Clifford Brown was a partner at a Beverly Hills law firm when he saw a newspaper ad that changed his life. He gave up most of his income, left his house over the ocean, and joined the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the next 27 years, he worked in Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Guinea, and Peru. In this conversation, Cliff describes bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, a practice where young men abduct women and force them into marriage. His own wife's older sister was kidnapped. Later, after Cliff spoke out against high-level corruption involving electricity smuggling, his wife was abducted at gunpoint outside a hair salon in Bishkek. We talk about what USAID actually did beyond humanitarian aid: creating agricultural industries that supplied American grocery stores, training accountants in post-Soviet states, building court systems across Latin America. A law called the Hickenlooper Law prohibited the agency from telling Americans about any of it. Cliff spent twenty years fighting his own agency's lawyers over whether the U.S. government could fund translations of Quranic texts that prohibit suicide, to counter radical Islam after 9/11. The lawyers said no, citing excessive entanglement with religion. His argument: it's legal to fund a bullet but not a conversation about scripture. The Washington Post covered his case in 2009. We discuss what USAID got wrong, including the failed counter-narcotics programs in Colombia and the democracy-building efforts that went nowhere in the former Soviet Union. And we talk about what fills the vacuum when America steps back, with China building railroads and mines across Africa on loan terms that countries cannot repay. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order pausing nearly all foreign aid. By July 1, USAID officially ceased to exist. More than 80 percent of its programs were terminated. Cliff describes the sadness of watching colleagues lose their pensions overnight, and a former staff member from Kyrgyzstan now working in a grocery store deli. Clifford Brown is the author of Inside USAID: An Odyssey of Foreign Assistance. He writes at cliffordbrown.substack.com. From the conversation: "I felt like I was a mental prostitute. I had to think about somebody else's problem as an attorney, and the only reason I was thinking about it was they were paying me to think about it." -- Who Steps In When America Walks Away- "Half a million jobs in Honduras from an onion experiment. 300 villages in Guatemala connected to electricity for a $30,000 investment. Shrimp, cantaloupe, flour, broccoli, all shipped to American groceries from industry that USAID helped create." -- Who Steps In When America Walks Away- You might also like: • Wrongfully Convicted: Darryl Burton Spent 24 Years in Prison for a ... • Councilwoman Leticia Fraga - From Mexico to Princeton, NJ - A story... • Denis Devine - Fishtown, Philly - a non-traditional dad, an engaged...
