The NY Times Tries and Fails to Gin Up Sympathy for Laid Off USAID Workers

Welcome to the real world, USAID employees. It's been more than a year since the Trump administration took a chainsaw to the agency, which oversaw the disbursement of billions of taxpayer dollars to various NGOs and other organizations. It was rife with wasteful spending and corruption, of course.

It turns out that many USAID employees are struggling to find work more than 12 months after being shown the door. The New York Times ran a piece on some of them, trying to gain sympathy. What the piece did instead was prove that these employees were insanely overpaid and had no real marketable skills.

"Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior VP at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store in Falls Church, Va."https://t.co/OGDiHFV79u
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) April 23, 2026

Here's more:

Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior vice president at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store near her home in Falls Church, Va.
Her take-home pay would not cover her mortgage, but said she was eager to do something other than spending down her savings and has applied for 60 jobs. She has since been called back for an in-person interview. “Aside from the salary, it would be fun,” she said. “I could do it for a little while.”
She has learned from online webinars on job hunting that her three decades of work in international development, including as the Peace Corps country director for Benin, need to be papered over on her résumé.
“Somehow, after 20 years of experience, you’re suddenly trying to hide the number because it makes you sound old,” Ms. Cowan said over lunch in her Falls Church townhouse. “I was writing in the blurb at the top of my résumé, ‘I have over 30 years of experience.’ No, no. And don’t put in the year you graduated from Bucknell.”

NYT frames this as if USAID employees had a quasi-property right to high-paying, taxpayer-funded jobs.

In reality, this tells a darker story—we spent half-a-century debt-financing a managerial class of Leftists whose only qualifications were ideological. https://t.co/c6UEuewmTO
— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) April 23, 2026

"In reality, this tells a darker story," Schmitt wrote. "We spent half a century debt-financing a managerial class of Leftists whose only qualifications were ideological."

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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