USAID gutting hits Colorado as organizations, small businesses struggle to survive

Hundreds of CEOs and staffers from Colorado-based organizations with live-saving, humanitarian missions gathered in a Five Points office space this week to weep, vent and strategize.

On Tuesday, employees in the international development field convened at the Posner Center for International Development to commiserate in light of the Trump administration’s and Elon Musk’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the federal agency many humanitarian aid programs relied on to fund their work.

“This is going to have a huge effect on the Denver and Colorado economy because it’s not just about the nonprofits and people who work there,” said Jamie Hansen, building director for the Posner Center. “We’re talking about the contractors and all the workers on all these projects. I have a board member whose organizations haven’t gotten paid for work they’ve already done.”

USAID oversees humanitarian, development and security programs in about 120 countries. Trump, Musk and Congressional Republicans have targeted the U.S. foreign assistance program with accusations of waste and advancing liberal social programs.

The U.S. spends less than 1% of its budget on foreign assistance.

In a matter of weeks, USAID faced stop-work orders, mass firings, furloughs and a downed website while the programs the agency supported across the globe have abruptly halted. USAID workers described being abandoned overseas amid political violence.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift a three-week funding freeze that shut down U.S. aid and development work worldwide, citing the stoppage’s sweeping damage.

The White House fired the inspector general for USAID on Tuesday, U.S. officials said, a day after his office warned that the administration’s dismantling of the federal agency made it all but impossible to monitor $8.2 billion in unspent humanitarian funds.

The fallout from the agency’s destruction is hitting Colorado, industry leaders said.

USAID issued more than $34 million in contracts and grants contributing to Colorado’s economy this past year, according to a global health consulting firm that put together a state-by-state list of impacted sectors at usaidstopwork.com.

Colorado farmers and agricultural workers are expected to take a hit, experts said, likely passing costs to consumers. Small-business owners will be negatively impacted, Hansen said.

“This isn’t an insular thing,” Hansen said.

When the Trump administration imposed a USAID stop work order at the end of January, Denver-based CEO Keith Ives lost 70% of his organization’s revenue overnight.

His company, Causal Design, specializes in foreign assistance work. Causal Design collects data and monitors foreign assistance programs ensuring the work they intend to do gets done. The company also measures the outcomes of foreign aid programs so the government can determine their effectiveness.

Now, Ives is preparing to furlough the majority of his 28-person full-time staff, which includes seven Denver workers.

Ives, who serves on the Posner Center board, doesn’t expect his business to exist much longer.

“We have an office in Wheat Ridge that we rent, and we rent out to four other small businesses and I don’t know how we’ll pay that mortgage,” Ives said. “Our employees not only will lose their employment here, but there’s nowhere for them to go with thousands or tens of thousands of people now laid off. The labor market is going to be dramatically skewed.”

Causal Design was conducting impact evaluations on “live-saving” food programs in Somalia, Madagascar and Ethiopia, but those have all come to a standstill, Ives said.

They also monitored and evaluated the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which tracks and monitors the potential for famine globally.

“That program has stopped and when famines happen, people die,” Ives said. “The loss of that program is dumbfounding.”

The data Ives collected to hold the programs accountable was publicly available online until the Trump administration took down the federal agency’s website.

“House of cards is going to topple”

For 15 years, Joshua Solomon led the Vietnam Health Improvement Project, an organization providing medical care and rehabilitation to children with disabilities and adults in rural Vietnam. USAID helped Solomon upscale the work they were already doing caring for the poor and those suffering from exposure to the U.S. military’s use of the chemical Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. With a $150,000 USAID grant, Solomon said they were able to hire more people.

His life’s work is in stasis under the federal stop work order.

“This 15-year, very effective nonprofit will close,” Solomon said. “This abrupt halt has a huge impact not only on my employees but on all the recipients of care. It’s huge. You’re talking about people in rural Vietnam who are starved to death and poor. The abrupt halt means we don’t even have funds to go back out there.”

Solomon said his employees are fielding calls from people who once received at-home medical care that vanished overnight under U.S. federal orders.

“Regardless of what people think, there is plenty of good,” Solomon said about USAID-funded initiatives. “This program saw effects immediately.”

Alexandra Fiorillo, founder of Denver-based Grid Impact, which is a global consulting firm for social change, said she experienced survivor’s guilt Tuesday as she listened to her peers describe the dismembering of their organizations.

Colorado has become a hub of international development organizations as its culture, politics, landscape and educated population has attracted socially progressive, environmentally conscious people from the industry, Fiorillo said.

Grid Impact only has a small fraction of USAID-reliant projects, but as a former USAID contractor, Fiorillo sympathized.

“The mission of USAID has to do with stability and governance and democracy and has a huge impact on domestic markets and farmers,” Fiorillo said. “We use the tools of USAID as soft diplomacy, influence to try and develop relationships internationally. …People need to wake up and realize the administration is going for every agency. …This is the easiest target for the administration to start with, but the house of cards is going to topple if folks don’t wake up and figure out ways to support and protect USAID.”

Multiple lawsuits have been filed over the administration’s targeting of USAID and its programs worldwide, including one filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington alleging the unraveling of USAID is saddling American businesses with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills for work that has already been done.

“Pretty dire situation”

Ben Fowler is the Denver-based founder and CEO of Marketshare Associates, an organization that measures the impact of the work USAID funds.

“The work USAID does is probably more scrutinized than possibly any other part of government,” Fowler said.

In the wake of the USAID shutdown, Marketshare Associates was forced to fully or partially furlough 29 employees across 10 countries.

Fowler said his organization is considering shuttering amid “a pretty dire situation.”

“The U.S. has been such a global leader in so many of these areas and created incredible goodwill and impact on the ground,” Fowler said. “A lot of that goodwill is being seriously put at risk. If there are particular elements of programming the new administration doesn’t want to pursue anymore, they could let the program end … but doing it across the entire portfolio feels like a willful attempt to try to shut down the sector.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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