Back around 1990, a federal government economist whom we knew applied for and obtained a job at USAID, currently in the news as a target for Elon Musk’s Efficiency Nazis (TM). USAID paid for a daily Spanish language class with a handful of other students and then, because he hadn’t developed the required proficiency in Spanish, USAID paid for one-on-one Spanish tutoring. (I remember this as 18 months of full-time pay with the sole goal of learning Spanish; he dug out his 1990 calendar and it shows just 6 months of language training while doing some other work for the agency (proof that every tale gets better with time?).)
USAID then deployed him… to Egypt.
The punchline to this story is that when we would laugh about the absurdity of taxpayers paying him to learn Spanish in prep for 3.5 years in Cairo, notoriously short on taco trucks, he would respond with a dry explanation that USAID had a foreign language proficiency requirement and it had to be met before anyone could be sent overseas and that there was no requirement that the language learn bear any relationship to the country of deployment. The whole episode seemed to make sense to him even if it seemed to the rest of us to involve a lot of costs and no benefit to taxpayers.
The costs of keeping a USAID employee in Egypt included at least the following:
- paying a regular federal government salary
- paying for housing in a high-end neighborhood of Cairo
- paying for private English-language school for the kids
- paying to ship a car over from the U.S. and then back, if desired
- paying to fly food in from Philadelphia and Germany and then selling it at to the Americans in Cairo at whatever the average price was for the same item back in the U.S.
In other words, the cost was similar to what would be incurred for any other diplomat in the embassy.
He never told us that he had observed any benefit being delivered by the expenditure of USAID funds in Egypt, either to the average Egyptian or the average American.
From the Guardian:
From state-sponsored NPR:
I did contract work for USAID in many countries after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Everything I saw was an extraordinary waste of tax payer money – the funding of projects that were invariably poorly thought out and half baked – and this was well before the DEI stuff. The money might as well as have been thrown out the window for all the good it did. It was poor people in a rich country sending money to rich people in poor countries.