'Blind to what’s happening on his watch': Rubio slammed after 'cheap shot' at aid groups

04 February

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is facing backlash after criticizing charity workers and nonprofit organizations striving to deliver essential, lifesaving supplies—humanitarian aid such as food and medicine—to those in desperate need. According to The Washington Post, Secretary Rubio went so far as to suggest that these organizations are intentionally obstructing their own efforts to score a “political point.”

“Secretary Rubio blamed aid groups for failing to navigate Trump’s freeze on foreign aid, saying they are either too incompetent to apply for exemptions or deliberately sabotaging their work to make a ‘political point,'” Washington Post diplomacy and national security reporter John Hudson wrote.

“I issued a blanket waiver that said, if this is life saving programs … if it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives … you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters (video below), according to Hudson. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”

The U.S. Secretary of State “added that if an aid group [is] receiving funds from the United States and “does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization -or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point.”

Experts sharply criticized Secretary Rubio, suggesting he failed to grasp that while aid groups can apply for waivers, those applications cannot be reviewed or approved if no one is working at USAID.

Rubio was made acting head of USAID by President Donald Trump. USAID is expected to be folded into the U.S. State Department, although experts question the legality of such a move.

Derek Martin is the founder of Pathfinder Research. He previously conducted “supply chain counterintelligence at the National Security Agency (NSA), where he further developed his investigative skills and protected critical government IT infrastructure from foreign threats.”

Pointing to a Politico article that reports the Trump administration is putting “thousands” of USAID employees on “forced leave,” Martin responded to Rubio’s remarks by saying: “Might be hard to apply for waivers with all agency staff on forced leave.”

Politico also cited a senior USAID official who “said the agency’s human resources department said in a meeting Tuesday morning that it had already revoked system access for more than 1,400 staffers — an indication that many more are being put on leave than those previously announced.”

“That’s in addition to hundreds of USAID contractors who have been laid off or furloughed in recent weeks. The contractors lost their jobs in part due to an ongoing freeze on foreign aid imposed by President Donald Trump and his aides, who are making moves to fold USAID into the State Department.”

Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs at the Center for International Policy, noted that “Trump put out overbroad orders that Rubio failed to coherently operationalize, resulting in mass confusion at nearly every point in the aid supply chain — and now Rubio is calling those trying to make sense of it incompetent or malicious.”

Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk served in both the Obama and Biden administrations in senior USAID positions, including “as USAID’s lead official for COVID-19,” according to his bio:

“He oversaw USAID’s multi-billion-dollar COVID-19 assistance portfolio, led the design and implementation of the administration’s Global VAX initiative, and coordinated the U.S. government’s global donations of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. He later served as the administration’s lead official for the global MPox response. He also served on the Biden-Harris transition teams for the Departments of State and Health and Human Services.”

“A very cheap shot by Rubio to accuse the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] of politicizing this, when the breakdowns are in fact coming from the (willful?) dysfunction within the administration,” Konyndyk charged.

He also called Rubio’s remarks a “very damning admission,” and said it “makes clear he’s blind to what’s happening on his watch.”

“Why aren’t waivers going through? Because @USAID staff (not by the NGOs) have to request them case-by-case from State, and DOGE has now purged all those personnel.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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