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After USAID is a series that explores the unintended, and not immediately visible, consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025. As practitioners, researchers, and critics of international development, the series welcomes the unique perspectives anthropologists have to offer on how people and communities around the world are making sense of this momentous change.
When I wrote about DOGE’s attack and eventual successful eradication of USAID nearly a year ago in Africa Is a Country, I was trying to think through the seeming paradox that this presented. I have after all spent more than twenty years critiquing institutions like USAID and the broader humanitarianism-industrial complex and yet found this wholesale destruction of an aid agency abhorrent. I was specifically responding to the arguments that USAID should matter to the United States because of its importance for representing the US globally as a strong, ethical place and because it builds good international relationships. I argued then that “even at its best aid is all about the US, not about the places it is supposedly helping. At its worst though it is patently defining global agendas, policing American ideas of worth and values, human rights and ‘empowerment.’”
Over the year since then, DOGE has fallen into the background in the face of increasing chaos in the US administration and the kind of state violence that horrifies most of the world and many Americans. When I spoke about this paradox on Democracy Now!, the other guest, historian Greg Grandin, commented on the historical links between the CIA and USAID. This framing is valid, but rather than a simple justification for dismantling the system, I see it as part of a larger shift in emphasis: how we interpret DOGE’s cuts to US aid funding depends on whether we view aid primarily as an instrument of US power, a flawed but necessary global resource, or something in between. But while many other DOGE cuts and actions, though horrendous, have either been less drastic than anticipated or been quietly dialed back, USAID has all but disappeared, with more of a whimper than a bang.
I have never directly studied USAID. My work on humanitarianism and development became necessary when I was trying to make sense of American imaginings of Africa, based on participant observation of tourists, study abroad students, and volunteers to Southern Africa. I was a South African anthropologist bewildered by how Africa was represented in the United States. So, I set out, with the support of my wonderful adviser, anthropologist of tourism, Nelson Graburn, to follow American travelers to southern Africa to figure out how travel encounters might change the common narratives about the continent. I learned what most students of travel learn, which is that what is newly understood is not the place that is visited but their own homes. So I wrote about what it means to be American and US imperialism.
By the mid-2000s, however, American imaginings of Africa were so wrapped up with a White Savior Industrial Complex that it became the focus of my work. One thing that resonates in this moment, but that became clear then, was just how essential African suffering or neediness was to an American sense of being agents of good in the world. While it is not a relationship specific to Americans—just watch the continued resurrection of Bob Geldoff’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” explored in my film When I Say Africa—it is remarkably consistent in the United States and in the static images of Africa here. So why was USAID so easy (it seems) to shut down? What has changed in this imagined relationship between Americans and Africa? After all, if there was ever a time Americans might want to look like good people to the world, this might be it.
The only way I can answer this is going back to another seeming paradox—that the images required to elicit support for organizations like USAID providing medicine or supporting health care in Africa were not just themselves violent and extractive but often indistinguishable from the critiques of those images. In my book on White Saviorism and Popular Culture I explored the work thatparody and satiric critique does to render the violence of humanitarianism invisible. For example, the short-lived reality competition show announced by CBS in 2021 is an extreme version of this. The Activist, a reality competition show, describes itself as: “six inspiring activists work with three high-profile public figures to bring meaningful change to one of three vitally important world causes: health, education and environment.” Not surprisingly many critics were offended by its competition aspect and the cheapening of “real” activism. The extent to which it felt like a parody and a horror story all in in one, so real it is unreal, is made powerfully clear in this comment on PBS from a possible contestant,Clover Hogan, a 22-year-old climate activist and founder of youth advocacy organization Force of Nature:
I remember thinking I was in a ‘Black Mirror episode’’’ (a surreal horror series). When the call ended, I cried & called my mum. The whole time, I was made to feel as if I was failing a test.
Though this show was cancelled, equating doing good with doing good business projects remain more common than aid projects that center the people who need help rather than the helpers. This is how Americans do it. As I write, I consistently hear on social and in mainstream media that these times of violence, both bureaucratic and carceral, are “Not American. But is it? Thinking from South Africa and as a South African anthropologist of the US, the current administration is not an exception or exceptional. Whether one is just paying attention to the decades of right-wing co-option of courts, policing, and other bureaucratic sites, or really seeing the white supremacy and settler colonialism at the heart of American life, nothing happening right now looks like “Not America.” If humanitarianism was about what it said about the US and what it meant to be a US citizen, then really there is no paradox in just stopping that work. As there is no paradox in the other violence perpetrated in the United States.
Many years ago, after studying American travelers to Southern Africa, I argued that a love affair with Africa reproduced American Empire, making it palatable when disguised as humanitarian aid. While the way USAID has been shut down is causing real harm, I can’t help believing that there is some real good that can come out of USAID’s closure. Business as usual is no longer possible, so aid organizations, funders and donors, all have an opportunity to do what many have wanted to and support and fund local organizations that have done sustainable good solving their own community’s problems. Activists in the West can focus on changing their own country’s policies on drug manufacturing and pricing, on farming subsidies and climate change so that the causes of the poverty, food insecurity, and lack of health care are addressed at their source. Can clarity about what America is produce a kind of global engagement that acknowledge the ways the United States is producing inequalities? Could countries like South Africa finally stop expecting and depending on aid, imagining new ways to provide healthcare, environmental protections, and education. This is my hope.