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When U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department told their contractors to pause all work, Sadie Healy expected the impact to be horrendous. But Healy, who runs a small global health consulting firm, Molloy Consultants, realized no one was documenting how bad the freeze on U.S. foreign aid would be. USAID wouldnt be cataloging the impacts as President Donald Trumps administration fired senior staff, shuttered its headquarters and then told its employees their jobs would end. The nonprofits and aid companies who worked with USAID were fighting to survive. So Healy decided she would do it. I am an action person. The depression and the sadness that we knew this was going to cause was something I couldnt deal with, Healy said in an interview with The Associated Press. So we called a Zoom meeting. Healy is one of a growing number of people and organizations in the international development ecosystem stepping forward to track the impact of the freeze on U.S. foreign aid. Many are nonprofits who already support grassroots groups around the world, while others are professionals now volunteering their time, connections and skills. The U.S. is the largest single global humanitarian funder, giving $13.9 billion in 2024, and largest supporter of U.N. agencies, meaning any changes to foreign assistance have sweeping impacts across geographies and issues. The pause in funding has since turned into the dismantling of USAID and its programs. CLOSE IT DOWN, Trump said on social media on Friday, though a judge has paused a plan to put thousands of employees on paid leave. Are USAID cuts permanent or not? Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and billionaire adviser to the Trump administration, has led the campaign to shut down USAID, saying in posts on X that it is evil, a criminal organization, and a vipers nest of radical-left marxists who hate America. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said funding will not be permanently cut, but people in the field say every day the freeze continues and USAID stops works causes irreparable harm. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment. Healy and her business partner Meg McClure said they decided to focus on documenting the number of American jobs lost. They eventually got in touch with a staffer from a Senate committee, who advised them on what data to collect. Within days, they launched a website, USAID Stop-Work, and a survey to document how many U.S. jobs have been lost as a result of the freeze on foreign assistance. So far, employers or employees have reported 10,758 jobs cut since the stop work orders landed on Jan. 24. That number includes some positions at USAID, but not all of the 8,000 workers directly employed by the agency and the thousands more in the field. We can document the destruction that this executive order has caused, Healy said. And we hope that lawyers and we hope that members of Congress can use that for their case. At least two groups with tech capacity and deep networks circulated online surveys to learn about the extent of the funding cuts. They eventually merged efforts and set up the website, Global Aid Freeze to visualize the initial responses. The nonprofit GlobalGiving launched a fund to support small international organizations, many of whom will not survive even a 90-day pause in U.S. foreign funding. Roth Smith, an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, studies how people organize outside of formal structures, often in response to a disaster. He said volunteer efforts to map a crisis and connect that information to people who can act is typical, but the reach of this organizing is impressive. This is a much larger scale and it seems to be highly polished,” he said. Things are fundamentally changed The international nonprofit Accountability Lab, which now operates the Global Aid Freeze website, said 568 organizations responded to its survey about the impacts of the U.S. government’s foreign aid freeze. Half of the respondents estimated they had less than 3 months of operating reserves, meaning they will shutdown by May if funding remains on hold. Blair Glencorse, founder and co-CEO of Accountability Lab, said they’ve been in touch with foundations to try to help them figure out where their support can be most strategic. He said it also seems hard for nonprofits in developing countries to understand how dramatic and lasting the changes in U.S. foreign funding may be. Things are fundamentally changed and I dont think the aid system is going to be the same again, he said. Other grassroots efforts have focused on supporting those who lost their jobs. Joanne Sonenshine, an economist who has worked as a consultant alongside USAID for more than a decade, said she saw a flood of LinkedIn posts about layoffs and in response, a flurry of job announcements. So, she set up a spreadsheet where people could put in their experience and contact information and others could post links to open positions. Almost 800 people wrote in their names, locations and work history. Another spreadsheet included more than 550 entries. “This just goes to show how much we need support for these people. And this is not just D.C. people, by the way, Sonenshine said. These are U.S. contractors or U.S. staff all over the world whose livelihoods and their familys life depended on the U.S. government. These grassroots tracking efforts are largely self-funded and self-directed. Healy and McClure pay for the website tracking U.S. job losses themselves. Accountability Lab stood up their survey without any dedicated funding, though they’ve recently gotten some support to continue the effort. Other professionals within international development have also offered to work for free to help people find jobs or help organizations get new funding. Healy said that willingness reflects the broader ethos and resilience of the community. We love planning, its our favorite thing, Healy said. We are like, This is the moment we were made for. Lets go. ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Thalia Beaty, Associated Press
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A group of investors led by Elon Musk has given OpenAI an unsolicited offer of $97.4 billion to buy the non-profit part of OpenAI. An attorney for the group submitted the bid to OpenAI Monday, the Wall Street Journal reports. Per the Journal, the other investors in the group include Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Ari Emanuel, CEO of sports and entertainment company Endeavor, is also backing the offer through his investment fund. OpenAI uses a hybrid business structure that consists of a nonprofit parent entity (OpenAI, Inc.) and a for-profit subsidiary (OpenAI LP, referred to as a capped-profit company). In part because of the extraordinary high costs of inventing and training AI models, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 that has let it raise billions from Microsoft and others. Altman is now in the process of turning the subsidiary into a traditional company and spinning out the nonprofit. The non-profit would, however, own equity in the new for-profit. (Neither OpenAI nor Musk didnt immediately responded to Fast Companys requests for comment.) The situation may seem familiar to OpenAI board member Bret Taylor, who was chairman of Twitters board of directors when Musk bid for, then bought, the company in October 2022. Taylor left Twitter soon after, along with most of the board. The unsolicited bid ratchets up Musks ongoing battle with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. Musk, who cofounded OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015 (and now leads the Department of Government Efficiency), has already filed two lawsuits against OpenAI complaining that the company has deviated from its original nonprofit mission and is now prioritizing profit over public benefit. In the second lawsuit, filed in November 2024, OpenAIs backer Microsoft was named as a defendant. Musk and the other investors could conceivably end up owning a large share of the for-profit AI. Musks AI company, xAI, has said that its building large language models that are less constrained by political correctness and more focused on objective truth. OpenAI, meanwhile, has been focused on developing frontier models that achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI systems that can do most economically valuable tasks better than humans. OpenAIs for-profit arm is growing quickly. Altman is currently in discussions with the Japanese investment bank, SoftBank Group, which may invest up to $40 billion in the AI company, upping its value to about $300 billion.
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Officials and federal officers turned away scores of U.S. Agency for International staffers who showed up for work Monday at its Washington headquarters, after a court temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have pulled all but a fraction of workers off the job worldwide. A front desk officer told a steady stream of agency staffers dressed in business clothes or USAID sweatshirts or T-shirts that he had a list of no more than 10 names of people allowed to enter the building. Tarps hung over USAID’s interior signs. A man who earlier identified himself as a USAID official took a harsher tone, telling staffers just go” and “why are you here? USAID staff were also denied entry to their offices to retrieve belongings and were told by officials that the agency’s lease had now been turned over to the General Services Administration, which manages federal government buildings. Neither the White House, State Department, USAID nor GSA immediately responded to requests for comment. The move marks the latest step in what has been the fast-paced dismantling of the six-decade-old U.S. aid and development agency and its programs worldwide three weeks ago. Even as President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who runs a cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, have taken aim at other government agencies, USAID has been hit hardest so far. The president signed an executive order freezing foreign assistance so the administration could review spending that it says is wasteful or not aligned with Trump’s agenda. That has forced U.S.-funded aid and development programs worldwide to shut down and lay off staff even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio had sought to mitigate the damage by issuing a waiver to exempt emergency food aid and life-saving programs. Despite the waiver, neither funding nor staffing has resumed to get even the most essential programs rolling again, USAID officials and aid groups say. The Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest humanitarian groups, called the U.S. cutoff the most devastating in its 79-year history and said Monday that it will have to suspend programs serving hundreds of thousands of people in 20 countries. The impact of this will be felt severely by the most vulnerable, from deeply neglected Burkina Faso, where we are the only organization supplying clean water to the 300,000 trapped in the blockaded city of Djibo, to war-torn Sudan, where we support nearly 500 bakeries in Darfur providing daily subsidized bread to hundreds of thousands of hunger-stricken people, the group said in a statement. In an interview aired Sunday with Fox News host Bret Baier ahead of the Super Bowl, Trump suggested that he might allow a handful of aid and development programs to resume under Rubios oversight. Let him take care of the few good ones, Trump said. Aid organizations say the damage that has been done to programs would make it impossible to restart many operations without additional substantial investment. A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have put thousands of USAID staffers on administrative leave that same day and given those abroad 30 days to get back to the United States at government expense. The temporary restraining order came in a lawsuit by two groups representing federal workers, and another hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. While the judge ordered the administration to restore agency email access for staffers, the order said nothing about reopening USAID headquarters. Some staffers and contractors reported having their agency email restored by Monday, while others said they did not. Some staffers told The Associated Press that they came to the USAID offices because they were confused by conflicting agency emails and notices over the weekend about whether they should go in. Others expected they would be turned away but went anyway. A USAID email sent Sunday night, saying it was From the office of the administrator, told employees that what it called the former USAID headquarters and other USAID offices in the Washington area were closed until further notice. It told workers to telework unless they are instructed otherwise. Department of Homeland Security officers and civilians also blocked USAID staffers and Democratic lawmakers from entering the headquarters last week. Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
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