Pod Save the World - Gayle Smith, former USAID Administrator

Episode Date: March 29, 2017

“Tommy is joined by Africa expert and former USAID Administrator Gayle Smith to discuss the crisis in South Sudan and the impact of Trump’s proposed budget cuts on the State Department and USAID.���

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Thank you guys for tuning in. This week's episode is with Gail Smith, who used to run USAID, who's a long-time Africa expert and a friend of mine for back of the day in the White House. We spent a lot of time together working on Sudan when I was on the NSC. So I had her on to check back in and figure out what's going on there because the news out of the region is grim. There's a famine. There's a potential civil war and a lot of problems. But the good news is that there are concrete ways to get involved. So listen. We'll talk through all of it. And I appreciate you guys joining. All right, I am on the line with Gail Smith. Gail was the administrator for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. She was a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for development and democracy on the National Security Council. She spent 20 years in Africa, specifically Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya as a freelance journalist and working for NGOs and is the co-founder of the Enough Project to End Genocide. Gail, thank you so much for joining today. It's a pleasure, Tommy. There are a lot of things I'd love to talk about with you.

but I was hoping we could start with Sudan because, you know, that's where you and I really got to know each other. It was back in 2009 and 2010, we were both in literally hundreds of hours of situation room meetings about Sudan. And the genesis of this interview was there was a March 4th New York Times story by Jeffrey Gettleman about how South Sudan is in big trouble. So it might make sense to start at the beginning. People listening may have heard of Darfur and Sudan. But I was hoping you could talk a bit about the origins of the war in Darfur and where. and you personally started working on these issues? Sure.

And let me go way back for a second, because I think sometimes it's confusing for people. There's Sudan and South Sudan. And in the beginning, there was just Sudan. It was a country, a third the size of the United States. South Sudan became independent a few years ago. The genocide in Darfur happened primarily because there was a, there's a government in Khartoum that still reigns there,

that while it controls the center, it's been very exclusive of the rest of, of the country and very controlling. And in Darfur, there was a fair amount of political rebellion and then the start of armed rebellion. And their response was basically a scorched earth policy. This was during the Bush administration. And there were photographs of villages burnt to the ground, hundreds of thousands of people

on the move, thousands of people killed. And the Bush administration did an investigation and determined that it was, in fact, genocide. that it was an attempt to basically wipe out the people of Darfur. So that gave rise to a great deal of attention to Sudan, and importantly among Americans. A lot of students, a lot of faith-based organizations, and a lot of activists to the country got very, very active around Darfur.

You and I were together locked in a windowless room in the White House for hours and hours and hours on end. As we grappled with what is our policy towards Sudan. You had a president and President Bashir who'd been indicted by the International Criminal Court, the United States previous administration, but the United States had declared it was a genocide. How do you deal with a government like that? Do you have any engagement at all? Do you try to put pressure on them?

You try to entice them. And at that point, South Sudan was bubbling because they were going through the implementation of a peace agreement that was achieved during the Bush administration. kind of had, how do you deal with Sudan, this big country with a track record of genocide and grotesque human rights violations, and then how do we deal with the implementation of this peace agreement? And the implementation was fairly shaky even then. Yeah, right. So the Bush administration, to their great credit, right, helped broker the comprehensive peace agreement, a very poorly named, but very important deal that helps sort of create a path to peace in Sudan, right? And the final

Right. The final step of that agreement occurred in January of 2011, which was squarely in the middle of President Obama's first term when about four million residents of South Sudan voted to establish a new country called South Sudan. So we were debating how to incentivize this process and prevent more violence. I think even Obama's biggest critics on Sudan would concede that this was an example of the power of diplomacy and the power of continued pressure even against someone like Omar Bashir, who is a genocidal warlord. That's hoping you could talk about that policy debate, why it was so contentious and maybe why you think it was ultimately successful. I think it was contentious for a couple reasons. And I think one was there are those who believed, and I think there's validity to this view, that even though it's a murderous regime, if you look at where Khartoum is, it's right in the center of East Africa and the Horn of Africa. it's in a very strategic location, and they claimed continuously

that they wanted to cooperate on counterterrorism. So how do you reconcile those two things that you've got one of the worst human rights abusers on the planet, but who wants to cooperate on counterterrorism and is in a neighborhood where that's very important? So that was one area of tension. A second area of tension was, although they had the agreement out of the CPA,

the actual implementation in getting ready for the referendum that led to the final vote, and then the grant of independence and Independence Day still required negotiation between Khartoum and South Sudan, the capital of which is Juba. And that was very tricky because Khartoum was, quite frankly, slow rolling some of the things that needed to happen. So there was a lot of effort on our part to engage both Khartoum and you would have made sure the thing didn't fall off the rails before South Sudan got fully to independence. And it was, again, it was contentious because you know, you're dealing with a murderous regime on one end, and there are some people who would argue we shouldn't have

had any dealings with them at all. The problem is if we had had no dealings at all, our ability to affect the implementation would have been undercut. Right. I mean, this show has an explicit rating, which is unusual for a 45-minute discussion of foreign policy, but it's useful for situations like this because Omar Bashir is a genocidal piece of shit, right? I mean, no one wanted to deal with that individual. And frankly, that's not an entirely novel. He is, I believe, the only head of state accused of genocide and crimes against humanity who's currently in power. But it's not a novel problem in that you have to deal with a very, very flawed, maybe even evil partner. I think people at home are probably wondering, why do we have to work

with this guy? What is that like? Why can't we throw him overboard? Well, I mean, there's what we did give and what we didn't give them. And I think what we did was to engage, and importantly, we did not engage President Bashir. He's an indicted war criminal. We engaged members of his government. And we engaged them, I think, for two reasons. One was on the matter of South Sudan, because there was no way to maximize our effectiveness on getting South Sudan over the finish line without talking to anybody in Cartagin. just couldn't do it. You'd proceed with one arm tied behind your back. The other reason was to see whether we could affect any change on the part of cartoon. Now, you know, they often wanted

us to give them a lot. They said, you know, well, if you normalize relations, then we'll stop doing all these bad things. Our posture was rather the reverse, is show me the money, and put something serious on the table in terms of your willingness to show any sign of change, and then maybe we'll talk. And that went on for a long time, quite a long time. Right. I guess the reason I emailed you the other morning out of the blue was we were all in all these conversations, 2009, 2010, the sit room. And a lot of them were led by Dennis McDonough, who then was not the chief of staff or deputy national security advisor, but he was still sort of someone the president asked, like, hey, you got to figure this out. Really focus on this. Yeah. But in those conversations, I always felt like the

South Sudanese were the good guys, right? We were always talking about Salvakia, who's the president of South Sudan as someone who could really help affect positive change. But now you see South Sudan as targeting civilians in the same way Bashir did. I read that 100,000 people face immediate starvation, another million are on the brink of starvation. So my question is, what the hell happened? Did we take our eye off the ball? Yeah.

It's as bad as you say. And think about this. Over the last eight months, 1.8 million people have flood as refugees. Jesus. And we talk about refugee crises all over the world here is saying. whopper that doesn't really get that much attention. I think there are a couple things, and I think one of these has been true about South Sudan since the war started, the war between South Sudan and the government cartoon,

was that the cause of the people of South Sudan, I think, was one that rightly attracted many people. This is a part of the world that was poor to begin with, but the South Sudanese were so oppressed and disenfranchised. historically. There were deliberate efforts by successive regimes in Khartoum to ensure that the South didn't develop. And that became even more potent when it was discovered

that the country had oil and all of it was in the South. Right. So it was desperately poor and deliberately underdeveloped. And their argument and their cause was for self-determination was to have the right to vote on whether they wanted to be part of Sudan or an independent state called South Sudan. So it was a good cause, and I think politically a very supportable cause,

and by contrast, quite frankly, and it's very easy to fall into who's the good guy, who's the bad guy. The South Sudanese were both the underdogs and by comparison the good guys. I think what happened, I think there are a couple things. And I think there was a warning sign. I mean, in fairness, throughout the war, I was, as you said, I was a reporter. many, many years ago. Before I even met you, Tommy, I covered a lot of movements

in that part of the world in the Horn of Africa, including the movement that gave rise to the government of South Sudan, the Sudan People's Liberation Army. But I covered 10 or 12. There were wars all over the continent, or all over the region at the time.

One of the questions I asked myself as I was looking at these movements is, are they fighting the status quo, or are they fighting a status quo and building an alternative at the same time? and some of the movements in the region were building an alternative at the same time. They were fighting an enemy, but they were building clinics or building schools. The SPLA kept making the argument that we need to defeat the enemy and get our independence,

and then we'll build schools and we'll build clinics and we'll do this and we'll do that. And I think that was a warning sign. It was also a movement and a war that was characterized by massive, violent, bloody factionalism. So there were some warning signs. I think the other thing is I think there was an underestimation, and I would say on my part as well, of, you know, we hear this phrase fragile state. It's becoming a more common term these days. And I think there was an underestimation of just how fragile and weak something called the South Sydney state was. There wasn't one. There wasn't a cadre of people with the skills needed to run a government. There were not, and still, are not institutions that could have provided the forum for resolving disputes. There were guns everywhere and a history of decisions being made at the point of a gun.

So it was quite vulnerable to what happened in 2013, which is a breakdown and a fight within the movement that has since exploded and bled all over the country in a way that is unimaginable. and one where I think we find today, I have never seen people who describe themselves as leaders be less concerned about the plight of their people than in South Sudan. It's horrible. Yeah, I mean, that dovetails with some analysis I've read from our friend John Petrigasse from the Enough Project

that points a finger squarely at corruption. South Sudan becomes a nation, these new officials finally get power, and then they feel like it's their turn to feed off of the government largest. And one of you, do you agree with that assessment? and what can we do? You know, I remember during that process, we were doing everything possible just to get to a referendum, to get to a vote, to get the independence.

How can we do more to prevent corruption? And then, I guess, relatedly, prevent fighting between ethnic groups that's endemic in these regions and seems to fuel these conflicts over and over again. Yeah, well, it's a tough one, and I wish I could say, well, the answer is very clear and there are just three things we need to do. And I'm not sure there are.

Here's my PowerPoint. Right. I've got a nice slide deck here that we'll lay everything out. It's really, really easy. because as I said, there aren't really any institutions, and there's not this core of people who are ready and have the skills needed. I think, and I think the other thing is that one of the things we did learn is we did quite a lot to help South Sudan once it became independent

on the assistance front, on the development front, on trying to get private investors in. And that wasn't sufficient either. And the moral of that story is unless there's the political will, even in part at the center, you're not going to see the kind of gains that we had all hoped for. I think, frankly, the first thing we need to do, and this is far from satisfactory, but is make sure that the international humanitarian response is sustained.

And that's hard. This is one of the most complex operations in the world at a time when we've got Syria and Iraq and Somalia and complex humanitarian operations all over the place. It's very dangerous, and it's extremely expensive. None of the parties want to give access to humanitarian, so there's an over-reliance on delivering food by air, for example, which is the opposite of efficient. The demands and the needs are enormous.

The dangers are high. There are a handful of really solid humanitarian organizations in there that intend to continue as long as they can. I think there's a danger that funding will decline and that literally millions of people who are dependent on the outside world will be totally abandoned. So I think that's the first thing. I think the second thing, and this isn't something that yields terribly quickly,

but it's a point that John and enough have made very strongly. You've got to hit people where they hurt. So I think following the money is absolutely key. It's a good policy measure, and even though it's a very poor country, it's amazing what people who don't care about their people will do and can do to find whatever assets exist. So sanction these leaders,

sanction their relatives, prevent them from flowing money out of the country? I think part of it is where possible moving on the money, seeing where assets can be frozen. I think, you know, something like a travel ban, which you, I'm sure recall the number of times that phrase came up in meetings, simply means that these officials and their relatives cannot travel to whatever country signs on to a travel ban. Right. That's not a bad incentive. Yeah.

Because a lot of these people want to be able to get out of the country for medical care, or shopping, or they've got kids in school overseas. Yeah. So I think those kinds of pressures are absolutely necessary. It was always remarkable. I talked about this, Jake Sullivan, a little bit. It's amazing how many name your foreign country official is upset about not being able to go to London to purchase the latest, you know, $5,000 item. Absolutely.

Along the lines of sanctions, I generally don't know the answer. Why did the Obama administration remove sanctions from Sudan in the last six months of the administration? Was that a mistake? I saw a lot of groups were highly critical of that decision. No, I don't think it was a mistake. I think it was a tough policy call, but I think the issue at the time was. was we had, I'll tell you how long this has been going on, the Bashir government came into power in 1989.

When I left the Clinton administration, where I was the senior director for Africa on the National Security Council staff, in January of 2001, some of the last meetings I recall were meetings about Sudan and working the equivalent of a roadmap with Cartoon. They kept saying we want better relations, we'll act right. we kept saying, okay, do these five things,

and if you do this, that'll happen, if you do that, that'll happen. It didn't work, but the point is this notion of trying to get Khartoum on the right side of history had been going on for decades. What we ultimately did, they made another push to normalize relations, and you've got to think about what's going on in that region right now.

You have Somalia, which, despite the violence, has actually made slowly, slowly incremental progress. You have South Sudan, which is swirling down a vortex and taking millions of people with it, but threatened great instability for the region. You've got Ethiopia, you've got Eritrea, which is the kind of wildcard up there. You've got what's going on in Egypt. So the notion that Cartoon was saying, all right, we want to act right, and by the way, on counterterrorism, they were, and I imagine still are an important

partner on that front. Right. We laid out to them. Here's where you need to show progress. And again, I've been going to these meetings since the 1980s. And for the first time, they took actual tangible steps. Now, one could have said, well, you took actual tangible steps. Bulls, so screw you and goodbye. Right. What we did is an requirement met by the president confirming that that progress was sustained. Because, you know, you could make some changes and then 30 days later say, ha-ha, pulled you. and that, again, I think it was in a year's time. So there's some insurance built in. Now, it's, I think it was not, you know, that's a fair point.

The flip side of that argument is we had been doing, trying to get change out of Khartoum through pretty much exclusively pressure since 1989 and nothing had changed. Something that given their nature, let's build in some safeguards to make sure it doesn't backfire. Got it. So last question on this subject. You're right that I think a lot of people raised awareness about Darfur, cared deeply, supported organizations doing good work.

What would you recommend people listening do now if they want to get involved? I'd start by naming an organization that you co-founded the Enough Project. But if you're listening and you're upset by this, you saw a 60 Minutes report recently about how desperate the situation was. What should we do? I think there's three things. And I think, yes, I co-founded it. I've been working with John. And we started something called the Coalition for Peace in the Horn of Africa in 1988,

so we'd go way back. I would get involved with the enough project and support what they're doing because I think they do absolutely superb analysis of what's going on in South Sudan. They've got the contacts in the region. They've got the policy analysis, but they've got the tools. And so more pressure and more demand for things like following the money, engage your members of Congress if you don't live in the District of Columbia where you do not have a voting member. because one of the interesting things here there has always been for 20-some years now.

And interestingly, bipartisan interest in Sudan and South Sudan on the Hill. And so getting messages to them that we need to follow the money, getting messages to them that we need to make sure that our humanitarian assistance doesn't fall, that we continue being the lead provider, and that politically there be some engagement out of the State Department. and a strategy to try to pull this out of the fire. The third is, I think, reaching out to humanitarian organizations that work on the ground. IMC, the International Medical Corps, was featured on 60 Minutes last night.

If you go to the website of Interaction, which is the umbrella group for all of the NGOs, it tells you where other organizations are that work in South Sudan. But I think those three things. But get involved as an activist is the premise upon which we found it enough. And remember, this was in the wake of the genocide and rural. And it was that we needed to have enough people mobilized to take action at the right time to prevent and respond to these kind of tragedies. Right. You're geeking out with me on POTSA of the World. More on the way.

You know, it's always interesting me that one other person who sat in those meetings with us was Samantha Power. And both of you were journalists before you were policymakers. How did you make that transition? And did it drive you insane that so little news out of Africa seemed to make it onto front pages in the United States or on TV? Yeah, I mean, look, I made the transition by Africa or by accident because I was a reporter for a long time. As a reporter, I spent a lot of time in parts of East Africa where very few journalists had spent time, which was behind the lines in wars in South Sudan, but also in Eritrea and in Northern Ethiopia. Big famine hit in 84-85, I began to work with a number of NGOs. So that was kind of a migration, and I ended up going into the Clinton administration.

They reached out to me and said your name's been given to us by a number of people, and would you be interested in working for the administration? They offered me. The first job they offered me was in Washington. I said no. Right. They wanted me to go to policy planning in state, and I said, no, no, no, I'll just write papers, and you'll think they're interesting, but nobody will do anything.

So my first job was in the field, and then I joined the NSC. I think, look, it bothered me when I was in Africa that there was so little coverage of Africa. And the tendency, and I think it's still true, it was, there was a lot of coverage when there was a crisis. And the more dramatic the crisis, the more extensive the coverage. Or to do a really interesting feature piece about Berk and I am all for educating the American public about different cultures. But there was no coverage of Africa that was covering Africa. like you might cover any other part of the world. Yes.

Right. Like it's a real part of the world where, yes, you've got South Sudan, you've got the Central African Republic, but you've also got some of the greatest and sustained growth rates in the world. You've got the greatest gains in the world in changes in extreme poverty or in maternal child health. You've got a continent that increasingly votes as a block in international fora. so it's somewhere between 20 and 25% of the votes on a lot of international issues

and is pretty active and pretty responsible most for us. So all those things are missed, and I think it's still, I'm still frustrated by it. It still perpetuates the notion that, you know, Africa's hopeless. I've heard people say Africa's hopeless as a defense of the budget proposal we just saw from the Trump administration. Right, right, yeah. It turns out Africa's a continent. It's a political and economic powerhouse. Yeah.

with some of the countries are very new. But so you mentioned that you ran the agency in charge of international development, USAID. I did. It was wonderful. You did a very good job. I was wondering if you could talk about that organization, the kinds of things you guys did and accomplished, and what Trump's proposed 29% budget cut would mean to state and USAID. Yeah. So USAID is the U.S. government's lead development agency.

And interestingly, there have been times when foreign aid was a political football. That hasn't been the case for the last 10 or 15 years. There's been, I think, a strong belief in its importance. And President Obama, thankfully, took a decision, and one thing we were involved in when I was at the NSA, was to really strengthen USAID, was to elevate development on par with defense and diplomacy, and go get some really big stuff done.

And I think we were able to do a lot. And again, it sounds like wonky and boring, but I believe in public service. I believe in learning how your government works, but also making your government work better. And one of the things I'm the most proud of is that USAID is a much, much stronger agency today than it was eight years ago

with things like evaluation and analysis and looking at what works and reinvesting in that and getting real measurable returns. Some of those returns, there are millions of kids who are alive today because of our interventions in maternal child health. USAID had the lead in the U.S. government response to the Ebola epidemic, which with President Obama's support ultimately mobilized the entire world.

Through a food security initiative that we launched in President Obama's first term, when there were huge disruptions in the price of food around the world and there were riots and demonstrations in 43 countries and 100 million people plunged back into poverty. We launched a food security initiative where in the evaluation that was done last fall, there were reductions in extreme poverty anywhere from 10 to 45% in areas where that program called Feed the Future

was operative. Reductions in stunting, which is what happens to a kid if he or she doesn't get the nutrition. Power Africa, which we launched as a way to get the energy sector running in Africa double access to electricity, it spread like wildfire all over the continent. And we were able to mobilize, this is a true number, $54 billion in other people's money to support Africa, to electricity in Africa.

So can we put a stamp on that? So you guys, by convening other parties, other countries, private sector individuals, 54 billion? What we did was there are a lot of good projects, a lot of potential, massive renewable potential, massive beyond the grid, rural small-scale potential. They're interested in investors, but they weren't dating. And they weren't dating because the regulations might not be right. The capacity of the government to negotiate and sign a contract might not be right.

There was a technical analysis needed somewhere. There were a lot of things missing in the middle. So with aid and the lead, we put together all of the U.S. government agencies that had a tool that could help, whether it was a legal advisor, a technical expert, a transaction advisor, who just ran around and got things done, so that the capital and the project would meet. And then we launched this beyond the grid to target on really small-scale, like rural electrification.

What happened is that investors saw that this is actually a way to make these deals work. And governments and private partners on the ground saw that it works. Everybody jumped on board. So the private sector signed up for major investments. and that was about 43 or 44 billion of that money is private capital. And then the other money is public, the World Bank, the European Union, Sweden, all committed to putting in what adds up to billions of dollars themselves.

So I think we've kind of built a machine where the investments are flowing, the projects are getting up and running, but we've got a system now to make the whole thing work. And that was a very low investment. It wasn't a major assistance investment. It was marshalling the tools of the U.S. government. And interestingly, on both that and food security, we ended up with bipartisan legislation from the Hill, institutionalizing both of those.

You're listening to POD Save the World. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. So you and I are going about this. There's all these myths about foreign aid, right? That it's a huge percent of the budget that we're giving money to terrible guards. governments and autocrats. And I think that's why it sometimes becomes a target from people like

Donald Trump. So I was hoping we could give people some selfish reason to support foreign aid. I'm cribbing here from an interview with a Bush administration official USAID director, Andrew Natsio, so I'm sure you know. Yeah. But he talked about how our foreign assistance helps us, one, manage foreign pandemics at the source before they get here to prevent mass migration by helping stabilize foreign countries. So it's a huge influx of immigration to the United States. And three, improving schools and services and health systems and Middle East, North African countries that prevent terrorism. I don't know if that's a good, partial, complete list or your thoughts, but it's like I want to give people selfish reasons to support USA. And I think all those reasons are valid.

The more we build and the more we grow and the more countries work for the people who live in them, the fewer problems we have. Fewer people flee. Right. Fewer people become disenfranchised and say, well, I'm attracted then to this ideology that just says, let's blow things. up and in things like pandemics, and we will see many, many more of these, we've got responsible partners that we can cooperate with. So it's absolutely in our self-interest from a national security point of view. I think another one is it's absolutely in our self-interest from an economic point of view. Africa, for example, is a huge emerging market, huge. And the U.S. has an economic

interest in that. We need more markets to buy from us and to whom we can export. So there's a huge interest in these countries and regions becoming sufficiently developed that they become trading partners. And the third one, and I'm, you know, maybe this isn't as selfish, but I think it really, really matters and not just because it's the good thing. But I think this whole notion of providing assistance as an expression of our values matters enormously. to our ability to sustain our role. People all over the world know that it's the United States that is the first and fastest to respect.

Right. People all over the world know that two presidents who disagreed on a whole lot of things, George Bush and Barack Obama, together and consistently have enabled the U.S. to lead in the fight against HIV and AIDS globally. That matters. I mean, I remember, you know, Andrew mentioned the Middle East. I remember being in a conference where a Palestinian gentleman, Palestinian American, came up to me and said, I want to say it's because of you that even, not me personally, USAID, that even though I was a refugee, I got an education,

and I was able to start an organization that educates young people. You know, small investment, but those things come back. And so I think acting on our values is important, and it's, you know, the thing that people, People often leave out when they say, oh, the government shouldn't do this. Americans don't care about this. Americans outside the government provide billions of dollars for this kind of thing every year. A lot of Republicans, too. A lot of faith-based groups. Who finances all of these NGOs, who gives through their churches and their mosques and their temples, Americans all over the country. So I think people do care about it. And I think it's a huge mistake to even consider the kind of cuts that have been put on the table.

So does that worry you? I mean, what do you think the future is for USAID? What makes you hopeful? what worries you the most about what the political landscape? Well, what makes me helpful is that it is, it's as strong as I think it's been in 25 years, and I think when we were in off-sank, there was recognition across the other parts of government that it's an extremely valuable agency in terms of what it can contribute, but that also that its analysis mattered. DoD was always very interested in our analysis of a crisis, a potential crisis, or a transition, for example. So I think that's on the upside, and it's made.

up of really smart men and women career professionals who respect them they're currently getting. I think on the downside, if you look at the combination of the budget cuts, which, you know, the proposed cut is actually higher than the 28% that's been asserted, because if you look at the difference between last year's budget through the congressional resolution, it's a 36% cut. Jesus. To USAID and state. And then if you look at what's going to be protected within those limited resources, most of those cuts would fall to our development assistance. So I'm very concerned that we will basically get out of the business entirely of development.

And then when you couple it with the executive order that came out last week that calls for the kind of reorganization of the government, I think there could be a contemplation of the kind of systematic diminution of our civilian international officials. institutions. I get that you need a strong DOD, but it's not a national security budget or national security strategy if you've got a strong DOD and a very, very, very weak USAID and state. And I think the Defense Department is the first to say that. Yeah, Bob Gates, General Mattis, the most recent Secretary of Defense said this. The first ever global development policy under President Obama, Bob Gates was on the state. He was a chair leader.

of launching. He was the strongest voice for having a robust capability to do effective development. Yep. And I think we just get totally out of whack if there's a way, way over reliance on the Defense Department. That's right. Totally agree. It'll change our role in the world substantially, I think. I agree.

Gail, thank you so much for talking with me. I really appreciate it. I'm glad that you are able to put some attention on what's happening in Sudan, what's having these budget cuts, what it all mean for people, because I think it's so important. It doesn't get enough headlines. Maybe if Donald Trump tweets about Sudan, we'll start to read about it. But fingers crossed. Well, thank you.

It's nice to talk to you again, Tommy. And thanks for all your help back in the day. Let's hang out and when I see you in D.C. next. Yeah, yeah. All right, buddy. Talk to you soon. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye.

Thank you, Gail, for coming on the show. Thank everybody for listening to POT Save the World. Talk to you next week.