Now one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government, Peter Marocco’s turbulent tenure during the first Trump administration sheds light on his current efforts to dismantle the American foreign aid system from the inside out.
Before Peter Marocco was selected to dismantle America’s entire foreign aid sector on behalf of President Donald Trump, he was an official with the State Department on a diplomatic mission.
In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Marocco was a senior political appointee tasked with promoting stability in areas with armed conflict. That summer, he made a two-week trip to the Balkans, visiting several Eastern European countries in what was advertised as an effort to “counter violent extremism” and “strengthen inter-religious dialogue.”
At the time, the U.S. was trying to maintain a fragile peace agreement it had helped broker two decades earlier in the region. The Balkans are still living in the shadows of the Bosnian war, a 1990s conflict between the region’s disparate ethno-religious groups that led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 people, including thousands of Muslim civilians who were massacred by Serb forces.
To avoid compromising such delicate international relations, American diplomatic work is carefully prescribed, even down to the people U.S. officials meet — and those they should avoid, like politicians under Treasury Department sanctions for corruption or war crimes.
On a 2018 visit to the Balkans, Marocco secretly met with officials whom the American government had determined were off-limits without the highest levels of approval: ethnonationalist Bosnian Serb separatist leaders. Those politicians had been working for years to defy their nation’s constitution and undermine the American-backed peace deal in an effort to promote a Christian Bosnian Serb state. ProPublica pieced the episode together from interviews with seven current and former U.S. officials. MORE