JOHN YANG: When the U.S.

Agency for International Development shut down, more than 80% of its programs were cancelled.

In an attempt to keep the most cost effective and life-saving projects up and running, two laid off agency employees created a website called Project Research Optimization.

It matches donors with threatened programs.

So far, they've helped keep nearly 80 projects running in 30 countries.

Ali Rogan sat down with the founders, Caitlin Tulloch and Rob Rosenbaum.

ALI ROGIN: Thank you both so much for joining us.

Caitlin, first to you.

What was it like when you realized that USAID was going to be essentially shutting down?

And what were you the most worried about happening after that?

CAITLIN TULLOCH, Founder, Project Resource Optimization: Thanks, Allie.

It really was a tumultuous time earlier this year.

I think initially were trying to figure out what the impact of the executive orders was going to be in terms of future programming.

And there was a belief that there would be future programming, USAID would continue in some way.

But after not too long, I think you could really read the tea leaves and understand that the agency as a whole was going to be shutting down.

And I think the scariest part of that, the part that really a lot of us had to spend a lot of time sitting with and processing, was that when you knew what USAID had been doing and the importance of some of these programs for global health, for survival in crises around the world, the thought of that just blinking out was really scary.

ALI ROGIN: And Rob, as somebody inside, as this all was happening, we heard many advocates for USAID saying this is going to lead to instability, hunger, deaths.

But as people who are watching this very closely, what have you seen in terms of the impacts on the ground?

ROB ROSENBAUM, Founder, Project Resource Optimization: Unfortunately, that is starting to really bear out.

And unfortunately, I don't think that we have seen the sort of full effects of this.

Many of the outcomes that the programs at USAID were set up to support take a long time to actually come to the fruition.

Immunizations that are not being met, those have lifetime consequences for children.

But where we are seeing kind of the most immediate impact of this is in humanitarian settings where health and nutrition services are not reaching children who desperately need them.

ALI ROGIN: So, Caitlin, tell me a little bit more about that.

What sort of programs are you connecting funding with?

And what is your criteria for basically picking which programs you're going to seek to connect to new sources of funding?

CAITLIN TULLOCH: As we understood that actually everything was at risk, I think that forced us to do a really terrible triage and focus on programs that we knew to be life-saving.

And that meant mostly programs from USAID's humanitarian portfolio and its global health portfolio.

I think the kinds of programming that we're looking at, as Rob mentioned, it's immunization for children under five, helping keep kind of global infectious disease burdens low.

And we saw in four or five countries, programs where the vaccines had already been procured.

The technical assistance to help strengthen the government's outreach and delivery of these vaccines was planned.

And then overnight the plug was pulled.

The other one that weighs heavily on my mind, I spent a couple of years working on treating children who are facing acute malnutrition.

This is, you know, at risk of starvation.

That usually happens in humanitarian settings, places like Sudan.

And so you saw the supply chain for things like this, ready to use food that helps keep children alive, all of a sudden being shut down, things being locked in warehouses.

ALI ROGIN: Rob, now you have funding through your platform flowing back into projects across 30 countries.

What does that look like?

And was it difficult to get some of these programs back up and running once funding had been paused?

ROB ROSENBAUM: Our approach has really been to try to figure out, in a really rapid triage kind of an approach, what are the programs that are delivering the most impact per dollar spent.

We call this cost effectiveness in terms of saving lives.

And we are able to do that because there's a huge amount of evidence out there of research that's been done to understand what are the interventions and the ways that programs are delivered that can lead to these types of outcomes.

And so went out searching for the programs that we understood were going to be delivering the most impact per dollar spent to reach out to those programs to really understand what they were doing, and then to use that information to try to crowd in private capital and private philanthropy to pick up some of those pieces.

We had a few donors at the beginning who kind of helped us build some momentum and get this thing going.

And as time has gone over the last eight to nine months, we've seen more and more people kind of come up and step forward and say, hey, this is something I really care about and this is a really important thing to do.

ALI ROGIN: You've used the word Rob, sticking with you a few times triage, which indicates an emergency situation.

Is there a point at which this no longer becomes an emergency operation and it becomes something that is a little longer term?

Are there plans for that at this point?

What does the future of this look like?

ROB ROSENBAUM: The bottom has not fully fallen out on this in terms of the like, long term consequences and the impact of what's happening.

And unfortunately, I do not think a lot of the funding that currently been cut is coming back in the next year or two.

So we've been working really hard over the last year again to triage these projects and to find those that we think are kind of most in most need of urgent funding.

We are continuing to do that from now through the beginning of next year.

We are kind of doing a last mad dash to say, are there any projects that should have met, that have met our criteria that we may have missed and rapidly kind of assessing them and getting them onto our platform to bring more funding in.

And then as we move into the new year, I think we're really moving into a new phase of this thing where we are focusing on what is the design of programs that really can lead to the most impact per dollar spent and how do we continue to work with the partners who are delivering this work, who have been delivering this work for many years now to help them streamline their programming, continue to do it at the highest possible level, and then continue to bring more and more private philanthropy in to help fill some of these gaps.

ALI ROGIN: Caitlin Tulloch and Rob Rosenbaum with Project Resource Optimization, thank you both so much.

ROB ROSENBAUM: Thank you so much, Ali.

CAITLIN TULLOCH: Thank you.