Former Modestan and USAID senior adviser speaks out on importance of agency’s future
Up until November, a Modesto native was working as a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal agency that has been at the center of much of President Donald Trump’s ire.
Anita Lyn Menghetti grew up on a Modesto walnut and almond farm her family still owns. She didn’t dream of becoming one of the top people in a federal agency that distributes international aid. Nor did she imagine that same agency would be at the center of a conversation about constitutional authority.
“If your motto is ‘America first,’ America does not live in the universe alone, America lives with other countries, and what happens in those countries impacts our country,” she said.
USAID, put simply, provides resources to other countries to help stabilize them and to promote democratic values. This is done by providing education, food aid using U.S.-grown produce, humanitarian aid after natural disasters and conflict prevention.
It was created by executive order in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, and then was established as its own separate independent agency by Congress in 1998. Its funding and existence are under the jurisdiction of Congress.
The newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, which was created through an executive order Jan. 20, locked out USAID staffers shortly after the Trump administration took power. President Donald Trump issued a freeze on foreign aid, and new Secretary of State Marco Rubio further issued a stop-work order, which effectively barred workers from providing aid in almost all cases.
“I think it’s a short-sighted attack on an agency that many people don’t understand,” Menghetti said.
During her time at the agency, Menghetti worked on issues including migration, climate change, humanitarian assistance as well as long-term development strategies for other countries.
“USAID’s ability to help countries on their developmental progress, to assist them in becoming more democratic to make them fairer places to live, can also impact their desire to want to stay in that country or not,” she said. “So it can have a direct impact on migration into the United States.”
What losing USAID would mean
Ghezel Asghari has lived in Modesto for two and a half years. From 2016 to 2020, she worked with USAID in Afghanistan, helping women and girls get access to education and setting them up with job training.
“I was witness to all the growth, day by day, year by year, for our country. It was really kind of fascinating to see,” she said. “Our team was going to the families and convincing their fathers or their parents or their husbands to let girls and women go.”
After the collapse of the government of Afghanistan, she continued to work at a USAID-funded nonprofit known as The Asia Foundation. She was based in Cambodia, where she further aided women pursuing master’s programs online.
“Some of them totally changed their minds about education, they would see that it’s really good for women,” she said. “They were seeing the benefits of it.”
Now 31, Asghari works for Stanislaus County and attends Modesto Junior College since receiving her Special Immigration Visa for her work in Afghanistan.
She said she’s shocked and confused to hear what’s happening to the agency she worked for.
“I am watching the news and I’m also talking with friends, some of whom are still working with USAID, and it’s really heartbreaking,” she said. “We never imagined something like this before, it’s really shattering for girls and women in Afghanistan.”
Rubio has appointed a State Department and USAID alum, Pete Marocco, to be head of the agency – an agency he was pushed out of after an internal memo by staffers claimed he was trying to gut services in the Office of Transition Initiatives. Marocco has also been accused of being a Jan. 6 rioter and has to date not directly addressed the allegations.
“I’ve worked for Republican administrations and Democrat administrations, the beauty of being a civil servant is you serve the nation,” Menghetti said. “And I took that opportunity to serve very seriously, and yet somehow I have been painted as a parasite.”
The sentiment when she was young was that what happened in Washington, D.C., had little impact on the day-to-day goings of people in California. But she said that is completely wrong.
“The federal government impacts every American’s life every single day,” she said.
Archived records of USAID’s collaboration in Modesto show the agency bought seeds from a Modesto-based company called AMSA Seed Co. Additionally, USAID collaborated in the 1990s with Modesto Junior College to train Salvadoran students in agriculture.
A union of current and former federal employees filed suit on Feb. 10 against Elon Musk and members of DOGE over access to private information at OPM.
As of the publication of this story, USAID’s website is currently blank. Looking up certain known pages results in a message reading, “The resources you are trying to access are temporarily unavailable.”
As of Monday, USAID has been kicked from its lease in Washington, D.C., according to reporting by PBS.
“USAID does not pave roads in the United States, and it does not deliver social security checks in the United States, but what it does is help to build a safer, more prosperous global population, which directly impacts the economy, the safety and the security of the Unites States,” Menghetti said.
This story was originally published February 14, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story identified Anita Lyn Menghetti as the owner of a Modesto walnut and almond farm. The farm is owned by her family.
