Trump killed USAID. But some of them keep working.

Her story is one of thousands.

The kids said goodbye to their friends in the second and fifth grades. The family wrapped up the house in Takoma Park and set off on a great adventure to Zambia.

Elon Musk, however, had other plans for them.

“Come January 20, things suddenly pivoted pretty hard,” said Kristin O’Planick, who just got the kids settled into their Zambian classrooms when it became clear the United States was about to nuke decades of soft power earned through humanitarian aid. And their lives.

“So I spent a couple weeks just being a wreck and not knowing what’s going on,” she said. U.S. workers abroad were “cut off from systems … nobody knows what’s happening, nobody’s willing to tell you anything.”

O’Planick and her husband worked for USAID, which dispensed about $32 billion in foreign aid — about half a percent of the U.S. budget. This is the kind of work the couple has done for decades, some say it’s a calling. She first answered the call in 2000 as a volunteer for the Peace Corps.

Her husband had recently switched to the Foreign Service and was assigned to Zambia for his work in climate and environmental programs. She was able to follow him and keep doing her job with USAID, helping entrepreneurs, smallholder farmers and government leaders in more than 20 countries build the kind of sustainable, vibrant enterprises we value in this country.

They were just settling in to a new life in Africa when politics blew all of it up.

Their work was ravaged when Ketamine-kicking Elon Musk unleashed an army of 20-something computer nerds driving Teslas to chainsaw USAID in 2025. It was all part of the preposterous Department of Government Efficiency, which was blown up along with 850,000 Trump fireworks on the 4th of July. Recent analysis is showing it did zip to reduce federal spending, but decimated job, families and America’s standing in the world.

This family heard the footsteps, saw the coming disaster and paid their own way back to Takoma Park. That’s not the end of the story though, or why O’Planick is a Persister.

She’s impressive because, even though her leadership was knocked out, her office went dark and her paychecks stopped coming, she keeps doing the work. Along with scores of other canned USAID workers. Every day.

They call themselves Aid on the Hill, and they continue to do their jobs in Washington, briefing members of Congress on the power, importance and strategic necessity of foreign aid.

It began for O’Planick when she and her daughter visited Capitol Hill on a Take Your Kids to Work Day that fired USAID workers had organized (because they no longer had offices to take them to.) The Aid on the Hill people were there in force, going to meetings, talking to staffers, keeping the importance of their work alive, being “able to tell the truth.”

“That was amazingly energizing,” she said. So she joined them.

It is a small but rapidly growing group and they have a message:

“International Assistance is not charity—it’s a smart investment in America’s future. It prevents crises before they reach our shores, promotes economic growth, and reflects the best of America’s values.”

The group started right after USAID was dismantled and individual workers — shocked and outraged by the total destruction of a cornerstone of U.S. diplomacy - were flooding Capitol Hill offices to speak with members of Congress. Three of them – Amanda Nataro, Ariella Bock, and Julianne Weis — happened to meet in an elevator and realized they all wanted the same thing. They wanted to keep persisting. Because their work is important.

President John F. Kennedy created USAID in 1961, not simply as a bleeding heart, do-gooder humanitarian outfit. (Though a recent analysis in The Lancet showed that two decades of U.S. assistance combating disease and malnutrition had saved roughly 92 million lives). No, the mad genius behind USAID was all about countering the Soviets. You know how the MAGA buzzword du jour is “communism”? The work of USAID helped contain it, quietly building alliances and soft power, being the good guys in white hats to muscle out the Reds.

The death toll now that USAID help is gone? About 800,000 people so far, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. And China and Russia have quickly slipped into that vacuum, planting a presence in the nations we have abandoned.

The people who know this are now all over Capitol Hill, working with the members of Congress behind closed doors to educate, inform and advocate. And debunk.

“I’ve been really surprised at how little the Hill staff understand about what delivering foreign assistance really involves, operationally,” O’Planick said.

The former USAID staffers have discovered an epic absence of information over the past year. In her 15 years with USAID, O’Planick knew that if a question came from Congress, she had to answer it pronto. What’s going on now is “a shocker.”

“I remember meeting with one of the (congressional) staffers who said they had asked about 3,000 questions and State had answered none. NONE,” she said.

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So these volunteers are persisting in answering them. They’ve issued case studies on food assistance, global fragility, migration, Jordan, Russia and critical materials in China. They’re doing legislative analysis on food security activities, the BUILD Act and impoundment.

If anyone from the Hill calls with a question, these volunteer persisters respond. Decades of experience in deserts and villages, jungles and cities, working with suffering people and flexing rulers, they’ve seen it all and they tell the truth. That’s it.

“There’s no way to get back that level of soft power again, right?” O’Planick said. But the people who have dedicated their lives to this are Persisting.

Aid on the Hill is working to become sustainable for the volunteers. Their help is free, but they have begun asking for a small donation to pay the people offering their brains, experience and information to explain why it’s righteous and strategic to save lives and secure power. They suggest $36.18. That’s what every American taxpayer paid into the system that kept millions of people alive, countries stable and alliances safe.

To donate to Aid on the Hill, click here.