The two passages below are excerpted from chapter 7 of Mark Moyar’s Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency. The first passage recounts Dr. Moyar’s arrival as a Trump appointee at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), revealing both the pervasiveness of leftist ideology in the federal bureaucracy and the bureaucratic resistance during the first Trump administration that led to a tougher approach to the bureaucracy during the second Trump administration. The second passage explains how former Obama administration officials helped stifle the reform efforts of Trump’s first USAID Administrator, Mark Green.

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I joined USAID on February 5, 2018. For the first few days of em­ployment, all new staff attended an orientation at a non-descript office building in Arlington, Virginia. Having been through fed­eral orientation programs before, I wasn’t surprised to find that some aspects of the orientation were informative, and others were so tedious and unnecessary that extra cups of coffee were required to stay awake.

The section of the orientation I remembered best was the “privilege walk.” It came as a surprise for a couple of reasons. First, it was unlike anything I had seen in the federal agency where I had worked previously, the Department of Defense. In the world of the Marines and the Special Operations Forc­es, “suck it up” was the preferred guidance to those who found their circumstances unfair or distressing. Second, the training reflected the ideological preferences of the Obama administra­tion, which had already been out of power for more than a year. Apparently, some Democratic hands remained on the cultural steering wheel of the agency.

President Barack Obama delivers a keynote speech at the White House Summit on Global Development in Washington, DC on July 20, 2016 - USAID

Each trainee picked an identity out of a hat. Mine was “North American woman of Scandinavian descent.” I don’t remember the other identities exactly, but they were along the lines of “un­documented migrant worker,” “male French development offi­cial,” “blind woman of African descent,” “transgender activist,” “male prostitute,” and “indigenous woman with unwanted child.”

We stood side-by-side in a line, facing the instructor, our identities known only to ourselves. The instructor then read a statement aloud. If the statement applied to us, we took a step backward. If it did not apply, then we took a step forward. The statements went something like this:

“Employers are less likely to offer me a job or pay me normal wages because of my identity.”

“I am at a heightened risk for sexual assault.”

“People will treat me differently because of gender stereotypes.”

“I may face discrimination when applying for government services.”

At the end, we revealed our identities. The male French de­velopment official was at the front, and I was close behind. Most of the others were far to our rear. During the ensuing group dis­cussion, the instructor and some of the attendees talked about what the exercise had demonstrated about identity, prejudice, and privilege.

I had no objection to the general concept of appreciating ad­versity based upon identity. In fact, I could relate to it personally, as I had been denied numerous career opportunities because of my identity as a conservative heterosexual white male. Nev­ertheless, I found the event absurd. If adults were not already aware that they should treat others with dignity and respect, or that some people were born with advantages or disadvantages, a two-hour training session wasn’t going to change them. The emphasis on group privilege, moreover, was drawn straight from the identity politics of the American Left and was plainly intended to justify extending the identity spoils system to the countries where USAID worked. In fact, as I later learned, the “privilege walk” had been created as an ideological indoctrina­tion tool by Erica Sherover-Marcuse, the third wife of radical activist Herbert Marcuse.

It would ultimately take nearly four years for the Trump administration to pull the talons of identity politics and other elements of leftist ideologies from the flesh of federal training programs. In an executive order dated September 22, 2020, the White House would forbid “race or sex stereotyping or scape­goating in the Federal workforce or in the Uniformed Services.” The order provided examples of instructors and instructional materials that were even more outrageous than those of USAID. One Department of Treasury training session had informed trainees that “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism,” and it instructed small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid “narratives” that Americans should “be more color-blind” or “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.” Training mate­rials for non-minority males at Sandia National Laboratories stated that an emphasis on “rationality over emotionality” was a characteristic of the “white male,” and asked those present to “acknowledge” their “privilege” to each other.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now believe that the orienta­tion would have served new employees much better by cover­ing a topic that was missing—the reporting of waste, fraud, and abuse. We did receive “ethics training,” but it focused on topics like obtaining permission to attend outside events or complying with limits on gifts from foreign governments. It should have covered the agency’s vulnerability to corruption, the obligations of employees to report evidence of corruption, and the USAID leadership’s commitment to protection of employees from retal­iation when reporting these crimes.

The agency or the Presidential Personnel Office also should have provided an orientation for new political appointees. As the implementers of policies that were unpopular with much of the career staff, the new appointees needed guidance on how to achieve our mission in a dangerous bureaucratic jungle. We needed assurances that the leadership would back us up when the tigers and jaguars bared their fangs. No leaders did anything of the kind for me or the other appointees who joined USAID in 2018. We would have to find our way through the jungle on our own, with only intuition and sporadic advice from other new­bies and a few veterans to keep the beasts from devouring us.

Mark Green believed that the agency’s habitual reliance on a handful of large implementing organizations had bred com­placency and corruption. To break this cycle, he directed senior staff to find ways to fund contractors and NGOs that the agency had not funded before. Iraq, where USAID was stepping up as­sistance to the Christian and Yazidi minorities, provided the first test bed. In early 2018, the Middle East Bureau held a conference for prospective partners in Washington, attended by over three hundred organizations, many of them just the kinds of imple­menters Green wanted as new partners. A large number of these organizations submitted compelling proposals.

When the USAID bureaucracy went through its award pro­cess, however, it ended up awarding nearly all of the work to the same large organizations that always won the contracts. Green and other agency leaders were furious. The outcome appeared to validate suspicions that contracting decisions were swayed by personal connections between the USAID officials making the awards and their friends at the mega-contractors.

Some of those connections had their origins in the previous administration. Between 2013 and 2015, the Obama administra­tion had implanted some of its political appointees in career jobs at USAID and other federal agencies, a process commonly called “burrowing in.” If Obama appointees had moved into a career job more than one year before the 2016 election, the Trump administration could not fire them. Some of the implants held very senior positions, from which they could continue influenc­ing policy and contracting after their party had left the White House. The most spectacular case at USAID was Angelique Crumbly. Obama had appointed Crumbly as assistant adminis­trator for the Bureau for Management in 2013, and she then had converted to a career position later in Obama’s second term. She became the acting head of that bureau when Obama left office and remained in that position for the majority of the Trump administration, which gave her extraordinary influence over the spending of the agency’s money.

Angelique Crumbly Sworn In--Assistant Administrator for the Bureau for Management, July 31, 2013 - USAID

Other Obama appointees stayed involved in the agency’s affairs and contracts after January 2017 by taking jobs in other sectors of the aid-industrial complex. Much like the military-industrial complex described by President Dwight Eisenhower in his fare­well address, the aid-industrial complex was a massive conglomer­ation of public and private institutions that excelled at promoting the growth of their industry and the incomes of their executives and shareholders. Swamp creatures rotated frequently among the four cornerstones of the aid-industrial complex—federal agencies, Congress, contractors, and lobbying firms—along with various and sundry aid institutes, think tanks, and non-profits.

During the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama had vowed to close the “revolving door” of “people going from industry to agency, back to industry.” Once he moved into the White House, Obama imposed rules prohibiting the revolving—but then granted numerous loopholes that kept the door spinning at a dizzying speed. In one of the most egregious cases, Goog­le exchanged employees with the federal government, national political campaigns, and Congress 258 times during the Obama administration, according to the Google Transparency Project. The Obama White House bestowed political appointments on thirty-one Google employees, and twenty-two officials left the Obama White House to work for Google.

At the end of Obama’s presidency, many of his top USAID appointees headed straight through the revolving door into the legislative, contracting, and lobbying arms of the aid industry. Susan Markham, who had been the agency’s supervisory gender coordinator, landed a job at the gender-equality advisory firm Smash Strategies. From that position, Markham helped craft the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2019, whose text sounded as though it had been lifted straight from the USAID gender policy documents of the Obama era. Most significantly, the act required the head of USAID to ensure that “gender equality and female empowerment are integrated throughout the Agency’s program cycle and related processes.” This provision enabled career bureaucrats to hire new gender advisors to scrutinize everything the agency did through a radi­cal feminist lens. (The act ended up passing thanks to some Re­publican votes, because most Republican congressional staffers didn’t know or care enough to object.)

Nancy Lindborg, who had headed the Bureau for Democra­cy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance during the Obama years, became the head of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Funded generously by Congress, the U.S. Institute of Peace implement­ed aid programs, conducted research, and beseeched members of Congress for more money. Its headquarters building, a glass palace near the State Department in Foggy Bottom, had origi­nally been projected to cost taxpayers $100 million but ended up costing $186 million by the time of its completion in 2016. After taking over the Institute, Lindborg hired a bevy of other former Obama appointees to help her run the organization and spend its $38 million annual budget. Despite its public funding and its ostensible non-partisanship, the Institute hired far fewer Republicans than Democrats on Lindborg’s watch.

Lindborg maintained close ties with senior career officials at USAID and elsewhere and used those relationships to influence policy and congressional funding. She and her lieutenants suc­ceeded in injecting Obama-era thinking into some of the most pressing policy debates of the Trump administration. Senior Trump administration officials told me, for instance, that they were distraught at the Institute of Peace’s sway over American negotiations with the Taliban.

Read more in Masters of Corruption