The Trump administration’s decimation of U.S. foreign aid was largely met with a collective shrug by Americans outside the development community. Where did the sector go wrong?
Also in today’s edition: Germany goes down the path of U.S. aid.
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When asked whether they support helping others — with food, for example, or vaccines — most Americans say yes. But when you throw in a politically fraught term such as “foreign aid,” many balk. Where is the disconnect?
There’s likely no perfect PR or communications strategy that would’ve prevented USAID’s demise given how laser-focused President Donald Trump and his ally Elon Musk were on killing it. Musk’s boasts about feeding USAID into the woodchipper weren’t exactly subtle.
But that doesn’t absolve the agency completely. Some say USAID was too silent about its successes — and the smear campaigns routinely hurled at it. Others argue USAID’s supporters focused too heavily on lobbying lawmakers instead of making their case to average Americans. They point out that an alphabet soup of off-putting acronyms didn’t exactly help make that case clear.
Regardless, somewhere along the way, hearts and minds were lost.
“I wonder to what extent we — the humanitarian and human rights community — need to look back at whether we screwed up, whether we lost our constituency,” The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said in May. “This used to be a bipartisan issue, and we lost a lot of America.”
Part of that loss, however, is rooted in law, writes Devex contributor Lauren Evans. In 1948, Congress passed an act that prohibited materials produced by the U.S. government for foreign audiences from being distributed domestically.
That squelched the agency’s ability to, well, brag.
“There was a culture of not blowing your own horn,” explained longtime USAID official Patrick Fine.
That silence allowed Trump and Musk to grab the bullhorn and blast USAID as bloated and corrupt — using cherry-picked information or, in some cases, outright lies.
So now what? It’s not too late to tell USAID’s story, its supporters say, in the hopes of changing the narrative.
As William Herkewitz, a former USAID comms chief, pointed out, the agency forestalled the deaths of at least 2 million people during a drought that ravaged the Horn of Africa in 2022. The tax burden on each American household to save those lives was about $6 a year. And yet, Americans were in the dark about what they just accomplished.
“Though America had just completed one of the most successful humanitarian responses in modern history, we didn’t even attempt a victory lap,” he wrote. “We merely shared some ineffective social media posts and moved on to the next disaster. It is baffling in hindsight.”
Read more: Why don’t Americans understand aid, and what do we do about it? (Pro)
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The odds aren’t exactly stacked in favor of development professionals nowadays. Besides past messaging missteps, they’re confronting the brave new world of artificial intelligence. And between AI’s efficiency gains and Trump’s foreign aid cuts, professionals need to get savvy to survive.
That means taking advantage of how AI can help you achieve more, by doing less. And there are still plenty of roles that will remain relevant if people adopt the power of this transformative technology, especially when it comes to automating repetitive tasks and using data to drive decisions.
For example, the need to speed up and tailor proposal writing is greater than ever.
“Organizations are under intense pressure to bring in new work, which means they’re submitting more proposals than ever, and many of these proposals are for unfamiliar sectors, making existing boilerplate language less useful,” says Joel Levesque, a veteran development consultant. “As a result, teams are scrambling to create more customized content on tight timelines” — something AI can help with.
Monitoring and evaluation is another area ripe for change.
“With AI tools now able to automate survey analysis, detect anomalies, and even write impact reports, the work becomes less about mechanics and more about uncovering and translating the story the data is telling,” says Anwulika Ngozi Okonjo, a digital innovation strategist
“Too many roles in global development are over-reliant on under-resourced, overburdened professionals,” she adds. “If we do this right, AI can help us build institutions that are more dignified and efficient.”
Read: 7 global development roles that are being transformed by AI (Career)
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Germany could theoretically become the world’s largest aid donor now that the U.S. has shrunk from the scene. But don’t count on it yet.
The coalition government already dropped the target of committing 0.7% of Germany’s gross national income to development and announced an 8% cut to the ministry for global development for 2025. It also plans to cut emergency humanitarian aid by 53% for this year, my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz tells me.
Germany’s aid budget has in fact been dropping for years. There was a 3.4% cut between 2023 and 2024, while another $1.1 billion was axed between 2024 and 2025.
The downward trendline is likely to continue.
The 2026 draft budget, approved by the cabinet this week, proposes a cut of €330 million, bringing the German development ministry BMZ’s budget to €9.94 billion, down from €10.3 billion in 2025. It marks another setback for the aid sector as Germany joins the growing roster of countries slashing foreign assistance.
Julia Steets, director of the Global Public Policy Institute, a Berlin-based aid and development think tank, points out that like many other countries, Germany finds itself under fiscal pressure — and painful trade-offs.
“It’s going to be very difficult because the general shift towards spending more for defense is so strong, and the overall increase of debt is so high in the current budget that it will have to come down,” says Steets, adding that with Chancellor Friedrich Merz “adopting a lot of the right-wing populist positions, it's going to be hard on the development budget.”
Background: Germany’s coalition contract includes new cuts to aid budget (Pro)
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An internal United Nations evaluation delivered a stark assessment of the U.N.’s country teams, revealing that the resident coordinator system has achieved only “limited results” for coherent development support. Now, Max-Otto Baumann of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability argues the time has come to move away from the distraction of the flaws in coordination, to focus on making the U.N. more impact-driven.
“The evaluation comes at a time when the UN80 Initiative — triggered by a funding collapse, and currently the dominant theme at the U.N. — shines a glaring light on organizational deficits while providing a window of opportunity for drastic reforms,” Baumann writes.
Opinion: What now for the UN? A new evaluation prompts critical questions
Farmers are facing tough times, but there’s a powerful solution in plain sight: school meal programs. Linking these programs to climate-friendly farming can achieve multiple goals at once: nutritional food for children, support for farmers, jobs creation, and resilience against climate change.
“School meals are one of the most powerful safety nets we have for child health and education; they are also an untapped lever for transforming our food systems if they are designed with a twin emphasis on farmers and on the children who eat the food they grow,” The Rockefeller Foundation’s Sara Farley writes.
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What if global health funding paid for results instead of activity? Rather than rewarding efficiency or transparency, traditional donor-funded global health programs have tended to focus on “capacity building,” which prioritizes the development of local institutions and workforce.
Nicolas Boillot, CEO of global health software company SystemOne, argues that while this has been a sensible approach historically, modern medical products and digital infrastructure means, well, that times they are a’changing. Fund products that can easily and quickly report on usage and impact, and this may “incentivize health systems that will not only function, but also endure,” he writes.
Opinion: Global health must shift to reward impact and reduce corruption
At least 48 people were killed at an aid distribution site in Gaza Wednesday, as U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is set to arrive in Israel today. Meanwhile, Canada joins the U.K. and France in backing the recognition of Palestinian statehood. [AP and The Independent]
The U.N. held an emergency meeting over growing concerns that high accommodation costs in COP30 host city Belém, Brazil, could make the summit less affordable and accessible for participating countries. [The Guardian]
The U.N. is preparing to deliver aid to Syria’s Sweida province after receiving government approval, following clashes that killed over 1,000 and displaced 175,000 people. [Reuters]
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