SPEAKING WITH THE ENEMY. NY Times host Ross Douthat interviews DOGE’s Jeremy Lewin
DOGE’s cuts to U.S.A.I.D. aren’t just a case study in the Trump administration going after woke spending or trying to change the federal government’s bottom line. It was also crucial to a larger shift in foreign policy strategy.
The whole apparatus that the United States has used traditionally to exercise soft power is being gutted, redirected and transformed. And that means changes to how the United States does aid and development work, how it promotes democracy around the world and the way it relates to foreign governments.
My guest today is well positioned to bring some clarity to this shift in strategy and values.
Jeremy Lewin is a youthful veteran of DOGE, a 28-year-old with no government experience before January, who’s now a State Department official in charge of implementing the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to foreign aid and development work.
Excerpts have been edited from full interview.
Douthat: You’re not at all someone who worked in the diplomatic corps, worked in the State Department, worked on foreign aid. Part of the model clearly is bringing in, let’s say, smart, young generalists and setting them to work inside the bureaucracy.
Lewin: I think there’s tremendous value in having the objectivity that comes with not having been part of the diplomatic corps. But ultimately, again, it’s about working hard and executing faithfully the vision that’s set forward by the people who are elected, confirmed and are leading the policy vision. That’s always been my task, whether it was on DOGE or now, in a more formal role at the State Department. It’s to execute the secretary’s vision and the president’s vision and to do so faithfully. I think that’s the most important qualification. I happen to have certain skills or a certain mind-set that has allowed me, I think, to be effective in that.
Douthat: So were you assigned to the State Department after you onboarded with DOGE? How did you start?
Lewin: Backing up, the idea of taking U.S.A.I.D., which was this unaccountable independent institution that was doing foreign policy and foreign assistance out of alignment with the national interest, out of alignment with the diplomatic priorities of the State Department, out of alignment with what the president or the secretary of state wanted to be doing, that’s an idea that’s been kicked around for a long time. There’ve been various proposals to merge U.S.A.I.D. under State, and certainly, the secretary had been thinking about that for a long time.
That being said, DOGE did not go in with the idea that they would be part of this rapid change in the structure of foreign assistance. In about the second week — and Elon has talked about this before — we realized, sort of indicative of the lack of accountability and leadership at U.S.A.I.D., that they were making payments that were in violation of some of the president’s executive orders — foreign assistance pause, et cetera. Elon had been tasked by the president with investigating the situation, and then there was a determination that we would be much more rapidly implementing the restructuring of U.S.A.I.D. At that point, yes, I suppose in some sense I was assigned to assist with that.
Douthat: You were assigned. OK. So U.S.A.I.D. then becomes a special focus. As you said, there had always been running critiques, from conservatives especially, that U.S.A.I.D. is basically building a kind of progressive-oriented matrix of programs and so on.
Lewin: It’s not even progressivism. U.S.A.I.D. viewed its constituency as the global humanitarian complex. It did not view its constituency as the American taxpayer or the national interest of the United States. You hear this and you see it in all of the documents that they prepare.
One of the biggest complaints is — and I’ve heard of this, I’ve talked to more than 30 ambassadors, most of whom were appointed by Biden or were or are members of the career foreign service — you would see examples where they would say: Hey, this country in Africa doesn’t actually want this program. It’s not in alignment with what the government wants. It’s not in alignment with what’s on the ground.
But you know who wanted it? Some nongovernmental organization or international organization that a bunch of Obama-Biden alums or all these people that worked at U.S.A.I.D. were at. So they would push, and you’d have senior Biden officials traveling to countries and batting down career ambassadors, telling them: No, you don’t understand the diplomatic priorities. What matters here is what the U.N. is telling you.
And so you’ve got America’s representative on the ground saying: The country that we are implementing this foreign assistance in doesn’t even want it, and it’s not advancing our interest; to the contrary, they’re upset about it. And yet we are still paying, we’re still using American taxpayer dollars to pay for a program that our ambassador on the ground doesn’t want, that the country doesn’t want. What conceivable benefit are we as Americans getting for the national interest of this country by funding that program?
Douthat: A lot of the critiques of what happened with DOGE was that speed basically became a license to have programs stop working for a while, because you’re trying to change things so quickly, or you’re canceling grants that then have to be restarted, and so on. In the case of foreign aid, you have a promise that lifesaving aid would get a waiver from the suspensions. But then there were all kinds of questions, like, well, how are you delivering aid if you are cutting staff over here, or if this system isn’t working over there?
Again, before we get into the specifics, why did it need to happen so rapidly?
Lewin: A couple of points. I think it’s first worth noting what the secretary said at his budget testimony a couple of months ago. He was in the Senate for more than a decade, and people had talked about these various ideas, including the restructuring of U.S.A.I.D. and the restructuring of foreign assistance. Many of these ideas were talked about in the first Trump administration, and they didn’t get done because of how entrenched the bureaucracy is, how difficult it is to get these things done. So if you don’t move quickly, there’s sort of a tremendous — you could think about the laws of physics, but you need to move quickly and with a lot of energy to get a lot of these things done. That’s the first observation. The second observation is — well, first of all, we have always tried our best to mitigate the ill effects. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be perfect — no one’s perfect in everything — but I think there’s this narrative that the administration or the secretary don’t care about these stoppage effects, these costs that happen when there’s tremendous change.
On the one hand, the mainstream media coverage has talked about, in a vague sense, the historic nature of some of these reforms, but it hasn’t talked about what they mean for the next 30 to 40 years of engagement in the world. When the secretary is thinking about these reforms, he’s thinking with that lens — a historical lens, a generational lens. And when you think about reforms in that way, the cost-benefit of some disruption in the short term versus the long-term benefit of significantly realigning foreign policy and foreign assistance for the American people, it makes a lot more sense why you’re willing to tolerate some degree of disruption.
We can argue all of these various specifics. We can engage in the hand-to-hand combat that many of your colleagues on the reporting side would like to engage in. But ultimately, the point here is the secretary has the vision of what this means.
The point is to do diplomacy — real diplomacy, bilateral relationships. You want this? I want that. Let’s get a deal done. How are we dealing with this security situation? How can we talk to each other so we avoid war?
The last reorganization of the department, ironically, occurred under Clinton. And where do they reorganize it around? They reorganize it around the growth of policy offices, the growth of these issue offices, the growth of this sort of: Well, let’s promote all these ideas. Let’s engage with these international organizations. Let’s build all these complicated bureaucratic multilateral constructs, both inside the U.S. government and on a global scale.
Douthat: I just want to give a due explanation of that theory, because part of what makes the Trump administration shift meaningful is it is not just a bureaucratic reorganization. It is reorganized around a change in the vision of U.S. foreign policy, where basically the argument that you’re making is that a network of civil society promotion, nongovernmental organizations and so on, funded by U.S. tax dollars around the world, doesn’t help the U.S. get its way around the world.
Lewin: It demonstrably failed. Just go look back at history, and look at what happened. What you see is the growth of these civil society organizations — well intentioned, I’ll grant you — but what have they actually accomplished? Where have they gone? We’ve seen how they’ve moved themselves toward authoritarianism with some of these critical ideas that have grown in this progressive left, how a lot of these international organizations have turned to censorship on a global scale and have turned to regime change.
One of the key things about realigning foreign assistance is a few general principles: The program has to work. It has to be accountable. It can’t be funding — I mean, we talk about, people talk about fraud: DOGE didn’t find that much fraud at U.S.A.I.D. This is really a definitional question — What is fraud? — in the sense of: Well, maybe I defrauded you. The grant says I do X and I do Y. That’s a very narrow conception of fraud. But is it a fraud to say you have this organization that The New York Times has painted as feeding all sorts of poor and destitute people around the world, but money is going to pay $400,000 salaries at [places like] U.C. Berkeley to do things like climate and race science research? Is that a fraud on the American people? I would say it kind of is.
Douthat: So you have two things going on, it seems, that you’re suggesting. First, you have a pivot ——
Lewin: And at the same time, by the way, China has eaten our lunch, right? I mean, we talk about soft power ——
Douthat: So part of what you’re arguing is that essentially the U.S. can do a fairer, better, more equitable version of the kind of investment that China has been promising Africa. So you’re saying, basically: We’ve gone in with aid and grants and NGOs, and they’ve gone in and promised to build trains, ports and — to use your example — maybe now, drone infrastructure. And so you’re saying: We can beat China by promising those kinds of deals on better terms. That’s part of it, right?
Lewin: That’s part of it. With an assistance component, too — where it’s strategic, right? I mean, I just approved a program to deploy small modular nuclear reactors built in the United States to an allied country to help with their energy infrastructure. We are building ports we just announced on the back of ——
Douthat: Can you confirm, out of all of these pots of money, in different aspects, the administration is ——
Lewin: The secretary has been very clear: We’re continuing to spend on PEPFAR and on malaria and on ——
Douthat: But the administration wants to spend less money on treating some of ——
Lewin: No, no, no.
Douthat: No?
Lewin: I think when you look at what PEPFAR was spending its money on, those cuts — a very modest amount of money was cut from PEPFAR — it was not for direct treatment, treating people with H.I.V. and stuff like that. It’s on, like, L.G.B.T.Q. education programs or whatnot that were funded because PEPFAR was a tremendously successful project and one of the most successful humanitarian projects in the history of the United States. But it became so successful that it outgrew some of its need. Countries graduated, their infection rates came down, some of them became wealthier enough that they could take more of the burden themselves because it was so successful.
This is a classic D.C. story. You keep on appropriating money to PEPFAR and then you don’t know what to do with it. So you start spending it on things that are non-core. You start spending it on things that are outside of the scope of what it’s supposed to be doing. Anyone in D.C. who’s thought seriously about these issues will admit that PEPFAR had more money than it really needed to accomplish its core H.I.V. treatment and disease prevention mission.
Douthat: Presumably a lot of the extra money was spent on the assumption that ideally you’re not just treating cases of the disease. You mentioned education — maybe you’re trying to educate people about not having the kind of sex that transmits H.I.V., right?
Lewin: Sure. And there’s a question about whether those things are abstractly good or whether the American taxpayer needs to pay for all of them, or whether other countries, whether other multilateral partners, et cetera, can pay for some of these things.
But the secretary is absolutely committed to PEPFAR’s mission and to beating H.I.V. around the world. He committed — I was part of that — more than $1 billion to honor the U.S. commitment to the global fund to fight H.I.V. We just obligated more than $1 billion across PEPFAR’s global programming to continue all of these key programs around the world through the next few months.
There’s no question that we remain committed to the program. We think we can do it more efficiently and with a different model.
For full interview and audio, go to NY Times.