Andrew Natsios:
Of course it is. The president should appoint his own designee for the AID administrator, the head of the agency, which is what I was under President Bush, and the assistant administrators, all of whom, by the way, have to be confirmed by the United States Senate, and the next level down.
They run the agency. And you put in place people who agree with you. I promoted more conservative people who are economists, who are pro-business in the agency. When the left takes control, they promote people on the left. That’s how any administration works. That’s true in the Pentagon. It’s true in the State Department.
What do you think the State Department was doing under Biden? They were running the LGBT flag with the American flag in all the embassies. That’s not AID that did it. That is the State Department that did it.
I — these issues are subterfuge. They — I think what they wanted to do is to show that they were in control and they wanted to make cuts, and they have made up these illusory charges against AID that make no sense and are not accurate.
With all due respect, none of these people know anything about AID. What does Musk know about international development? Absolutely nothing. He has a bunch of young kids in their 20s. They don’t know. They’re techies. They don’t know anything about international development. They don’t know anything about the Global South. They don’t know anything about these — the programs and policies of the agency.
AID is the most pro-business and pro-market of all aid agencies in the world. I can tell you that categorically. I am a conservative Republican. I’m not a liberal. And I have served in repeated Republican administrations.
And the notion that the agency is Marxist — they said — they made the accusation it was a Marxist organization. That’s utterly ridiculous. I know that we have private sector officers in it. We have a program that we started when I was administrator called the Global Development Alliance that brings in American businesses who contribute $6 billion a year to AID’s programs.
We don’t — they don’t give us the money. We don’t give them — we jointly invest in the same projects, and we manage the projects for the businesses. The business community in the United States is very pro-AID. They never bothered to ask the business community what they thought of this whole attack on AID and an attempt to abolish it.
