Fired USAID ‘Victims’ Featured On CBS Were Actually Consultants, Not Employees

During Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” episode on CBS, the show featured two people who allegedly lost their jobs due to President Donald Trump’s government cuts to play on viewers’ emotions.

However, they were not actually employees of USAID but consultants for an outside company. Kristina Drye and Adam Dubard, according to their own LinkedIn pages, had short-lived gigs at a company called XLA, providing consulting services to USAID.

CBS presented the pair as being “fired this month in the chaotic shutdown of foreign aid distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. More than 8,000 USAID employees were sent home by the administration.”

“People are really scared,” Drye said on the program. “I think that, you know, 12 days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were gonna pay for their kids’ daycare, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight.”

But neither Drye nor Dubard were among the USAID employees who were fired since they didn’t work for the agency. Drye was a speechwriter and communications analyst who worked “through XLA and Jefferson Partners to support the USAID Administration team, serving on the speechwriting and communications group for Administrator of USAID Samantha Power,” according to her LinkedIn profile. Dubard was a “Communications Analyst for XLA working with the USAID Public Engagement team within the Bureau of Legislative and Public Affairs (LPA),” according to his profile. Dubard worked in this capacity for just under one year, while Drye was in her position for nearly 2.5 years, hardly the career public servants who had worked for USAID for decades that CBS made them out to be.

Drye at least hinted at this in some of her comments, referring to the fired workers as “they” and not herself.

“And they had to leave the building,” she said. “And these are folks who had decades and decades of public service serving USAID across administrations from, you know, George Bush, to Obama, to the first Trump administration. And they were never able to walk back in the building again.”

Dubard claimed the Trump administration was “not looking for competency” or whether someone is “good at your job.” Instead, he claimed the administration is “looking for pure loyalty tests and if you don’t give it, you will be punished.”

The Trump administration has been cutting programs that waste American tax dollars on programs that don’t align with its vision, something presidents have always been able to do.

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The very notion of parading around “victims” of Republican policies has been done by news outlets for decades, as radio host Erick Erickson pointed out.

“When Dems are in charge, the press highlights beneficiaries of policies,” Erickson posted on X. “When Republicans are in charge, the press highlights victims of policies. You never heard from the people who lost their jobs when Biden killed the Keystone XL, etc.”

The Erickson Rule of Media Coverage: When Dems are in charge, the press highlights beneficiaries of policies. When Republicans are in charge, the press highlights victims of policies. You never heard from the people who lost their jobs when Biden killed the Keystone XL, etc. https://t.co/pcxiE78S46

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 17, 2025