568
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
568 points (96.4% liked)
News
23388 readers
1757 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Good riddance! USAID contractors are the scum of the Earth.
A lot of the foreign aid money that you're told goes to a developing country actually stays in Washington DC area, siphoned off by these evil parasites.
I worked on a project where we identified the need to have a part time accountant to help a bunch of NGOs to get their books in order. USAID had money in the budget for this, it was all looking good. But then out of nowhere one of these bullshit contractors swooped in and instead of hiring a local accountant, the money instead went to the contractor who spent a week in the tourist area to give a few seminars in between trips to the beaches. Didn't do jack shit to help anyone but made the equivalent to half a year's salary for a local accountant which would have actually helped NGO's that were teaching children how to read. He took all of that money for the week while he stayed at a fucking resort.
This guy would've probably made thousands of dollars (possibly >$10K) for his bullshit Powerpoint which was probably just stuff anyone can find on un.org. And it would've shown on the budget as foreign aid to the Palestinian people. Since the presentation was cancelled that money might actually get to the Palestinian people instead. Though who am I kidding, it will more likely go to another one of these assholes. But at least there's a small chance some money might actually get to somewhere it can make a difference. If he showed the powerpoint he made by copying pasting stuff from un.org, it would've cost USAID thousands of dollars.
One less DC swamp rat siphoning off money from the developing world. Nothing of value was lost.
This is a pretty extreme view. Individual USAID contractors are not the scum of the earth. Most are well-meaning people who truly care about helping others, which is why they signed up to work in international development to begin with. A good portion are returned peace corps volunteers, or even immigrants to America from these developing countries. The idea that someone becomes an expert in maternal health in order to siphon off foreign aid money is kind of laughable.
That said, the industry that has formed around foreign aid is largely there because of the way the government has chosen to distribute aid money. A lot of this type of work was at one time done by the government, but the government has switched to a model where it uses the private sector to compete for technical work and because congress believes the private sector can be held accountable in a way the government can’t be. These companies are highly regulated. The amount of profit they can make is controlled by the government, and is typically only about 2-3% of the price of a contract. From that profit, they are liable to pay for any waste, fraud, or abuse if it is discovered.
The alternative some suggest would be to hand out millions of dollars to developing countries governments. Let me tell you from personal experience, most of these countries don’t have controls in place to appropriately manage this money. If we gave this money directly to developing countries, a good portion of it would end up misused. So, the government hires an American company to run projects and programs for it. Within these projects, typically all but one or two of the staff are host country nationals. That means most of the staff are locals, with just a few expats / Americans there.