For almost twenty-five years, William Easterly, a free-market economist at New York University, has been a prominent academic critic of foreign-aid programs. In his 2001 book, “The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics,” Easterly wrote that decades of development assistance from the West had failed to spur growth and relieve poverty in many poor countries. Moreover, he argued that U.S. aid programs had propped up autocratic rulers, such as Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister from 1995 to 2012, once dubbed “the man who tried to make dictatorship acceptable” by The Economist. In a 2014 book, Easterly wrote, “What used to be the divine right of kings has in our time become the development right of dictators.”
Many of the aid programs that Easterly has criticized were supported by the United States Agency for International Development. U.S.A.I.D., created in the nineteen-sixties by John F. Kennedy, is the world’s largest bilateral-aid agency; in 2023, Congress allocated more than forty billion dollars to its projects. But, on Donald Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that halted most aid programs and claimed the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy” were “in many cases antithetical to American values.” Since then, Elon Musk and his colleagues at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been dismantling U.S.A.I.D., shuttering its headquarters, taking its Web site offline, and placing most of its employees on leave. Last Monday, Musk wrote on his X platform, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
When I called Easterly last week to ask him about these developments, his tone was far from celebratory. “It’s illegal and it’s undemocratic,” he said, of the slashing tactics adopted by Musk and Trump. “Even if I like the idea of moving away from aid, I cannot condone this horrific way to go about it.” The Administration has said it plans to reduce the number of U.S.A.I.D. staffers from more than ten thousand to about six hundred. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the State Department will take over some of the agency’s operations, but details of how this will happen remain scant. Easterly compared the Trump-Musk approach to the economic “shock therapy” introduced in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “That was a disaster because you needed a gradual transition; you can’t do everything at once,” he said. “I think the same is true of the aid world. There needs to be a gradual transition, not an overnight shutdown.”
Even though many aid programs had failed to meet their objectives, Easterly went on, some of them had worked well, particularly in the area of public health. In recent days, there have been reports of people in Africa being turned away from medical clinics at which they receive drugs to treat H.I.V. that are paid for by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), an initiative that was financed and administered through U.S.A.I.D. The Republican President George W. Bush launched PEPFAR in 2003, and it is widely regarded as the biggest success of aid policy in the past generation. Now it is on hold, as are many other health initiatives in poor countries. The New York Times identified more than thirty medical-trial programs that had been stopped, including malaria treatment for young children in Mozambique, cholera treatment in Bangladesh, and screening for cervical cancer in Malawi.
Over all, U.S.A.I.D. finances programs in more than a hundred countries. Picking through the list, Republicans have highlighted some that they claim show the agency has been following a wasteful and “woke” agenda, including a one-and-a-half-million-dollar grant to promote job opportunities for L.G.B.T.Q. people in Serbia, and a twenty-million-dollar grant to the nonprofit Sesame Workshop to support an Iraqi television show modelled on “Sesame Street.” Last week, Trump said U.S.A.I.D. had “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics”; his Administration’s claim that the U.S. was spending fifty million dollars to provide condoms in Gaza turned out to be fake news.
Esther Duflo, an economist at M.I.T. who studies development and who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work in promoting an experimental approach to alleviating poverty, told me that Trump’s decision to halt all foreign-assistance programs surprised the aid community: he hadn’t mentioned it during the election campaign. In 2003, Duflo and two colleagues founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a global network of researchers, which now operates in dozens of countries and has a staff of several hundred. J-PAL pioneered the practice of using randomized control trials to assess aid interventions—such as whether paying parents to keep their children enrolled in school is effective—and the technique is now widely used throughout the development community. A couple of days after Trump’s directive, U.S.A.I.D. issued stop-work orders for many of the projects that it finances, including J-PAL. Duflo said she and her colleagues are now trying to find alternative funding, but that J-PAL, as a long-established organization with a variety of donors, will continue its work. “But for many smaller organizations it is much more catastrophic,” she said. “They were relying on the U.S. government.” In many cases, Duflo added, aid organizations were telling their field offices to halt their projects. “Even if organizations can find alternative funding, it will take time,” Duflo said. “In the meantime, everyone is sent home.”
There is now great uncertainty about how a Trump-led United States will respond to humanitarian disasters in the developing world, such as earthquakes, famines, and civil wars. Clemence Landers, the vice-president and a senior policy fellow at the think tank Center for Global Development, worked in Liberia, serving as an adviser to the country’s finance minister after the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman head of state elected in Africa. When Johnson Sirleaf came to power, in 2006, Liberia had been wracked by more than a decade of civil war, a military dictatorship, and chronic poverty. Its capital, Monrovia, didn’t have a working electricity system or a functioning health service. “U.S.A.I.D. was one of the first donors to jump in,” Landers recalled. “It helped to get the lights back on, to set up a basic education system and a basic health system.” The head of the U.S.A.I.D. mission in Liberia met frequently with Johnson Sirleaf and acted as a strategic adviser, while the rest of the mission’s staff helped to coördinate foreign assistance, Landers recalled.
“U.S.A.I.D. has a big footprint in-country, and that’s central to this,” she said. “It’s what makes the United States unique.” If Washington pulls back permanently from its leadership role in providing aid and disaster relief, there isn’t any other Western country with the capacity and willingness to take its place, she went on: “A lot of U.S. allies are facing similar constraints—internal lack of support for external engagement—and don’t have big aid budgets and aren’t going to be able to fill the void.” The European Union is trimming its foreign assistance. In France, which is facing a fiscal crisis, a budget announced this week slashed the aid budget by nearly forty per cent. In Germany, where an election is in the offing, there has also been talk of cuts. “It’s not, at this moment, the Europeans who have the resources to fill the gap,” Landers told me. “It’s countries like China.”
While Landers emphasized the importance of foreign-assistance programs and U.S. leadership of these efforts, she also acknowledged that there were legitimate debates about how aid should be targeted and delivered. Some countries, particularly Britain, have argued that donors should concentrate their resources more heavily on the poorest countries, which would mean a reduction of funding to middle-income countries that are viewed as strategic allies, such as Jordan and Egypt. (Israel, a rich country, is one of the largest recipients of U.S. assistance, though most of that is military aid.) Another debate centers on whether U.S.A.I.D. and other agencies direct too much of their budget to big N.G.O.s—called “Beltway bandits” by critics—and not enough to local organizations. “A really ambitious, forward-looking leader could have a big agenda for modernizing the U.S. aid system,” Landers said. “There is a vast amount of agreement that it is ripe for reform.”
