It's Rachel in Tel Aviv.
Before we get to the rest of today's show, here's an update from the Middle East.
On Monday, after Hamas returned 20 living hostages from Gaza, Israel began releasing nearly 2000 Palestinian prisoners back to Gaza and the West Bank.
Large crowds gathered near Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where released Palestinian prisoners were taken.
Good afternoon.
Good evening.
Hi, Mustafa.
It's nice to hear your voice.
I talked to Mustafa Abutaha, an English teacher in Gaza I've been in touch with since the start of the war.
Mustafa, can you describe the scene when the Palestinian prisoners returned?
What did it look like outside?
He was there amongst the crowd.
This is, I would say, the biggest, the largest, the most enormous crowd I have ever seen in my life in Gaza.
I have seen mountains of people.
So, you know, words are not enough to describe how people, you know, are feeling so amazed.
And all of them start waving, shouting, dancing.
I danced and I sang a song.
What did you sing, Mustafa?
Freedom is back.
Freedom is back.
You said that the war has come to an end Mustafa, but there are so many details to be worked out yet.
So I'm just wondering how confident and optimistic you feel about that.
It's okay because the American president, Donald Trump, said the war is over.
War is over.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem.
This is not only the end of a war.
This is the end of an age of terror and death and the beginning of the age of faith and hope, and of God.
Trump brought his message of peace to the Israeli parliament.
It's the start of a grand concord and lasting harmony for Israel and all the nations of what will soon be a truly magnificent region.
I believe that so strongly.
This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.
My colleague David Sanger is covering Trump's trip to the Middle East.
David, you are in Jerusalem, where President Trump actually spoke to the Israeli parliament Knesset, and you watched the speech.
It appeared to me that he was clearly taking a victory lap, and I'm curious what your takeaway was.
He was taking an adulation lap.
I mean, when Air Force One came down over Hostages Square, you heard people yelling Trump Trump, and it kept up.
Almost every place he went from, both the Netanyahu government and even the opposition.
He was given the credit for the final turn of the screw that got Hamas to release the last hostages.
And tonight, as we speak, there are no living hostages in Gaza.
That's been the first time in years.
But what was really interesting today, though, Rachel, was Trump's message.
He said explicitly, as far as I'm concerned, The war is over.
You didn't hear that from Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister.
That contrast really struck me.
Trump seems like he's projecting this idea that he has made peace.
But Netanyahu has been really much more circumspect on where we are in the peace process.
He is not committed to the war being over.
That's exactly right, Rachel, and the reason is simple.
President Trump turned out a 20-point plan and then twisted Netanyahu's arm to get him to sign on to it.
Netanyahu did on the assumption not incorrect that there were things in there Hamas couldn't agree to, starting with the fact that Hamas would have to disarm long one of Netanyahu's demands and move out of Gaza and give up any rights or thought of controlling it.
So when Hamas came back, they agreed to part one, which was the hostage release in return for getting hundreds of Palestinian prisoners out of Israeli jails.
But they said they would have to go negotiate on the remaining issues, including disarming.
And President Trump just took a partial yes as an answer and said that constitutes a peace agreement, which it didn't.
He didn't seem to say much about the future of Gaza, though, did he?
You know, Rachel, that was the big missing element of the speech.
And the speech went on for more than an hour.
He went way off script.
He told stories about Steve Witkoff meeting Vladimir Putin, which had nothing to do with the Middle East.
He told stories about his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was there, who played a big role in this.
But what he didn't do was talk to the Israeli parliament about what they needed to do next.
He never mentioned a two-state solution or an alternative to a two-state solution.
So he never talked about the hard choices Israel would have to make.
He kept it all at the level of kind of happy talk.
Now, those details, Rachel, they were supposed to be the next part of the trip.
He went to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt and met with nearly 30 world leaders.
They were supposed to make some decisions about an international stabilization force which would go in to basically keep the peace in Gaza.
They were supposed to make some decisions about who would pay to rebuild Gaza.
What it would look like.
But Israel wasn't there and Hamas wasn't there.
And the meeting just wasn't long enough to go into any depth about getting this done in Gaza.
Do we have any indication about what came out of that summit?
We don't know a whole lot of details now.
We know they signed a document that basically signed these countries up to the president's 20 points.
But, you know, this was very Donald Trump, the developer.
I'm going to come in with a big concept and then you people can go off and work out the details.
The problem is in diplomacy, it frequently doesn't work that way.
And the big worry that I have, Rachel, is is that we've got tremendous momentum now.
This was an incredibly emotional day.
People around the world were engaged.
And the question is can you keep Donald Trump engaged now that he declares that he has brought about peace?
And can you keep the rest of the world engaged in the really hard, detailed work of rebuilding Gaza?
David, thank you so much.
Thank you, Rachel.
Okay, here's Michael with the rest of today's show.
From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.
This is The Daily.
It's day 12 of the government shutdown.
Now President Trump is ordering mass federal layoffs.
In a court filing.
The Budget Office said more than 4000 employees across several agencies will receive layoff notices.
The shutdown of the US government, for which there is no end in sight, has given the Trump administration an extraordinary amount of power to remake and, in some cases, to decimate, dozens of agencies.
The Departments of Commerce Education, Homeland Security and the CDC are just some of the agencies impacted.
In many ways, it's a power that the administration learned how to wield during two extraordinary weeks back in January, when it systematically destroyed USAID.
Today, Chris Flavell on what he learned from reconstructing the death of that agency from the inside.
It's Tuesday, October 14th.
Chris, throughout the government shutdown that's now entering its third week.
The threat that the Trump administration has issued is that it might use the shutdown as the rationale to gut the federal bureaucracy further gut the federal bureaucracy.
And you have spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct what I would argue is the single greatest act of government gutting by this White House since it took back power in January.
And so we wondered what lessons you learned from that reporting that might apply to this moment, to this shutdown.
Yeah.
The moment feels like a lifetime ago.
But think back to the first few days of the new Trump administration when, as you said, they wiped out an entire government agency USAID the Agency for International Development in a matter of days.
And it was so complete and so sort of shocking at the time to basically get rid of 10000 federal workers that I wanted to go back to it and understand what happened and what was the thinking behind it.
What was the strategy?
And what I found out was there wasn't, in fact, a plan to kill off USAID, at least not at first.
It happened a little bit on the fly, sort of a series of decisions and clashes that built USAID on each other to advance an agenda that is ideologically consistent, but not, it turned out, all that planned out.
They were looking for opportunities and willing to use them really aggressively when they came up.
It's interesting that you have found that the obliteration of USAID was essentially improvised.
Because right now, during this shutdown, the threat of traumas to the federal government, like what happened at USAID, feels quite explicit.
That's exactly right.
And I think the reason the case study of USAID remains really instructive today is it shows how they were willing to improvise and how effective that could be.
And I think that applies in an important way to the shutdown, where it tells us maybe the outcome of the shutdown will not be dictated just by what is strictly legal, but also outcomes that we couldn't have imagined when it began.
Well Chris, take us inside the story that you have pieced together of this two weeks during which USAID went from a fully functioning agency to ultimately vanishing.
Yeah, it's really the story of just a few key characters.
Let's start with a man named Jason Gray, longtime federal civil servant, worked at a number of big agencies.
Crucially, had only been at AID for about two years when he was picked, at the very beginning of this administration, almost without warning, to be in charge of USAID.
Now, the fact that Jason Gray didn't have the kind of experience someone would usually have to run an agency like USAID became important when, on that very same day, on the first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing foreign aid.
That order wasn't surprising.
It indicated he would just be similar.
But something about that order is going to be really important.
It was actually unclear what it meant.
The order confusingly said that the government would quote immediately pause new obligations and disbursements.
But a lot of the money that was flowing at USAID was for projects around the world already in existence.
So that left open the question, well, what happens to those?
Should those stop as well?
Mm-hmm.
The people I spoke with said the idea that President Trump would stop existing programs, which is sort of a little crazy, right.
Probably illegal.
So they didn't even think that would be what it was.
Right.
And I'm not a lawyer, but hearing the language from this executive order, pause new obligations certainly sounds like pause new spending, not old spending.
That's exactly right.
And in fact, it seemed so obvious to the people inside USAID that they didn't give it much thought.
And the result was most programs just kept continuing as they were.
But this is where we introduce our second main character.
Pete Morocco was a key figure in the first trump administration.
He had a stint actually at usaid in the closing months of that administration, was remembered as being very hard charging, very aggressive, being very eager, i'm told, to enforce president trump's agenda and left people a little unhappy.
He eventually left after just a few months at usaid.
And Well, Pete Morocco suddenly reemerges in the early days of the second Trump administration because he has a senior role at the state departments where, as director of foreign assistance, he has some authority over USAID.
And all of a sudden, just a few days into this new administration, He calls senior staff at USAID.
He says hey, it's come to my attention that AID is still spending money in violation of the executive order.
This is a real problem.
And he said he wanted to get to the bottom of it.
Okay, so suddenly you have a clashing view of what this executive order says.
You got the newbie head of the agency a little out of his depth, seeing the language of the order and saying I'm all good.
You got the old line, hard-charging Trump figure coming in and saying, you're totally wrong here.
All spending is now done.
That's right.
So here we are.
This is just like four days in to the new administration.
Senior officials at the top of USAID gather for a meeting in the agency's headquarters, just a few blocks from the White House.
And they said, no, you know what?
We looked at this.
We think this is all above board.
The way we spend money can be complicated.
Perhaps they said to themselves Pete Morocco just maybe doesn't understand the way money flows from USAID.
We can fix this.
And so the plan they left that meeting with was we'll explain ourselves to Pete Morocco, and this should be fine.
Right.
Problem solved.
And of course, that's not what happened.
The following Monday this is one week into the new administration Pete Morocco for the first time shows up at the USAID headquarters.
And he says he's there because he wants to keep on digging.
He's not convinced this problem is fixed.
And crucially, he's not alone.
He brings with him members of the Department of Government Efficiency.
He says they're there to help him figure out what went wrong.
And I think people at this point, as we speak today, know all about Doge, right?
Doge is under Elon Musk and went around looking for severe cuts and for ways to get rid of staff.
But this is just one weekend.
People don't yet know at this point what Doge is all about.
They didn't yet realize just how serious it was for Doge to be in the building.
In fact, this is one of the first agencies that Doge went to.
It was only later that day that people began to realize what Doge was there to do.
Because that afternoon, senior figures from Doge made a demand.
They went into Jason Gray's office with a list of 57 senior officials at USAID and said we've done some digging.
We think these 57 people were involved in these payments.
We want them put on administrative leave and sent home.
So suddenly Doge is operating as kind of a search and destroy operation to find the culprits for who has allowed spending to occur in violation of this executive order.
They're kind of the enforcement arm of the Trump administration coming in to settle that matter.
That's right.
But though that's the story they gave, the people I spoke with said it didn't really hold up because these 57 names weren't, on closer inspection, people who were likely to have anything to do with these payments.
This list of names was something quite different.
It was really the senior most people in leadership roles from around the agency.
And so what it came to look like was an attempt to decapitate USAID.
Okay.
So, as all these folks are pursuing their own ends and there's a lot of anger in the air over the idea that rules are being broken, what happens next?
A few days later, Doge comes back and presents to USAID officials what they call their evidence for why these 57 people should not get to come back to their jobs.
The evidence turns out to be painfully thin.
It consists of an email that one of the members of the Doge team sent his teammates a few days earlier, in which he said, quote look, I reviewed these AID payments since the order and And.
Then he lists some people who had access to the system.
And then he goes on to say, I could be wrong.
So this is not the evidence required to end the career of 57 leaders at USAID.
That is the judgment of professionals inside USAID.
In particular a gentleman named Nicholas Gottlieb, whose role is to oversee employee and labor relations at USAID.
So this Nick Gottlieb suddenly becomes another player in this saga.
He looks at this evidence and he says, no, I cannot agree completely.
To keep these senior leaders on leave based on this, this is not sufficient.
And then Nick Gottlieb does two things that prove to be tremendously important to the future of politics.
USAID.
First he sends an email to those 57 people saying look, based on the evidence, I've got no basis for keeping you on leave.
But then, arguably more important, he sends a memo to Jason Gray.
He says he will report Doge's actions to the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates wrongdoing and protects whistleblowers, and is meant to protect federal employees.
So he threatens to begin some sort of formal investigation of what Doge has done.
Wow.
So Nick Gottlieb decides to stand up and fight all this and ask for an investigation into Doge's investigation inside of USAID.
Yeah.
It's really impossible to overstate just what a big deal this was in the eyes of Doge and Pete, Morocco and eventually, the White House.
They viewed this as absolute insubordination.
Their view was how dare this mid-level career federal civil servants tell us what we can and cannot do?
This is the deep state personified.
This starts to look a lot like the deep state.
And it set the tone for what happened next.
This is just 10 days in to the new administration.
So right away, they find Nick Gottlieb and march him out of the building.
Wow.
But they don't stop there.
They go to Jason Gray and they say this action from your employee, from this Nick Gottlieb, it shows that you've lost control of the building.
So they demanded that Jason Gray try to regain control of the building.
And the way they wanted him to do it was to lock out the entire staff from their phone and email systems.
Block out every single one of the thousands of people who work at USAID around the world from the technology they use to work at USAID.
That's right.
It's worth saying it's not clear how well thought out this idea was.
I've heard different versions of it.
Someone said not necessarily.
They just wanted to prepare a plan.
They wanted the option.
But what Jason Gray heard by the accounts of everyone I spoke with was something that he viewed as too much.
He said we've got people in combat zones, people delivering food in Gaza, people fighting Ebola in Africa.
I cannot lock them out.
That will put them in danger. physical danger, I won't do it.
People, he's really seeming to say, could die.
That's right.
He said people could die, and that to him was the line he wouldn't cross.
And what that sounded like to the administration was yet another example of insubordination from USAID.
And within days, the agency would effectively be shut down.
We'll be right back.
So Chris, once Jason Gray, the head of USAID, the Trump-appointed head of USAID, says you can't freeze every employee out of their computer system, their phone system, what comes next on this journey towards the end of USAID?
A lot of things happen really quickly.
One of them is, as of the next morning, Jason Gray has been removed from his post as head of USAID.
And that's really just the beginning.
We're now into the weekend.
This is just the second weekend.
I cannot stress enough.
We are less than two weeks in.
And this is when members of Doge begin to go in and really aggressively protest, begin rooting through the files, turning off social media, shutting down the website of USAID.
Someone described it to me as akin to the face of USAID being erased.
So over this weekend, you can tell that USAID is in real trouble.
At the same time, thousands of staff members begin losing access to their email accounts and computer systems.
So in the background, the agency is starting to be dismantled.
But then it moves to the foreground.
This is Sunday afternoon.
We're about 13 days into the new administration.
What breaks out into the public is a tweet from Elon Musk.
And he writes, USAID is a criminal organization.
Time for it to die.
Not a lot of parsing to do of that language.
This is Elon Musk issuing a kind of death sentence for this agency.
Yeah.
And in hindsight, you know, it's clear what that meant.
But again, remember at the time, this is also new.
People don't really know how much power Doge has and they don't know how much power Elon Musk has.
Right.
In theory, if one is to stick to the law.
Elon Musk, who's not really a government employee, certainly doesn't have the authority to unilaterally end a congressionally mandated agency.
So this tweet marks a funny transition from a world where those kinds of rules still matter to a world where oh, maybe Elon Musk and Doge can just end USAID.
Right.
And the next day is when you can really tell beyond a shadow of doubt USAID is not going to survive.
Because?
Because early on that day, that Monday, two weeks in the administration is an even more aggressive tweet from Elon Musk.
And it reads we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper could gone to.
Some great parties did that instead.
From there.
Staff who worked in the Washington DC headquarters were told to stay home, and Later that day the State Department sent Congress a letter saying they would move, reorganize or otherwise wind down USAID.
It even said, quote, the remainder of the agency may be abolished.
Chris, I just want to make sure I understand the sequence of what happened here, based on your investigation.
We get this pretty confusing executive order and a bunch of people at USAID who interpret it exactly as it's written, and And that leaves folks like Pete Morocco convinced that there's rampant insubordination going on across the agency.
Doge comes in, starts punishing people for being insubordinate and within a week or so, Doge is shutting the whole place down.
Is that more or less right?
That is correct.
Which is America first, and foreign aid are not so compatible, so USAID was always going to be suspect to this administration.
It feels like the speed with which the agency just evaporates has a lot more to do with a few individuals Becoming furious at what feels like a very normal process of employees engaging in a back-and-forth push-and-pull around rules and process.
And the reaction being nuclear.
This is disobedience.
This is resistance.
We are going to destroy your agency as a result of it.
And that all feels very outsized, given the facts that you found on the ground.
That's exactly right.
I think you're landing on a really important point, which is maybe those two things aren't totally separate, right.
Maybe the style and substance of government here... affect each other, right?
The policy decisions that reflect the ideology get influenced and overtaken by sort of the style of government, the combativeness, the hostility towards career civil servants, the suspicion of the deep state, and that sort of hostility and animus comes to overtake or redirect the policy goals and those two things, rather than remaining separate, become sort of a cycle and they start reinforcing each other, leading to really aggressive and fast outcomes that at the beginning of just this short two-week period probably would have been pretty hard to predict because you had two combustible elements interacting at the same time.
Right, but a clear lesson to have emerged from this and I know this is complicated is that the greater the resistance from people inside of it to what people from the administration wanted, the greater the pain, the trauma and the gutting resulted.
I think that definitely describes what happened at USAID.
And I think that is in fact the lesson that others took away from from AID and from this early period that it's easier not to fight.
It's easier just to give in.
And we see that in the behavior of some law firms, of some universities.
I don't know if that is, though, a general thing.
Another lesson might just be that USAID fought back in the wrong way.
They thought that just by appealing to the letter of the law and to accepted HR practices they would be able to stop this administration.
They probably underestimated the degree to which officials would feel sort of personally chagrined when they said no to their demands.
So the lesson of USAID, to my mind, is...
The steps the Trump administration will take to try to shut down an agency, the steps they'll take in response to what they perceive as insubordination.
They're unexpected and they can seem really extreme, and USAID wasn't ready for it.
But as you apply that lesson to the shutdown, I wonder if what we see is...
This is not a saga, this is not a battle that unfolds along lines that make any sense.
This is not an administration that's following a particular strategy, but instead they're reacting.
They're looking for openings, they're aggressively pushing those openings, and they've learned a different but maybe more important lesson.
And that lesson is they can get away with things like this.
The consequences don't always materialize.
In other words, if the Trump administration decides that the shutdown is licensed to go into an agency it doesn't like or wants to severely reduce.
What the lesson of this all is for the Trump administration is, they can probably do what they want, and that was true before the shutdown.
Perhaps is even truer now that the government is in shutdown because it's concentrated the president's authority over funding.
And once they make a decision to go into an agency any decision, as we've talked about any resistance could then be used to very unpredictably take something that seems small and turn it into something very big and use it as a rationale to transform, maybe even end an agency.
One of the unexpected conversations that's emerged from the shutdown is even the Trump administration needing to grapple with.
Is the government important?
And the reality of USAID is that, since it happened so early, we now have had the longest time to think about the repercussions of it going away.
And I think we'd be remiss if we didn't for a moment talk about what it has meant to the world that USAID is now gone.
Yeah.
What it looks like in real life is people not getting HIV medication, mothers not getting life-saving care, starving children not getting emergency nutrition packets, countries that used to get political assistance to remain democracies not getting that help, infrastructure that used to get built for drinking water and sewage and electricity, and schools not being built.
It looks like the opposite of progress all over the world.
And it's it's already happening.
Right.
And that is no doubt of enormous importance to the countries where USAID was doing that work, to the people doing that work.
Foreign policy experts would tell you that over time, this meant a lot to America's ability to exercise soft power and influence around the world.
But at the same time, If you go walk the streets of the United States and ask people, do they miss USAID and the work that it does, and people are being honest, I'm not sure the answer is going to be we miss USAID.
I think the answer is probably, what was USAID again?
And that might be the most striking lesson of all.
It showed the genius of Trump to recognize maybe not part of a plan, maybe out of emotional spite, but ultimately to recognize that he could do what almost no president has done and end a major agency and gamble that it wouldn't cost him any meaningful blowback from the public.
And...
As of now, it looks like he was right.
Looks like that gamble paid off, which raises the question in this shutdown.
Well, if it worked at USAID, maybe he'll try it at other agencies.
Maybe when he threatens to close, quote Democrat agencies, maybe he'll do it and maybe it'll work out for him again, just like it did at USAID.
Well, Chris...
We'll be right back.
Here's what else you need to know today.
On Monday, Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina said that they would soon begin to redraw the state's congressional maps to assure another Republican seat in the US.
House of Representatives before next year's midterm elections.
The effort would make North Carolina the latest state to fulfill President Trump's goal of trying to retain Republican control of the House by gerrymandering congressional districts rather than winning competitive elections.
This summer, Republican lawmakers in Texas redrew their state's election maps to create five new Republican-friendly House seats, while Republicans in Missouri redrew its maps to create one more Republican seat.
Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson, Mary Wilson, Shannon Lin, Diana Nguyen and Claire Tennis-Getter, with help from Nina Feldman.
It was edited by MJ Davis-Lynn, Liz O'Balin and Michael Benoit, contains music by Marian Lozano, Alicia Baitu, Dan Powell and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.
That's it for The Daily.
I'm Michael Barbaro.
See you tomorrow.
