Albany area native Michelle Dworkin back home after the Trump administration shut down USAID this year ending her foreign service career talks about people dying globally, disasters like Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica unanswered, taxpayer dollars wasted  and national security endangered by the ill-informed closure of that agency.

Michelle Dworkin served as a foreign service Officer with the US Agency for International Development for 17 years.  Most recently, she was director of the Program Office in USAID/Colombia where she managed a $1.2 billion portfolio of some 50 projects focused on peace building, counter-narcotics, economic growth, biodiversity conservation, and support for Venezuelan migrants.  Previously, she worked in Honduras on addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.  She previously was a Congressional Liaison Officer with the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs in USAID/Washington and participated in a Brookings Institution fellowship in Congress.  Other assignments and titles include Deputy Director of the Program Office in USAID/Guatemala, Program Officer for USAID/Afghanistan’s Western Regional Platform in Herat, and Program Officer in USAID/Egypt.  Before USAID, she worked on USAID-funded education and training programs, primarily for students from the West Bank and Gaza. She holds a master’s degree in Sustainable International Development from Brandeis University and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Anthropology from Tufts University.  She is bilingual in English and Spanish, and has knowledge of French, Arabic, and Hebrew.