Americans are an incredibly generous people

This week, Laurence and I sat down with Maany Peyvan, who served as the head speechwriter and adviser to USAID Administrators Samantha Power and Rajiv Shah. We talk about the right (and wrong) arguments for aid, what the end of USAID will mean at home and abroad, and whether tech can fill the gap. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

For more of their conversation, please subscribe to the Riskgaming podcast.

Danny Crichton:

You come here under dark clouds because you're coming from us from the United States Agency for International Development. What has happened to the agency has really affected you, and so I wanted to talk about your personal story and go from there.

Maany Peyvan:

Yeah, thank you Danny. Well, you're absolutely right. It is personal. I have worked at USAID across two democratic administrations, during the Obama administration and then again under President Biden. I served under two amazing administrators. One was Dr. Rajiv Shah, who now runs the Rockefeller Foundation. The other is Ambassador Samantha Power. I have seen an arc of both the work of the agency and the incredible impact it's had in places all around the world.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's been the project of most of my professional life to get Americans to care about foreign aid and to get Americans to care about USAID. And they've never cared about it more — and they've never read about it more — than they are now, as the agency is sadly being disassembled.

Personally, it's incredibly hard. Not hard because of my circumstances. I was a political appointee, and I knew post-election I wasn't going to have a job. But the tens of thousands of civil service and foreign service workers at USAID, the nationals of the countries in which USAID did its work, who are all facing this massive upheaval, you feel deeply about their circumstances.

In my darkest moments I think about the mother whose child is now going to be born with HIV, who otherwise would not have been. I think about the severely malnourished kid whose life could have instantly been revived with access to some food aid or a miracle paste that we're able to provide. And I think about that disappearing.

The final thing I'll say is, even amidst everything, there is a wellspring of hope that more people have become alive to this work, aware of it, encouraged by it. I hope as we seek to rebuild the legacy of foreign aid, we can rebuild it with an awareness that didn't exist before.

Danny Crichton:

You were at the top speechwriter for the agency, and you have this unique role — and Laurence, you had a similar role at the U.S. mission to the United Nations — where you need to communicate both externally to hundreds of different countries around the world, to thousands of different organizations that are receiving aid, but also to the American public about the importance of helping in countries they might have never heard of on continents that don't seem like priorities to the average American. How do you bridge that communications divide?

Maany Peyvan:

I think it was a big ambition of ours, certainly coming into the Biden administration under Samantha Power, to be very public in terms of the impact of the things that were happening around the world and to craft arguments that we felt were compelling to folks day-to-day.

Some of those arguments are national security arguments about how development aid can make Americans safer, whether that's through preventing disease, stopping flows of migration, or you can really pick your cause. There are economic arguments about how aid creates markets for future trade. That's not rhetoric; seven of the United States’ top 10 trading partners today are countries that used to receive foreign assistance. But the real argument that we wanted to deliver was that America cares. America gives a shit about what happens to people all around the world.

You have to remember that we were coming in during a global pandemic. If ever there was an event that showed you that what happened halfway around the world could impact your life in a dramatic way, it was that pandemic. And so we really did try to build on idea that the fates of Americans were intertwined with the fates of people around the world, to communicate that we cared about them and that we were willing to do something about it, and to communicate frankly that America kicks ass at this. The people, the men and women of the USA, the men and women of our military, of our foreign service, they can do things that no other country can do, that no international organization can do.

Laurence Pevsner:

We've known each other a long time, Maany, and you have this term, you say, "We should have spent less time talking about the benefits to us and more time talking about how this is just a good and righteous thing to do."

I think that's a brave argument to make. Normally when you get into politics, you have to be the realist all of a sudden. What makes you think now in this moment of, as you were saying, dark clouds around USAID, that this is the right time to turn towards a more moral outlook?

Maany Peyvan:

Well, I think the argument of pure naked self-interest is an argument that works really well with the foreign policy establishment, with the realist school of thinking. And I think it's an argument that works — or had worked — pretty well with the Republican Party, and frankly, the lobbyists who supported the Republican Party.

Where I think those arguments fall flat are with people who don't follow this closely, who aren't necessarily paying attention day-to-day. I don't think talking about naked self-interest to those folks is going to inspire them. And when you're talking about trying to build coalitions of support and trying to reach the American people, what you're talking about is inspiration.

Americans, we should not forget, are incredibly generous. In this country, we donate over half a trillion dollars a year to charitable giving, and the majority of that is individual giving. I think we need to start tapping into that moral fabric.

The final thing I'll say in favor of the moral argument is that it is what draws us to this work. The individuals who serve at USAID or who serve their country, yes, we care about national security. Yes, we care about economic security. Absolutely those things matter, but we are drawn to these fields because we feel a deep sense of patriotism, have a strong belief that we can make the world better, and know that our work matters in the lives of other people around the world. If that's what inspires us, we need to give the American people some credit that the argument would animate them as well.

Danny Crichton:

With Riskgaming, we often try to model incentives for individuals. Most of our political simulations, most of what comes from them is people basically pursuing their own self-interest. And, as you point out, self-interest was an effective bipartisan argument for aid for decades going back.

Why has that pulled back now? Because when I hear that self-interest isn't enough anymore, that to me is sort of insane. It's like saying, "I could make more money, but I have decided not to." And so what do you think has changed?

Maany Peyvan:

I think there are a few things at work. I think there are a group of people among the Trump administration and Republican Party for whom the idea that giving something away may benefit you is simply too complex a thought. There's an America-first dictum that says, "Unless that money is going directly to Americans, mostly in the form of tax cuts, it's waste." They don't think giving away foreign aid makes us stronger. To me, though, it is obvious that it does; it's both lived and proven. But I think there are some people who really believe giving money away makes us look like chumps.

Danny Crichton:

Charity is a bad deal.

Maany Peyvan:

Charity is a bad deal, exactly. I think that is a bit of what's going on here. I think this has also been undertaken as a project to drive efficiency and to make things work better. I spent six years of my life in Silicon Valley. I worked at Google. I worked at YouTube. There is a real arrogance within the private sector, just as there is in the public sector, about what it means to be effective.

And I think what we're seeing is a bit of that private sector arrogance coming in, with some in the administration saying "You guys are inefficient. And so you need to be cleared out and we need to replace you with the kind of people who might thrive in a more cutthroat environment.”

What I would say to those people as someone who has been on both sides of the grind is that there is some element of truth to the idea that, in the public sector, you don't wake up every day and worry if you're going to make your quarter.

But what the private sector almost never has to worry about are the life and death decisions that people who work at USAID in humanitarian relief and in the public sector and in development have to make every day. Do I risk the lives of these aid workers to deliver aid in this war zone? Do I take my limited budget and invest it in things that are going to save infants or children or adults? They do not have the weight of those moral decisions. So there is a level of appreciation that should be given to those folks.

Laurence Pevsner:

If USAID is folding into the State Department or being slashed entirely, that obviously creates a vacuum. And we know the vacuum can be filled by a bunch of different players. There's a lot of talk about how China will come in, especially on the African continent. Another group that, to your point, doesn't normally do this but potentially could, is the private sector.

Maany Peyvan:

I don't see a tremendous opportunity for the private sector to come in and deliver humanitarian aid in a war zone — it's not a profitable or a stable environment in which to do that kind of work. But I do think there are real revolutions available in science that could potentially change not just our lives, but the lives of people all around the world. So some of the clearest examples have to do with using AI-driven protein mapping to design more effective and less drug-resistant therapeutics, whether for tuberculosis or malaria, or for testing different vaccines.

It is also worth being very aware of the opportunities in agriculture as well as in precision breeding. Unless we equip farmers in vulnerable areas to be more productive with better technology and climate resistant seeds, we're going to experience severe, severe hunger around the world in a very serious way. And by the way, those innovations, heat-resistant maize or a perennial rice seed, benefit us as well. They make food cheaper here in the United States, too.

And when you're launching a big humanitarian response or you have a massive global health program that is trying to move medications around the world, you can think about how AI-driven forecasting could really improve the logistics, delivery, and day-to-day operations. There was a really impressive company called Citus Analytics that built a predictive model that said anytime we see an increase in rain in this region, we know there is going to be an uptick of malaria adjacent to it because malaria comes from mosquitoes, which are waterborne. And so we will pre-position our malaria supplies around the world based on these predictive factors. That's the kind of technology that can, I think, do a ton of good.

And then finally, when you work in over a hundred countries around the world, just bottom-line, baseline translation is a really, really difficult problem. Being able to use generative AI to instantly translate documents, be able to access and communicate with different actors in your space, that is going to be transformational.

Danny Crichton:

Last year, one of our most popular pieces was on how large language models are really dependent on English and Chinese because they have the largest corpi.

But one of the challenges as you get to smaller languages is that, because of the digital divide and lack of access to technology, none of that text is able to actually be injected into the models, which means none of these models are designed for many of these languages. You can't actually translate very easily. And so there's a huge challenge there.

But I actually take this much more broadly, which is this idea of why would you go to an emerging market where there's theoretically no profit? And to me, it’s because you encounter this set of hundreds of different types of problems you don't see in the industrialized world. Maybe it's malaria, maybe it's lack of income, maybe it's different types of health problems, but these are problems that drive innovation.

The opportunity, then, is this interaction, this ability to see new problems, to kind of open your mind to new ways of doing things. If we don't inject new ideas in her, we get calcified. And that to me is a long-term threat to the competitive advantages of the United States.

Maany Peyvan:

I remember when I was in grad school, this was the hot topic. You were not going to move into markets that felt unstable or didn't present you with easy opportunities overnight. I think there is a bit more of an appreciation and understanding of the economic opportunity that exists in not just developing markets, but even what you might call fringe markets. Africa is going to have a growing population for years to come. It's the last continent I think that's actually going to still be growing. It is shortsighted not to think ahead to what these markets might represent to you or your company or even to our country in the future.

Danny Crichton:

To close, let's revert back to the original story, which is that USAID was just dismantled. What happens next?

Maany Peyvan:

So I'll talk about this in the short term and in the long term. In the short term, this is a massive, massive attack on the global foreign aid infrastructure. And even if we were able to snap our fingers and turn the funding flows on tomorrow — which let's be clear, despite all this talk about waivers and everything else, we cannot and we have not — people are going to die. People are dying already.

My hope is that more life-saving aid gets turned back on in a serious way, although let’s not get caught up with whether USAID, the institution, is what survives. Let's get caught up with whether the work itself survives and whether the people who do that work are able to continue to do it.

But there are already organizations that have crumbled, that have fired people, that have furloughed people. I think 30% of the local organizations providing lifesaving relief in Sudan have already folded. This is a massive blow. And we're talking about it here in the abstract on a podcast in a very intellectual manner. The images of what it looks like when children are defeated by AIDS, when infants don't have enough to eat, when mothers can't deliver in a safe manner, when food aid doesn't reach the people, when cholera ravages a community, these are horrific. Those images are coming, and they will be coming not because of a war, not because of an airstrike, not because of some horrible act of God, but because of an act of man, the acts of the United States.

I am hopeful, though, that we can get to a better place in the long term. I really believe that we need to take this conversation back to the American people, that we need to make the American people proud of the good that their aid has done around the world, that with less than 1% of every dollar in taxes that they spend — that's the amount of money we're talking about here, less than one penny of every tax dollar you spend — their money has done tremendous good around the world.

It spurred a green revolution that averted an age of famine. We were able to eradicate smallpox, to nearly eradicate polio, to save 60 million lives from tuberculosis, to turn back the tide on AIDS and HIV and malaria. These are all things the American people should be proud of. This is your legacy. And I think we, and when I say we, I mean elements of the Democratic Party, need to become braver about taking that message to people, to inspire people, to not just give, but to give more and to give more generously and to be the force for good that we know we can be around the world again.

Danny Crichton:

We are going through this period of destruction, but one can only hope that out of the green shoots, something of creation will come out of it. Maany, thank you so much for joining us.