Trump’s USAID Purge and Foreign Aid Turmoil Spark Global Security Concerns

Photo: J. David Ake/Getty Images
Over the past fortnight, the administration has prohibited all new programming and issued a broad “stop-work” order on existing U.S. foreign assistance programs. In one fell swoop it removed more than 50 career civil and foreign service leaders of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and then suspended others for allegedly trying to maintain basic rules associated with employment terminations or security related to sensitive and classified information. In a whirlwind, the clamp down included the removal of USAID’s account from X and its website from the internet. Yesterday, the administration conveyed its intent to shut down the agency as rumors also swirled that President Trump will effectively force the battered organization into the Department of State. Today, employees were informed in the wee hours of the morning not to show up at USAID’s headquarters, and later in the day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he is taking over as the agency’s acting administrator. In this same time period, hundreds of USAID contract employees have been laid off or furloughed. Nongovernmental organizations and other humanitarian and development enterprises that partner with the U.S. government through grants and contracts have laid off well over a thousand employees so far. While many humanitarian and development programs sputtered to a standstill, and as thousands of people working to improve lives, livelihoods, health, and freedoms internationally were separated from their jobs, vulnerable communities around the world began to feel the effects of a vanishing partner.
Although some administration leaders have harshly derided the agency based on caricatures, USAID has actually represented American ideas in action. I worked there during three presidential administrations, including the first Trump administration. The people who served at the agency across all different hiring categories, including foreign service nationals, contract employees, civil service leaders, and foreign service officers, struck me as a particularly dedicated and highly trained group. There was always a mix of conservatives and liberals, though such viewpoints seldom came through in the nonpartisan work of the agency, executed with bipartisan U.S. political support. These experts—many with years of experience in specialty areas of agriculture, economics, security, and public health—are exemplary public servants, and many routinely put their lives on the line. That’s why the entrance of USAID’s lobby has featured a solemn memorial to the employees who lost their lives doing such work on behalf of the American people.
There are real reasons to care about development and humanitarian aid. Its share of the federal budget, less than one hundredth, should not be one of them. Despite its relatively small size and a name that subtly belies its importance, foreign aid is critical to U.S. foreign policy, national security, and international standing. Through U.S. global health programs focused on AIDS and malaria, for example, the United States has saved more than 35 million lives around the world over the past couple of decades. Programs to strengthen health systems additionally identify and contain the spread of infectious diseases, work essential to any commitment to maintain or even improve the health of Americans.
Assistance focused on food, water, and agricultural markets to prevent hunger is another easily recognizable area of development and humanitarian support. After all, the United States is the largest provider of food assistance. But strategic financial support in this and other areas is about a lot more than direct service delivery. Better systems and information are key. Take, for example, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which was initially created by USAID during the Reagan administration in response to crises in Africa. That U.S. innovation developed into one of the world’s preeminent sources of information and analysis about impending food crises, demonstrating the value of such technology-fueled information management programs for U.S. efforts ranging from Sudan to Afghanistan. Such systems, drawing on satellite-enabled remote sensing data and collaborative networks across the U.S. government and globally, only become more important in a world of increasingly extreme weather impacts. As of this past week, FEWS NET and so many other valuable programs supported by U.S. foreign assistance were halted and pulled offline.
All of this is not to say that reforming foreign aid is unimportant. Rather it is continuously needed. Recent presidential administrations have each implemented numerous reforms to make U.S. foreign assistance operate more effectively and efficiently. Whether it was to make programs faster, more transparent, or more likely to strengthen a stricken community’s ability to pick itself back up in the future, working with Congress was always a key ingredient for successful reform. The Bush administration’s establishment of the Millennium Challenge Corporation enabled bigger, longer-term infrastructure investment partnerships with promising country partners, while the first Trump administration stood up the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. These investment-oriented innovations, developed closely with Congress, are worth continuing to build upon while leveraging USAID’s private sector engagement programs and its on-the-ground presence in countries around the world.
With regard to USAID’s future, Musk has said it is “time for it to die,” and that President Trump has agreed to shut it down. Every administration over the last 75 years has wanted to shape foreign aid in line with its goals, but making an imprint on U.S. foreign assistance is one thing, turning it into a fossil is another. Hollowing out and then strangling the system into extinction through executive actions is akin to throwing away our toolbox or unilaterally disarming at a time of mounting geopolitical competition for partnerships globally. It does not make us safer or well-positioned to influence the world for the better.
In reaction to the Trump administration’s early steps, news coverage is increasingly drawing attention to transnational threats mitigated by foreign assistance, like corruption, conflict, and criminal networks connected to the trafficking of people and drugs. Some Democratic members of Congress held a press event at the front doors of the agency headquarters to voice their concerns. Well-researched news stories on community impacts and U.S. global standing will surely follow. The damage from an ongoing bureaucratic purge, and the associated chain reaction, however, will already be severe.
We should all care about foreign aid—we should care enough to make it better, not kill it. While a more measured approach to sharpening U.S. tools of foreign assistance and national security investments would be prudent, that does not seem to be in the offing. Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the branch of government that should have the authority to establish, fund, or dissolve entire agencies of the U.S. government, should demand it.
Noam Unger is the director of the Sustainable Development and Resilience Initiative and a senior fellow with the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
