In the wake of the USAID closure, philanthropies are trying to fill some of the gap. How one organization is trying to do the most good in the face of the sudden funding gap.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Mary Childs
Mary Childs (she/her) is a co-host for NPR's Planet Money podcast and the author of the bestselling book, The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All. Before joining the team in 2019, she was a senior reporter at Barron's magazine, where she covered the alternatives industry, the bond market and capitalism. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times and Bloomberg News. She's written about the pioneering of new asset classes like time, billionaire's proposals to solve inequality and diversity and discrimination in the finance industry. Before all that, she was also a Watson Fellow, spending a year traveling the world painting portraits. She graduated from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, with a degree in business journalism and an honors thesis comparing the use and significance of media sting operations in the U.S. and India.
