Federal Workers Speak

Jason Gilpin U.S. Agency for International Development

As a Foreign Service Officer for USAID for 15 years, Jason Gilpin was posted in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and the Pacific Islands. During this time, he worked in some areas of high conflict, including in South Sudan, where a long civil war killed 400,000 and displaced about four million. He lived for two years in Bangladesh, where roughly one million stateless Rohingya refugees from Myanmar have been living since 2017 in the world’s largest refugee camp in the district of Cox’s Bazar. He also spent four years in Israel, where he supervised grants for the West Bank and Gaza during the 2014 Gaza War. In this interview, he reflects on the work he did and why it was a privilege to serve in the U.S. government.

My dad was a YMCA director for 30 years, and I got to see the good he did in our communities. I wanted to do something to serve the world as well. As a sophomore in college, I heard about USAID in a political science class about the U.S. and Latin America in the 20th century. I asked the professor how, after all the American interventions in the region during the Cold War, we repaired our relationships. She told me about USAID and how they partnered for mutual interest—everything from helping countries increase their agricultural yields to eradicating disease—deploying a handshake instead of a handgun to advance American foreign policy and influence.

I spent my 20s figuring out how to get hired at USAID. After a brief stint teaching English abroad, I found a job in higher education. There, a career development colleague suggested that the best way to follow a career of your dreams was to find somebody who has the job you want and then “reverse engineer” their resume. So I looked at the resume of a USAID Foreign Service Officer (FSO) and followed their path—got a master’s in international affairs, learned about project management and non-profit organizations, and joined the Peace Corps, where I was stationed in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

I had lucky timing. In the 1990s, USAID had been downsized in the post-Cold War budget cuts. In his second term, in light of the United States’s critical foreign policy needs, George W. Bush rebuilt USAID: he increased partnerships in areas of the world with violent extremism and anti-Americanism and, after starting the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), hired more people to implement it. The month I left the Peace Corps, USAID was hiring FSOs again.

USAID had a unique role in international development and humanitarian assistance. We had partnerships and communications with government ministers, and we also had relationships—which we had cultivated at provincial and local levels all over rural and remote areas around the world—that the State Department did not have. Our projects had different goals—economic growth projects, education projects, health projects. We bolstered economic growth, fought disease, improved education and transformed health systems—and also fed millions of people throughout the world with bags of food emblazoned with “From the American People.” When war or natural disaster hit, it was all hands on deck to help USAID’s humanitarian assistance arm, the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, deliver food, water, and shelter to those who needed it most. People in Nepal, in Haiti, in the Congo—around the world, really—remembered that when they needed it the most, the Americans were the first there to help.

I was a Foreign Service Officer at USAID from 2010 until 2025. I joined as a contracting officer, which means that I negotiated grants or contracts with organizations and companies that carried out—implemented—USAID’s projects in different parts of the world.

My favorite part of being a contracting officer was working directly with local partners. I enjoyed seeing our projects up close and interacting with people in villages from Liberia to Bangladesh’s border with Burma. I negotiated contracts and grants that did everything from building roads in South Sudan to distributing food to a million people in the West Bank and Gaza.

In 2018, I switched to become a program officer so that I could deal even more directly with projects, do more public-facing work and also design programs. I spent a lot of time designing programs so that we could find good partners, coordinate better with other donors, and make our programs more effective in delivering results and advancing American foreign policy.

As a program officer, I worked closely with local partners and other foreign donors. I communicated directly with USAID and State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., about what was happening in the field and shared back from directives and other information from D.C. I supported our extensive reporting to Congress, which was fed by some of the most rigorous monitoring, evaluation, and oversight in all of the U.S. Government, and I also wrote reports about what we were planning and accomplishing.

In Bangladesh, I served as a response coordinator for the Rohingya refugee crisis.  One million Rohingya refugees survived in the refugee camps in the districts known as Cox’s Bazar and Bandarban. Bangladesh often gets struck by huge cyclones, and given its long border with war-torn Myanmar (Burma), it’s a very unstable part of the country. Dozens of different tribal peoples live in small villages that you can only access by boat. Maintaining coordination among dozens of different donors, UN agencies, non-profit organizations, and U.S. government agencies was extremely challenging. Part of my job included attending donor coordination meetings and talking with the Aussies, the UN, and the Japanese to coordinate our projects so that we were working together efficiently rather than separately.

Cultivating these relationships with government ministers and other officials also meant that we could get things done for American economic interests. One of the last projects I worked on was to bring internet connection to small islands in the Pacific. The internet is everything there—it can bring education, remote businesses, basic commerce, and lifesaving medicine. Their biggest companies are telecommunications, so some countries had regulations that caused obstacles to permitting satellite communications. I worked to help countries adopt regulations that would permit satellite connectivity in underserved areas. We convinced at least one nation that even though they might lose some jobs, they would gain more by adapting to new technologies.

There’s been a lot said about USAID since early 2025 that isn’t true. I’d like others to understand what we did and what we sacrificed, individually and as a group, to work for USAID. Serving in USAID’s foreign service was a demanding job. When we’re responding to a humanitarian emergency, we work 80 to 100 hours a week and don’t sleep very much. In assigned U.S. government housing, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t. We, and in many cases our spouses and children, are subject to tropical diseases like malaria and typhoid, all while breathing horrific air quality. Every day, we have to read detailed reports of what happens to the people we are trying to help—people suffering and dying of war, of disease, of natural disaster or starvation. It takes a tremendous personal toll because you have to digest these catastrophic stories of human suffering all over the world.

We served our country loyally. To do so, like many others, I gave up my life in the U.S., and I gave up time with my family and friends here in America. We also put ourselves in extreme danger. We were constant targets of terrorist attacks. In 2013, I was evacuated from South Sudan by U.S. Army Rangers in the middle of a civil war. When the war broke out, there were only five Marines guarding the U.S. Embassy in a place where USAID staff had been executed by militants in the 1990s.

A lot of USAID officers have stories like mine. We know what it’s like to walk into a hospital in Liberia and see a baby that would have died from malnutrition if not for special fortified food that USAID, the American people, funded. We understand what it’s like to look at the face of a baby with a distended belly and know that because our country gave half of one percent of our budget to USAID, this baby will get to live its life.

I spent a lot of time in refugee camps with people who have less than nothing. When you have less than nothing, it means that because you had the misfortune to be born of a certain circumstance at a certain time, you can never again travel outside the boundaries of a refugee camp, or even work to support your family. The Rohingya refugees’ rations have been cut in half now partly because of cuts in U.S. foreign assistance.

USAID still lives. It’s not dead. It’s still alive legislatively, and it’s alive all over the world in the hearts, minds, and lives of the people we worked alongside and supported. USAID certainly thrives in the hearts of the people who served the agency, and we’re still dreaming about how we can make it better if and when it comes back.

This spring, Jason started working as a senior international contracts negotiator for a private sector firm in the Pacific Northwest. He feels lucky to have a good job with a great company, building a product that he loves. Jason hopes to contribute again to global progress and give back more later in his life.