ideas. I'm here today with Rachel Bonifield, the top global health expert at one of the world's most respected, evidence-based research organizations in the area of global development. We're here to unpack these dramatic changes and to hear Rachel's warning that even greater freezes and disruptions could be coming in the months to come. I'm John Bateman, and this is The World Unpacked. Rachel, welcome to the podcast.
Rachel Bonnifield: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Jon Bateman: Our last couple episodes, we've done killer AI, military coups, I thought to have a lighter fare for today. We would talk about some of the world's worst diseases and most intractable problems. So we're here to talk about global health and the evolving strategy in the Trump administration. And I wonder if you could walk us through very briefly. Most people tracked this issue heavily in the early months of the Trump administration. It was front page news in every newspaper, every day. It was exciting, it was political combat, millions of lives in the balance. Months have passed, we've heard very little about what's actually happening in the world of US foreign aid. What is the biggest thing that people haven't been paying attention to in this story?
Rachel Bonnifield: Yeah, great question. So as you say, if you rewind to January, February of this year, there were these dramatic stoppages of basically all our foreign assistance. And then shortly thereafter, terminations of quite a few awards and the complete dissolution of USAID. So USAID no longer exists. And what has happened since then is that gradually quite a view of those awards have been restarted, not all, but quite a you, and transferred over to the State Department. So if you look at our disbursements for this fiscal year, they actually, at this point, don't look that much different than previous years. Really? Which is interesting. However, there's a big however here. And the big however is that our obligations, basically new awards, new commitments, have fallen off a cliff.
Jon Bateman: And how do you interpret this? Does this mean the Trump administration, they had these massive freezes across the board, and then did they kind of pull their punch and say, you know what, we're not ready to make such a radical step?
Rachel Bonnifield: I think that's part of it. I mean, in the immediate aftermath of them pausing, freezing aid, cutting USAID as an agency, there was a lot of pushback, including from Republicans, and particularly around these questions of life-saving aid, aid that if withdrawn, people really will get sick and die. And in particular, there's something, a program called PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This is by far our largest global health program, probably our largest aid program. On the order of five to $6 billion a year. This was set up under President George W. Bush. It has had traditionally extremely strong bipartisan support. And the idea that PEPFAR was at threat provoked quite a bit of bipartisan concern. And the pressure that came from that was sufficient from Republicans that the State Department, Secretary Rubio had to have an answer to it.
Jon Bateman: When this was all going down and we had the dozing of USAID and there were these dramatic images of sign being ripped off the building and workers being let out with their personal effects in hand, there was almost like the propaganda of the image going on. These were things that the administration was very proudly putting forth into the world and Elon Musk was the chief spokesperson. And that was a moment. Where key people in the Trump administration, in particular, a guy named Jeremy Lewin, who is now the senior official in charge of aid, was almost reluctant to make any positive case for aid. It was more about the critiques, the problems, the supposed corruption. But I think now we're at a moment where after this pause, the Trump Administration is finally articulating what they want from aid, not just the case against it. How is that playing out?
Rachel Bonnifield: I think that's right. And just one point I do want to make before we jump into all of that is that even though a significant amount of this aid has been turned back on, it's not a no harm, no foul kind of situation. That was an extremely dangerous and deadly decision to do that. We can't quite quantify how many people died as a result of that, but there is plenty of anecdotal reporting evidence that the numbers are quite significant.
Jon Bateman: I mean, we've seen estimates out there. People have attempted to quantify it. So you'll commonly hear claims, including from, you know, esteemed people like Atul Gawande and others citing scientific articles arguing that hundreds of thousands perhaps have already died and millions, maybe up to 13 million people over the next five years, their lives could hang in the balance. What do you make of those figures?
Rachel Bonnifield: I would say those figures, they're helpful in an indicative sense. I would not take them too literally. There are many, many assumptions that go into those sorts of numbers, including, for example, how long the disruptions would last and whether any other aid or sources of financing, sources of support would come in to fill those gaps. And right now, we're not at a point where the data and evidence exists that we can go back and look forensically in a systematic way and come to any firm conclusions on that. We know people died as a result of this. This has been documented. But it's going to be quite a while before we're able to say with any confidence how many.
Jon Bateman: And just to concretize this a little bit, because I think sometimes these discussions are so abstract, what are the main diseases that people are dying of and what was USAID doing that's been disrupted?
Rachel Bonnifield: Yeah, so I think there's kind of two country archetypes that we would need to distinguish to understand this. And this would be sort of humanitarian settings and stable, but poor countries. So a humanitarian setting would be something like a Somalia, maybe an Afghanistan, maybe a South Sudan. These are contexts where there is very little infrastructure of any kind, including health infrastructure, where they are often war torn. There's not really a government to work with. And the aid we're providing in those contexts is primarily emergency humanitarian aid. So what does this mean? This means food to feed hungry people who would otherwise be on the brink of starvation, intensive nutritional support, right, for kids who are wasting, who are severely malnourished. It is clean water, basic health services of all kinds, right, because just nothing exists in these contexts without aid. But then we have the stable countries, but they're poor. So these would be countries like Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique. The largest recipients are going to be the larger population centers in sub-Saharan Africa. And what you see in these countries is quite a few things. First of all, you see a lot of HIV, particularly in southern Africa. So traditionally, the highest prevalence places have been places like South Africa, Zimbabwe. A lot of the countries I just mentioned have quite high prevalence rates. These are the countries where PEPFAR has been very active in fighting the HIV epidemic and helping transform that from basically a death sentence for everyone to a much more manageable condition that requires lifelong treatment, but will not kill you if you are continuously on high quality treatment.
Jon Bateman: I wanted to ask you about what the Trump administration's emerging strategy is for aid. So this document, America First Global Health Strategy, yes, thank you. So Rachel, I think what you're pointing out to is on page one in the document, we have got this full page cover photo of Secretary Marco Rubio. Now I've authored some reports in my day, government reports, think tank reports. I didn't know that this was an option of putting the author as a full-page photo in there. I mean, I don't know if this is something you've done before.
Rachel Bonnifield: It has not, but maybe I will.
Jon Bateman: He's laying the groundwork in more than one way. Tell us about this strategy. It embodies the closest thing that we've seen to the Trump administration embracing foreign assistance and health assistance and saying, here's what we want out of it, despite the cuts. What does that look like?
Rachel Bonnifield: It does so, I'd say, in two major ways. The first is the self-interest part of the equation, right? That this is about keeping America safe, and that's the first plank of it, is making America safer. And this is primarily focused on outbreak responses, pandemic preparedness and response, really preventing things like Ebola and M-Pox and COVID-19 from. Escaping small localized outbreaks and becoming a major problem for the entire world. Because we've seen, of course, how disruptive and problematic it is when that occurs. And they make a very strong affirmative case that this is in our national interests that to have a network extended into almost every country around the world where we're able to partner with countries on disease surveillance and response, that that's something we need for our own security. So that's kind of the first affirmative case.
Jon Bateman: And that's a pretty classic argument. Samantha Power, the former administrator of USAID under the Biden administration, when she was asked in an exit interview what her advice would be to the incoming team, by the way, not knowing the ton of bricks that was about to hit her agency, the first thing that she said was disease surveillance and preventing illness from reaching American shores. So it sounds like there's a certain amount of convergence there on at least some of the classic argumentation.
Rachel Bonnifield: I think, though, what's even more interesting is if you get to the sectioned section, and the second section really talks about PEPFAR, the future of our bilateral aid relationships, not necessarily on these strictly transactional issues or issues where it's so obviously in America's interest. But actually, it presents quite a compelling argument about why aid in a humanitarian spirit is good for America and quite a strong, actually retrospective defense of That was one of the things I was most surprised to see. It has critiques of aid. Often, I'll be honest, critiques I strongly agree with. I was telling colleagues, like, you know, I have my qualms here and there, but in that section, like I could have written 80 to 90 percent of that section based on, you now, very mainstream critiques of aid that have floated around for a while and that are not from people trying to tear down the system, but trying to reform it and make it better.
Jon Bateman: Let's drill into this because what you're describing from Rubio and his agency is a massive turnaround from the Musk rhetoric that was leading the charge against USAID in the early days of the administration when he very explicitly was calling the agency a criminal organization, a den of corruption. He used the word evil many times. He said it was a pile of worms now. We've moved to a different phase where Rubio and his team is telling a much more coherent and traditional technocratic critique. Walk us through that critique. What are the actual substantive critiques of the U.S. Aid apparatus that have emerged now that we've move into a more serious conversation?
Rachel Bonnifield: We talked about PEPFAR already, the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief. This was stood up in 2003, when AIDS was genuinely an emergency, where an entire generation of people in many sub-Saharan African countries were dying. Children were being orphaned. The working population was dying off. There was no one to run businesses. You were seeing, you were on the precipice of societal collapse as a result of this disease and the pattern it was taking through. Sub-Saharan Africa. And so in an emergency context, you need an emergency response. And the way they did that, and the way most aid is traditionally delivered in America, is through implementing partners. Implementing partners can be like non-profits, they can be for-profit kind of specialized contractors. Sometimes they can work with governments or multilateral agencies. But they But they would bid, and then these agencies or, say, an NGO would win the contract, and they would run the program. So they would set up a clinic that provided medicines, they would procure the medicines, they would setup a whole supply chain, and they would get those out to the people who needed it, which is great in an emergency. The problem is that this is not in any way sustainable for several reasons. First of all, it's not going to be, it is not a long-term solution to have an African country. In the long term, you need African governments to build up their own capacity to have a supply chain, I'm sorry, a health system and supply chains that work for everything.
Jon Bateman: We hear a lot about these NGOs. It's a term of abuse in right-wing circles now. The notion is that this is a bunch of blue-haired liberals who are running around promoting climate resilience or whatever, and that somehow USAID resources are kind of a slush fund for this group, and therefore U.S. taxpayers are promoting left-wing political causes. I mean, what I'm hearing from you is, actually these recipient partners are about 50-50 profit for profit. I think actually a lot of them are religious groups, World Vision, an evangelical organization.
Rachel Bonnifield: The biggest one is Catholic Relief Services.
Jon Bateman: Classic, well-regarded organization. Mother Teresa was involved with them years ago. But also that there is a technocratic critique of this that's just completely different from the early narrative. It's about duplication of effort, non-sustainability. What's the solution to that? And is the Trump administration implementing a logical solution to the problem that you and they have both identified?
Rachel Bonnifield: As you say, there is this technocratic critique, right, that this is inefficient, that they have high program management expenses and overheads, that a lot of that money never reaches countries, that, you know, I think actually there's one other dimension of this, which is that even the things they are doing in countries, they're doing at a very high standard of quality and expense. And that might be what we aspirationally hope for. That that would be the quality of services everybody would get long-term, but it's not affordable for African countries to absorb services at that level.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, I can imagine any number of flaws of this approach. Is there a realistic response that the administration has come up with to cut through this problem without creating new problems?
Rachel Bonnifield: And the answer is yes, actually. And I was very pleasantly surprised to see this. They are saying that wherever possible, they want to actually give the money to the partner government, not work through an intermediary. By the way, the intermediary is, you know, for all the critiques of them, one reason they exist is because this provides the U.S. government and Congress and the American taxpayer visibility into how every single dollar is spent, right? You don't get that if you go through an African government. I think it's the right thing to do, but there's a very good reason why this has been so hard to do in the past because there has been a lot of pushback from Congress, for example, about not necessarily feeling comfortable giving up that level of control.
Jon Bateman: Is this a kind of only Nixon can go to China situation where because Trump has this unassailable reputation as a hardcore nationalist and someone who would never let another country take advantage of us? That's how he portrays himself in his movement, you know, right or wrong, that he then has the political freedom to take a risk with aid and just hand money over to a foreign government in a way that he can force Congress to go along with? Whereas before, you know, the green eye shade types would have said, hold on, I don't think so.
Rachel Bonnifield: I think that's exactly right. I mean, the other flip side of this is that they want to reduce the PEPFAR budget. They want to pair this with budget cuts, right? They do not want to be spending as much money in perpetuity as we currently are. And the sale that's being made, the pitch is that, well, if we cut out the middlemen, we cut these layers of overhead and reporting and expense, we can actually achieve the same results at a much lower.
Jon Bateman: Oh, is that true?
Rachel Bonnifield: It should be. Yes, it is true, but I would say that with an asterisk. An asterisk is you still have to provide basic incentives and accountability frameworks for making sure anything actually happens. If you just provide it as a slush fund, it is likely to be used kind of as a slash fund, which means some of it would go to health and some of might go to other things that African governments prioritize. So it's not saying they would be doing anything wrong. But if we want that money to be used to sustain our PEPFAR results, we have to have some sort of visibility and accountability for whether those essential services are in fact being maintained.
Jon Bateman: I want to come back in a moment to this Nixon going to China thing because it has fascinating implications for the politics of aid in the United States. Let's just drill in a moment to what you're describing because it sounds like you're saying there's the strategy and the objectives of the administration, but these things are gonna create new challenges of their own, the implementation is not easy. This is where issues of state capacity and technocratic expertise one would think would come into play. Is this strategy executable by departments and agencies that have been cut to the bone in terms of personnel knowledge on the ground?
Rachel Bonnifield: It's a great question. And it's something I'm personally quite concerned about. They are laying out an extremely ambitious timeline for this transition, basically six months.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, I think I read in the strategy that they want the majority of these agreements to be in place by December 31st of this year. We're talking about dozens of countries here. What immediately came to mind is this 90 tariff deals and 90 days phenomenon that the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department have been trying to execute hugely over ambitious. Probably the administration's defenders would say it doesn't matter. It's a rhetorical gambit. It sets the direction. Maybe we won't fulfill these timelines, but... We put a fire underneath the bureaucracy and underneath these foreign countries and make things happen.
Rachel Bonnifield: I think the difference here is that there's not clearly a plan B right now, right? If we care about continuity of these services, and they're saying their plan for continuity of these service is to transition to this other mode of financing. And meanwhile, there's no backup of, okay, we're going to have NGOs or more traditional providers in place and these get delayed, or maybe they're on time, but there's support for that transition. There's very, very high risk in that period, if this is not managed correctly, that people fall through the cracks and these services actually don't get up and running in time for this transition to take place.
Jon Bateman: Which is exactly what happened in January, February, March, where there were these mass freezes. So if I'm hearing you right, there could be another wave. Disruptive, violent kind of illogical cuts to programs, not necessarily because it's in pursuit of a coherent strategy kind of carefully sequenced, but because of kind of bureaucratic and political just trains crashing together.
Rachel Bonnifield: Yeah, and because they don't think through all the technical details of what is practically required to transition these programs over to government control. Probably if I were designing this, what I would like to see is basically a one-year transition period to set the groundwork for governments taking this on themselves, where we have a little bit of a longer tail of more traditional service delivery through American intermediaries. And a clear timeframe at the end of that when the transition will occur, and we can all work technically and politically, financially towards that moment.
Jon Bateman: I mean, one thing I'm taking away from this conversation so far is Trump is most well known at this point for cutting foreign aid, just the aggregate amount. He's also doing two other things at the same time. He is reforming the style of aid programming and he is shifting who the decision makers are in the government. And those latter two things could conceivably be beneficial, but they somehow have to outweigh the cuts. There's almost like some sort of formula there of which of those ends up being the major force? Are the reforms effective enough to outweigh the cuts? Is that the right way to think about it?
Rachel Bonnifield: I mean, to be fair to the Trump administration, there are some countries that receive significant amounts of U.S. foreign assistance where it probably doesn't make much sense at this point. South Africa is still one of a very significant recipient of U S foreign assistance or has been historically. It is a upper middle income country. It's not growing, but it is much wealthier than many of these countries. It has a lot of HIV, and I think we've been a useful partner to them in thinking through and supporting their response, but it is not unreasonable for the Trump administration to say, we should be transitioning our way from support to this country. But there are other places where it's not necessary, you know, these are still unaffordable without U.S. Support. And it's totally clear whether the reforms will be sufficient efficiency to outweigh cost.
Jon Bateman: This conversation about sunsetting or transitioning for a country for a disease, it sounds like this is important to the Trump framework, that we be clear with countries that this is not an endless obligation that we're taking on. Is this a conversation that has been harder to broach within the aid ecosystem up until now? Does it take a more hard-hearted nationalist politician to be able to actually come out and say these things has there been a reluctance.
Rachel Bonnifield: Yes and no. So I think you would be surprised by how active the idea of transition or graduation is in the global aid community. I don't think that those conversations couldn't be broached. Perhaps it's that people didn't have the stomach to actually execute them when push came to shove.
Jon Bateman: And this brings us back to some of the politics of aid, which I think is such a crucial conversation. U.S. Aid was almost chosen as the first target of DOJ, right? It was a proof of concept of a gutting of an agency and a freezing of a set of programs. And it seemed to many that that choice was driven in part by ideological and political aims of the administration, things that Trump campaigned on, America First. But also because this is a program that is misunderstood by the American people that perhaps is not as politically popular as other programs that directly serve Americans, that there's a basic vulnerability there. And that was what enabled this whole apparatus to be run over by DOGE and Trump and others. Is that your assessment? And how do we avoid that going forward?
Rachel Bonnifield: Public opinion polling on foreign aid is surprisingly positive. Significant majorities most of the time when you poll both say they think the U.S. Should have an aid program, that they think we should either maintain or increase aid levels. It's not as hostile of a climate to foreign aid as you might think. Now, famously, they also think that about a quarter of the U.S. government budget goes to foreign aid, which is off by you know, an order and a half of magnitude, it's really well under 1% that goes to anything.
Jon Bateman: It's extraordinary.
Rachel Bonnifield: That's traditional foreign aid in any way. One percent includes like all the Ukraine aid, for example. But when they think of foreign aid, they think these life-saving programs. They think of global health, that's what they support. They support food aid, they support basic humanitarian assistance. And it is true that in USAID, relatively small amount of overall money, but enough to make a political point out of things. Was being spent on things that people did not think of as traditional foreign aid. And the two that came up quite frequently was our sort of democracy and governance support. This is non-ideological nuts and bolts of democracy. And I personally would defend it. And I think it's an important thing. And it is something to be clear that Congress explicitly allocated money towards, right? Yeah, but I think
Jon Bateman: If we think about someone like Trump and his core allies as political entrepreneurs, right, that's a lot of what populism is, where they are looking across the span of policy and trying to find the gaps, the chinks in the armor, the places where there seems to be maybe an elite consensus on something, but there is a missing layer or a decaying layer of popular trust, and they seem to have honed in. On foreign aid as one of those things. At the same time, when they started DOGE’ing foreign aid, even Trump wanted to come out and say, we will not cut off critical life-saving assistance. So there does seem to be this category of other stuff that is maybe weakening support for the core mission, despite, as you say, maybe being actually a small aspect of the pie.
Rachel Bonnifield: I think that's right. And one thing that I have said frequently is that foreign aid can't be something you do behind the backs of the American taxpayer, right? You have to do it in a way that is explained to them that they're bought into. And the example I was giving of democracy support is something where there was an elite consensus. That's why there were allocations in congressional bills year in, year out for this specifically. It wasn't something rogue bureaucrats in USAID were doing. This was a bipartisan funding passed by Congress, but it was never explained to the American people that this was happening. Why? Why we saw it as in our national interest to do this kind of thing.
Jon Bateman: It seems like an important strategic question for the whole aid community and global development community going forward. How much do you try to stage a counter revolution in order to bring back in all of these very logical things, right? And you might say things like, well, critical life-saving aid. That's great. But those are just band-aids. If we're going to solve root causes, we need to be doing all of this other stuff that's much harder to explain to people versus how much do you actually embrace a figure like Trump? And say, this strategy and this photo here is an opportunity to re-legitimize the core elements of aid, things like PEPFAR, malaria assistance, with a new set of allies who are willing to actually wave the flag and say this is something that we're proud of.
Rachel Bonnifield: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, you know, like I said, I really welcome a lot of what's in this strategy. I think there are places I have some qualms. I am nervous about how quickly they want to move on this and how quickly the want to make cuts in accordance with putting things on budget. But I like the overall approach. I think, you now, with some tweaks around the edges, this is a really workable way of doing things that could actually solve a lot problems.
Jon Bateman: And just to say, I know we're joking about the photo a lot. It is funny in fairness. But if I were a part of this community and in your profession, I might say, wow, this is fantastic. A leading member of this administration, someone who's probably gonna run for president in 2028, wants his face to be the face of global health. That's potentially exciting for people who thought maybe this whole system is going away. But as you've said, for now, they're pulling some of their punches. I want to just end on the question of how are other actors around the world reacting to all of this? One of the most common things you hear is if the U.S. Retreats from aid, China or Russia will come in and fill the vacuum.
Rachel Bonnifield: So Russia is not doing very much. They're pretty quiet on the aid front. China is a significant figure in aid broadly. They have the Belt and Road Initiative. They are extremely active across much of sub-Saharan Africa. But they have a quite different approach from the US. They do a lot of commercial investment and infrastructure and a lot basically unrestricted lending to countries. But it's mostly on a loan basis, and a lot of countries are now facing debt. Distress and significant indebtedness to China. But countries also like this because instead of saying, okay, you can only spend the money on these things that we the Americans think are good and righteous causes, they are given free rein to spend it on things that they think are more important to their long-term economic development.
Jon Bateman: So it sounds somewhat asymmetric that China doesn't necessarily have the precise equivalent of USAID's activities, USAID activities. Instead, they have more commercial infrastructural deals that maybe serve a similar function in terms of soft power, but they're not doing the same things as us.
Rachel Bonnifield: Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, it's been an interesting question, right? Like, would China jump in and really try and fill the vacuum left by USAID? And there was really a prime opportunity. And what we've seen so far has been, I'd say, pretty tepid and cautious. We haven't seen that kind of major movement.
Jon Bateman: And what about U.S. allies, the UK, the European Union, Japan, Australia? Is anyone stepping in and philanthropists, private organizations and wealthy individuals? Are people showing up and saying, we're going to fill these gaps?
Rachel Bonnifield: So part of what makes this moment tricky is it's not just the U.S. That's cutting aid. The UK has done a major aid cut. France has done major aid cuts. No one is really increasing aid, right? So the best we're seeing is staying steady. And especially the European countries, they're giving more aid to Ukraine. There are increasing investments in their own military and defense. And aid is often on the chopping block is the first thing to go. But on the question of philanthropists, actually one thing, I'm very proud of at the Center for Global Development, my organization, is that we're hosting temporarily an initiative called Project Resource Optimization. And basically what this is a team of mostly ex-USAID people who went through the entire list of foreign assistance projects that were paused and then terminated and found the most urgent, high-impact projects. They identified $110 million worth of funding opportunities. That they vetted as being high impact, highly cost effective opportunities where urgent funding was needed to sustain the programs. And that has now been completely funded by philanthropists.
Jon Bateman: If the U.S. Is retreating and mostly people are not stepping in to fill the void, China's not, Russia's not, our allies mostly aren't, does that cause us to doubt the strategic claims that people make about this? It's so good for our soft power. It's good for global stability and U.S. self-interest in a long-term way. If other countries aren't following up and almost racing to fill the void. Does that give us any doubt?
Rachel Bonnifield: I am slightly surprised that China has not done more. But honestly, no, it does not make me doubt the strategic claim because I think the strategic claim, sometimes it's overstated, right, that this gives us great leverage with governments or that this is, you know, that the goodwill can be transactionally channeled in some way to get some other objective. And I think when we make this claim, it's not true. Or it's not, it's true so simply. What it really is, is it's a body of kind of bottom-up goodwill from the people in those countries, right? From the actual citizens who are getting food from a van that says, from the American people, who see America as their lifeline. It's not at the government level. It's at the individual citizen level where their interactions with America from the beginning. Are positive of, oh, this country, the most powerful country in the world across an ocean cares about us, and they carry that with them across their lives.
Jon Bateman: That value that you've described of a kind of inchoate goodwill that doesn't necessarily give us leverage. I think it's fair to say, Trump just puts a much, much lower value on that. If he were to buy that in the marketplace, right? Like just the price at which he would buy that is much lower. And maybe that has to do with the cuts that we're seeing and maybe that's not surprising. Final question for you, Rachel. I'm gonna write you a check for $1 billion. How would you spend it?
Rachel Bonnifield: Oh, great question. We talked about Gavi, this is a big multilateral. They are, that does immunization. This is how most people in poor countries get basic vaccinations. The U.S. has totally withdrawn from this mechanism and they're facing about a 2.5 billion shortfall. So I would probably give that to them.
Jon Bateman: Okay. Well, congratulations. I thought you'd be more excited. I mean, I'm writing your check for a billion dollars.
Rachel Bonnifield: Well, I'm giving it away immediately, so.
Jon Bateman: That's fair enough. This is no ordinary podcast and Rachel, you've been no ordinary guest. So thanks so much for coming on today and explaining this all to us.
Rachel Bonnifield: My pleasure.
