Michelle Dworkin, a Niskayuna native, returned to the Capital Region in June from Colombia, where she had completed two years of what was supposed to be four years of work for USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development. Dworkin joined the agency in 2008.
“I started in the Egypt USAID mission, and then served on a military base just outside the city of Herat in western Afghanistan, and then Guatemala,” she said. “And then I served in Washington, D.C., doing congressional affairs. And then I was in Honduras for four years. And then I was in Colombia. I was supposed to have been in Colombia for four years, but it got cut short to only two years because of the dismantling of USAID.”
Dworkin is one of several former USAID and federal workers looking for public service jobs in the Capital Region. After the federal government laid off thousands of workers earlier this year, New York state launched a campaign urging former federal employees to apply for state government jobs. According to the governor’s office, 250 job offers have been made to former federal workers, and 158 have been accepted. The office also said there have been more than 13,000 applications from former federal workers as of the end of October, with some applying to multiple positions.
Dworkin said the governor’s invitation to former federal workers was one of the reasons she wanted to return to New York.
“We’re here. We’re excited to do good work for the state of New York,” she said. “A number of us have been applying for jobs with the state and other organizations here. We bring a lot of talent and a lot of transferable skills.”
Kate Lapham, a Queensbury native, worked in Uzbekistan for Creative Associates, a USAID contractor, where she managed the “All Children Succeeding” program. The project focused on training educators to implement programs making primary education more accessible for students with disabilities. Lapham has worked in international development, including for USAID, since 1997.
A group of former USAID workers, including Lapham and Dworkin, met with state Sen. Patricia Fahy on Nov. 3, 64 years after USAID’s founding.
“We talked about the talent and the expertise that we could all bring to New York state, and really sort of brainstormed with her around ways that we might do that a little bit more effectively and support Gov. Hochul’s initiative to bring laid-off or fired federal workers into the New York state government workforce,” Lapham said.
Lapham received a stop-work order at the end of January, leaving her and her coworkers concerned about how they would wrap up their work in Uzbekistan. Her concern extended not only to colleagues, but to the credibility of the organization as a whole.
“We had promised that we would support this very strategic ally in Central Asia to accomplish some education policy goals that they very much wanted to accomplish, and then in the middle of that, with no explanation, we stopped doing that,” she said.
Creative Associates also provided grant funding to Syracuse University’s Center on Disability and Inclusion in its School of Education. The center’s director, Christy Ashby, said the dismantling of USAID resulted in a complete shift in her work, which involved remote support for educators in Uzbekistan as well as in-country professional training.
“We were also working closely with one of the universities in Uzbekistan to revise their teacher training program to include more inclusive education elements, and we had just started doing all of the syllabus revision and work,” she said. “We would have been continuing to help them embed support for inclusion and for students with disabilities into their teacher training programs. Obviously, that didn’t continue. I have no way of knowing if they are continuing that work on their own, but they’re certainly not doing it with our support.”
Both Dworkin and Lapham are particularly worried about the message the abrupt shutdown of USAID sent to the countries and organizations that depended on its support. A report from the medical journal The Lancet estimated that cuts to USAID programs could result in 14 million otherwise preventable deaths if the cuts continued through 2030. According to the study, USAID programs have saved approximately 90 million lives since the agency’s creation in 1961.
“We basically pulled out and said, ‘We’re not doing this anymore,’” Lapham said. “The message that sends is, ‘We don’t care. We don’t care about you. You are not a priority. This is not a priority of ours now,’ and I think that is a very dangerous message to send on behalf of the American people.”
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the shutdown of USAID and her next steps, Dworkin said she was grateful to be home.
“I have a USAID hat that I frequently wear around, and I often get a lot of positive comments, people asking, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of them. Oh, did you work for them?’” she said. “And when I say yes and explain what happened, people are often very sympathetic, or sometimes I run into people who might have some sort of connection. They have a family member, a friend who worked for USAID, or who worked for one of our grantee or contractor organizations, or some other connection where they’ve heard about our work. So it is really nice to have that support here.”
