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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.
The Trump administration’s controversial decision to abruptly cut 92% of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) funding was immediately met with criticism. News outlets from around the world shared reports describing the life-saving work of USAID’s humanitarian assistance programming. Losing this support would mean people trapped in conflict zones around the world might go without sufficient food, medicine, or water, likely resulting in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. In the eight months since, the real toll of these cuts is starting to emerge as communities across the world struggle to survive with less.
Despite evidence pointing to the effectiveness of humanitarian assistance, before the Trump administration’s cuts, US support fell far below global need. While disaster assistance and conflict relief receive the majority of USAID’s budget, a significant portion also funded projects that “burned cash,” a colorful term I first heard used by an official in Africa to describe how USAID’s economic and democracy development assistance projects were often wasteful, ill-conceived, and out-of-step with local contexts.
“Maybe you [referring to the US] spend a million dollars just trying to get some NGO off the ground. The organization doesn’t accomplish much and quickly dissolves once the funding runs out. The only measurable benefit is that the program was funded by outside capital which was spent in the local economy. That’s usually the most significant effect of this funding. The US just burns a lot of cash, and they call it ‘governance assistance’ or ‘civil society support’,” he stated during our first exchange.
Over the past decade studying international development and working on US funded international democracy and human rights assistance programs, I have met countless researchers and practitioners living and working in aid recipient countries who echoed the same sentiment. USAID sometimes funded good work, but it also wasted a lot of money.
Characterizing USAID’s programming as wasteful has been a consistent criticism of the institution since it was founded. In surveys, the average American regularly rates foreign assistance as the first thing that should be cut from the federal budget, a position that unwittingly echoes the findings made by critical international development scholars, including many anthropologists, who have amassed an archive of evidence demonstrating USAID’s track record of missteps and wasted resources.
In the rush to challenge the administration’s false claims that USAID was a bastion of fraud and corruption, a slew of stories highlighted the organization’s most effective and impactful humanitarian work. This framing of USAID was strategic, since for a short period at the beginning of the Trump’s second term, it appeared as if Republicans in Congress could be persuaded to save the agency’s funding for either humanitarian or geostrategic reasons.
Unfortunately, that support never materialized. Instead, Congressional Republicans cut foreign assistance funding and approved the administration’s rescission request to claw back money that had been allocated for international development but not yet spent. Bucking what for decades had been a bipartisan consensus around foreign assistance, Republicans now arrived at the same conclusion that many critics of USAID had been repeating for decades, that the agency’s programming was wasteful and should end.
To call USAID wasteful is to make a subjective judgment about the institution’s value. To borrow from Mary Douglas’s famous formulation that dirt is “matter out of place,” what is government waste other than our perception that public funding is out of place, that money being allocated to one institution or program should instead go to another, or perhaps not even be allocated at all.
Supporters have attempted to recover USAID’s tarnished image by pointing to examples of its critical humanitarian work, but these have been met with Republicans unearthing comically poignant instances of the institution’s excesses, usually found in the strange and unsuccessful efforts by USAID to change the economic and political behavior of people abroad. These contrasting examples represent USAID’s many facets––as life-saver and cash burner––but they fail to offer a systemic or rigorous accounting of where the agency succeeded and where its money was wasted.
This should be surprising since the agency has spent considerable resources incorporating measurement, learning, and evaluation requirements into USAID funded programming. And yet taking stock of the agency’s effectiveness remains a challenge.
The biggest obstacle to tracking program effectiveness is that there is no central database that lists all of USAID’s funded programs and their locations, nor does the US government make publicly available all program evaluation reports. Yet, even when program evaluation reports exist, their quality is often poor both in terms of their descriptive and evaluative analysis. Watchdog groups have repeatedly criticized USAID for its lack of programmatic transparency, which some attributed to an internal agency culture that overly promoted success stories and minimized failures.
Moreover, because American development assistance is mostly carried out by for-profit companies and large NGOs, many former practitioners are prevented through nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) from speaking with researchers or discussing the programs they managed. Arguably, the privatization of US development assistance has ironically hindered the sector’s ability to engage in self-criticism and innovate since doing so potentially jeopardized future executive and congressional support.
Defenders and critics of USAID each have an incentive to encourage rigorous, critical, and good faith research on the impact of these programs. The Trump administration, for instance, could build a public website that organized all of USAID’s programs into a single searchable database available to researchers. The site could include program evaluation reports, budgets, and other relevant and disclosable information that might help the American people, and researchers, better understand whether and how these programs worked. If they mostly burned cash, as the administration claims, then illustrating that to the public by sharing information about these programs seems like an easy policy win.
Moreover, development contractors could unilaterally release their former and current employees from their NDAs, which would allow them to write and speak freely about their experiences without fearing a lawsuit. Accounts of the day-to-day operation of international development programs would offer a rich repository for reflection and analysis, as well as highlight the immeasurable and unintended effects of these different programs.
For those committed to their perceptions of USAID, however, the stakes of this question may be too high to be subjected to good faith debate and social science inquiry. What would it mean for Republicans to learn that their cuts to health programming led to easily preventable deaths? Or more provocatively, what would be the significance of discovering that USAID’s democracy assistance programming accomplished little more than burning cash? The former might point to the cruelty of Republican policy, while the latter could be even more devastating to the extent it signaled the impotence of American exceptionalism and the emptiness of American democracy at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The question, then, is not whether international development’s effectiveness should be studied, but whether American society is open-minded enough to wrestle with and accept the interesting surprises and uncomfortable truths this research might reveal.