Blog Tour: Inside USAID - An Odyssey of Foreign Assistance

 

Current Events/Politics

Date Published: September 26, 2025

Publisher: MindStir Media

This book gives needed context for the current controversy about the US foreign aid agency, USAID. One evaluation described it as "an eye-opening, sharply insightful, and often humorous look into the inner workings of USAID and the broader world of US foreign assistance. Blending memoir, policy analysis, and rich storytelling, the book delivers a compelling behind-the-scenes portrait of what it means to work in international development, from the surreal bureaucracy to the life-threatening assignments abroad."

Inside USAID is an insider's view of some of the sillier aspects of government bureaucracy, revealing the adventurous, often risky life of diplomatic staff posted in third-world countries as well as some of the waste in the system. It also takes readers through some fascinating and dangerous events in the author's own twenty-seven-year career with USAID, peeling the curtain on nearly three decades of diplomatic service across seven countries, sharing war-zone experiences, absurd government acronyms, failed aid attempts, and moments of genuine impact.

The stories balance critical reflection with a deep appreciation for the ideals behind U.S. foreign aid. The book is both a tribute to the unsung heroes of development work and a critique of the system's inefficiencies, political intrusions, and sudden dismantling. It contextualizes the countries historically, politically, and economically, off ering readers a nuanced understanding of how aid shapes (and sometimes fails) entire nations. The book also is both a eulogy and a call to action for rebuilding what the author sees as one of the U.S.'s most effective foreign policy tools.

Witty, wise, and often sobering, Inside USAID is a must-read for policymakers, development professionals, historians, and anyone who wants to understand the real stories behind America's global influence through foreign aid.

 

Excerpt

 

CHAPTER 2:  WHAT IS (OR WAS) USAID?

 

Before getting to my own stories, here’s a short description of USAID and a bit of commentary about foreign aid generally.

 

Examples of US foreign aid can be found that predate the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe following World War II, but they are few and far between. Congress appropriated $50,000 to help survivors of the earthquake that destroyed Caracas, Venezuela, in 1812. After World War I, the US provided $387 million to the Committee for Relief in Belgium to help feed the hungry. Before he was president, Herbert Hoover, as the head of the American Relief Administration, led a large relief effort to address famine in Soviet Russia from 1921 to 1923. There were some others, but the modern version of our foreign aid program, most of which has gone through USAID, dates from a 1961 Executive Order by President Kennedy and the Foreign Assistance Act enacted the same year.

 

There was never a consensus about how to say the Agency’s name. Some pronounce each letter—you ess ay eye dee—while others say yoose aid, accent on the yoose. Earlier it had been called simply “AID,” a clever acronym that officially meant, not “aid” in the sense of assistance, but rather “Agency for International Development.” They could have said “for economic development,” which would have been more accurate and understandable, but then the acronym would not have been a cute pun.

 

A word about the many other acronyms used throughout the foreign aid world: These show, in small part, the great variety of targets USAID was asked to deal with, for which we often went to great effort to develop meaningful project names. Some examples:

 

• SUPER (Support for Uganda Primary Education Reform)

• PEACE (Programming Effectively Against Conflict and Extremism)

• ASPIRE (Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship)

• BRIDGE (Building Research and Innovation for Development, Generating Evidence)

 

To lighten the bureaucratic grind, I once half-jokingly suggested one for a project I still seriously think could be used to combat the rampant sexual violence in so much of Africa: EMAJO (Encouraging the Men of Africa to Jerk Off).

 

About the Author

Clifford Brown is a retired Senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer who served for 27 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), including roles as Mission Director, Deputy Mission Director, and Regional Legal Advisor. His work took him to postings in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Guinea, Peru, and Washington, DC, with regional responsibilities spanning numerous additional USAID missions.

Before joining USAID, Brown practiced commercial law for eleven years in Los Angeles as a partner at Ervin, Cohen & Jessup in Beverly Hills, California. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Whitman College, where he was also a Thomas Watson Fellow, spending a year conducting independent research in Latin America. He earned his Juris Doctor from UCLA School of Law, where he served as Managing Editor of the UCLA Law Review.

Brown is the author of Dilettante: Tales of How a Small-Town Boy Became a Diplomat Managing U.S. Foreign Assistance (2021), a collection of stories tracing his path from early work on farms, railroads, and tugboats in Eastern Washington to a career in international law and diplomacy. He is retired in Maryland.

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