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Melania Trump faces showdown with Donald as her awkward USAID speech resurfaces....
While President Donald Trump has set out on an act of petty revenge or geopolitical respect to shutting down USAID, the First Lady has used the agency to her liking.. more:
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-ne...onald-34636303
Trump calls USAID a 'tremendous fraud.' His wife and daughter promoted its work
Melania and Ivanka Trump toured Africa to promote USAID programs.
"We care," Melania Trump declared in 2018 during a visit to Egypt as first lady to promote her partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"We care, and we want to show the world that we care, and I've partnered and am working with USAID," she continued. "And that's what I want to share -- that we care."
On her four-country jaunt through Africa in 2018 -- her first major solo international trip as first lady -- Melania Trump offered praise for what she described as "successful" USAID programs as she observed them up close.
In Malawi, for example, she handed out bags, school supplies and soccer balls as part of her "BeBest" initiative as part of a collaboration with a USAID literacy program.
"It's really touching," she told ABC News in an exclusive interview during the visit. "I'm glad that I'm here to see in person what the children are going through, and [see that] they're educating them in the right way.
Six years later, her husband, President Donald Trump, is working to dismantle the very programs his wife celebrated – and denigrating the aid agency that supported those initiatives as a "tremendous fraud."
"For decades … USAID has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight," the White House claimed in a memo released earlier this week.
That sentiment is a far cry from Melania Trump's own glowing characterizations of the aid agency's work. During a visit with primary school students in Malawi's capital, Lilongwe, where she promoted a USAID program that distributed more than 1.4 million textbooks to students, the first lady explained the value of American investments abroad.
"When people have opportunities and societies are freer and more educated, we are stronger as the United States," the first lady told ABC News.
The White House and the first lady's office both declined to comment for this story.
At another stop on her African tour, Melania Trump toured the Great Sphinx in Giza, where she observed a USAID-backed project to limit groundwater that threatened to erode hieroglyphics in the iconic Egyptian monument.
"She was well-briefed, she was personally interested, she was very impressed that we were working so closely" with local government and "to provide economic opportunities for the Egyptian people," one former senior USAID official in the region recalled.
Now, the official who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said it's "hard to stomach" what President Trump has done to disband the agency whose work so impressed the first lady.
"It's very disturbing and clearly it's all politics," the official said. "Until you see [the work of USAID] firsthand, it's very difficult to understand and explain. You leave a different person."
And the first lady isn't the only Trump who has stood behind USAID's work.
In 2019 then-President Trump signed a memorandum launching a new "Women's Global Development and Prosperity" Initiative aimed at empowering women in the developing world. The $50 million fund, known as W-GDP, was developed to be distributed by USAID with an ambitious goal of empowering 50 million women in developing countries by 2025.
The initiative was led by the president's daughter and then senior adviser, Ivanka Trump.
Ivanka Trump told ABC News at the time the initiative was not only seen as an opportunity to provide economic assistance to women in the developing world, but also related to national security.
"We know there's a correlation between gender inequality and conflict, there's tremendous amounts of research. There's a reason today, the president signed WGDP as a national security presidential memorandum," she said in an interview with ABC News. "It is in our domestic security interests to empower women"
"Our goal is to empower women to help their home countries become self-reliant and to allow a lot families -- millions of families throughout the world -- to become self-reliant, and also in the United States, very importantly," then-President Trump said during a ceremony to formally launch the W-GDP.
In 2018, Ivanka Trump embarked on her own visit to Africa, where she met with women cocoa farmers who received support from a $2 million USAID-funded project meant to support female entrepreneurs across the continent. At a coffee shop in Ethiopia, she announced a loan backed by USAID for a coffee business owned by women.
ABC News has requested comment from a representative for Ivanka Trump.
The second Trump administration has worked to undermine those sorts of investments. In his first days in office, President Trump has made a priority of curbing diversity-related initiatives in government, crystallized in an executive order he signed on his first day of office, taking aim at federal funding for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The Trump administration said this week that it would place all USAID direct-hire employees on administrative leave starting Friday, except for core leadership and "mission-critical" staff, according to an email sent to employees and a message posted on the agency's website.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trum...y?id=118547473
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Melania and Ivanka's close ties to USAID exposed as Trump goes scorched-earth on the 'corrupt' agency
Melania and Ivanka Trump used thousands of dollars from USAID to fund pet projects during Trump's first term it's been revealed as the agency's spending comes under scrutiny from the president.
The president has gone scorched-earth against the USAID this week, berating its use of tax-payer dollars and saying it had to be 'corrupt' in its spending.
But despite Donald's disdain for the aid agency, it has maintained close ties with his wife and daughter for years by investing in their government ventures.
USAID helped fund Melania Trump's Be Best program and Ivanka Trump's Women's Global Development and Prosperity Initiative during the first Trump term.
And each woman traveled with the agency on separate trips to Africa, where they praised the investments it was making on the continent.
Ivanka Trump travelled with then-USAID administrator Mark Green to Africa in April 2019, where they met with women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia and rural cocoa farmers on the Ivory Coast.
USAID oversaw $265 million per year in spending Ivanka Trump's women's business initiative and an associated antipoverty program.
Melania Trump partnered with the agency on her 2018 trip to Ghana, Malawi, Kenya and Egypt.
In Malawi, the first lady promoted USAID's national reading program, which was donating on Trump's behalf 1.4 million textbooks to the more than 5,600 primary schools in the poverty-stricken nation.
'I am so proud of the work this administration is doing through USAID and others,' the first lady said at the time, 'and look forward to the opportunity to take the message of my Be Best campaign to many of the countries, and children, throughout Africa.'
In his first term, Trump heavily cut funding for the aid agency but it still found money to invest into his family's government ventures.
Ivanka Trump used USAID for her program to promote women in business, claiming 12 million women around the world had been helped by it.
She travelled with the agency to Colombia in September 2019 to run a workshop for women entrepreneurs.
That same year, she also used over $11,000 from the agency to buy video recording and reproducing equipment for a White House event, its records show.
Meanwhile, USAID was one of the first agencies to name an ambassador to Melania Trump's Be Best initiative.
When Melania Trump first announced her signature program in May 2018, she asked government agencies to name a liaison to her group. USAID immediately did so.
At her one-year anniversary celebration in May, Melania acknowledged the agency and thanked it for naming the first Be Best ambassador.
'For the first time in history, the United States Agency for International Development has appointed a Be Best ambassador,' she said.
'On this one year anniversary of my initiative, I call on all of our partner agencies to appoint a be best ambassador who will serve as a liaison between my office and their respective agency to better highlight and promote the programs and services offered to parents and children on behalf of the US government,' she added.
Donald Trump was sitting in the audience listening.
Neither the East Wing, the West Wing, nor Ivanka Trump's office responded to DailyMail.com's request for comment.
USAID delivers billions of dollars in humanitarian aid overseas.
The Trump administration is threatening to shut it down or bring the independent agency under the umbrella of the State Department.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now acting director of the agency it's been announced this week.
Hundreds of USAID contractors were placed on unpaid leave and some were terminated. Elon Musk, who is running Trump's Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE program, said the agency would be eliminated.
Its Washington D.C. office is closed and employees were either put on leave or told to work from home.
Trump has said of the agency: 'It's been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we're getting them out.'
He also claims it 'had to be corrupt' to approve certain initiatives.
The president has berated the agency for its spending practices, including having a subscription to Politico Pro, a service that tracks legislation and other government news.
And his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, gave a blistering account of USAID's spending. Speaking to reporters at the White House last week, she held up a sheet of paper giving details of the astonishing ways in which taxpayers' money had been doled out.
More:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ding-cuts.html
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