‘Absolutely Ridiculous!’ Bush’s USAID Chief Flips The Script on Musk, Says Agency Was Burdened By Oversight

Andrew Natsios, the former USAID administrator under President George W. Bush, gave a barn burner of an opening statement in a Congressional hearing on the agency Thursday, saying that “the notion that AID is irresponsible in terms of its oversight is utter nonsense.”

Natsios defended that agency, which was gutted and shuttered by Elon Musk and President Donald Trump this month, as a key mechanism for economic development overseas. He highlighted how the agency raised billions in private sector funding for its projects, worked with Christian NGOs around the world, and argued was in fact burdened by oversight as opposed to somehow allowed to frivolously spend billions — as Musk has claimed.

“I speak for myself today. I don’t represent anyone. And I’ve been doing this work since 1989 when I joined the Bush administration. The first Bush administration as the director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, when the world order was collapsing. In our little office, along with the Food for Peace Office, we saved tens of millions of lives around the world,” Natsios began, adding:

Which they continued to do it through the BHA bureau, which is now much larger than it was when I was there. If you’re upset about getting off course, so am I. But let’s course correct not course destroy. when I took over as the administrator in Bush 43 W’s administration in early 2001, I ordered my deputy to

begin reviewing every single project, every single program in AID, line by line, and we eliminated 80 programs over a month.And we move that cash back into the program because there was a cassava mosaic that was destroying the cassava crop in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, in eastern Congo, and there was a risk of a famine. And we got cuttings in and we stopped the pandemic, the the disease pandemic for the cassava. My point is, I eliminated a lot of philosophically offensive programs that a conservative administration would not tolerate. And when the Democrats took over, they moved the agency to the left. I moved it to the right.The Obama people actually said I was very right-wing. I was the most right-wing administrator in the history of the agency. And yet the career people followed what I wanted to do in the agency. We put heavy emphasis on economic growth. Some of the things you’ve criticized, sir, with all due respect, are economic growth programs that have been highly successful. 10% of the workforce in Egypt is from tourism.AID has properly invested $100 million over the years, and it’s massively increased the number of jobs in Egypt. They are our ally. Don’t we want people working instead of being unemployed? It is 12% of the GDP of Egypt tourism. We call it development tourism. We do it in Lebanon. We do it in Tunisia.We did it in

Kosovo and in Bosnia. We’ve done it in Morocco. We do it all over the world. It brings in revenue and employs people. It’s an economic growth project. I believe in economic growth. I believe in the private sector. I believe in free markets. That’s what aid does. The notion that aid is some kind of a Marxist institution is absolutely ridiculous! I know the career officers. I work with them. There is a career track called the Private Sector Officers. And what do they do? They work with the business community.I started a program which the Democrats continued called the Global Development Alliance. We started it very early on– 2001. What it does is it matches AID money with corporate money to supply their supply chains. We did this, we do this all over the world. We’re we’re working with hundreds of American corporations. We’ve raised $60 billion in private-sector funding. With the American business community to increase jobs all over the world.We’ve been doing this for 24 years very successfully. The Europeans and the Canadians and the Australians have taken our lead in this and tried to replicate these private public-private alliances. 25% of the money in those GDAs is U.S. government money. 75% is private money. We invest together. We don’t give them any money. They don’t give us any money. We design

the project. We co-invest and then we manage it. The notion that AID is irresponsible in terms of its oversight is utter nonsense.I wrote an essay 12 years ago called The Clash of the Counter Bureaucracy and Development. It was published. It’s the most cited thing I’ve written in the scholarly literature, and it was based on my frustration with the level over and over and over again of oversight. The inspector general, the special inspector general.Why do we need two special inspector generals in Afghanistan and in Iraq? Then we have the GAO. We have the OMB. We have the Congressional Oversight Committee. Every line of what it does is overseen by seven different levels of oversight. You know why money disappears? I’ll tell you why. Where do we work?Where do we work? Christian NGOs are now delivering food in Sudan in a famine. There will be 2 million people dead by the end of this year. Those are the projections. There is no government in Sudan. There are no police in Sudan. There are no courts.

Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) cut Natsios off, saying, “I thank you for your opening remarks this morning. And I now recognize chairman emeritus Ranking member Meeks for his five minutes of questioning. Chairman McCaul. I’m sorry, Chairman Emeritus McCaul. First five minutes of questioning.”

Watch the full clip above via C-SPAN.