Presented by Abt Global
Getting figures for how much the State Department has and has not spent on foreign assistance has made pulling teeth look easy. Fortunately, our smiles are still intact after we gathered some key findings.
Also in today’s edition: The multifaceted role technology plays in shaping development — past, present, and future.
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State of play
The State Department has been on a spending spree — sort of. At least that’s how the recently opened drip-drip of funding feels compared to the deep financial freeze that marked the first half of this year. And even now, the spending constitutes only a fraction of what the U.S. government would normally dole out.
But it’s something — and $4.7 billion, to be exact. That’s the amount the State Department has obligated in new foreign aid for the second half of 2025 — about a fifth of the money spent by the department and USAID during equivalent periods in periods in prior years, my colleagues Elissa Miolene and Miguel Antonio Tamonan write.
It’s a marked jump from the $500 million obligated in the third quarter of the year. The boost is largely due to the series of bilateral health compacts the U.S. has signed in recent weeks with several African nations.
Global health, in fact, is one of two pillars — alongside humanitarian response — that America’s foreign aid system remains focused on. But unlike the small, quick-hit responses to natural disasters that account for most of the humanitarian aid spent, global health seems to be where the money is, for the moment at least.
But the figures come with a caveat: The State Department did not respond to a request for comment, so this list reflects only what we could verify, and may not include the full spectrum of nonpublic commitments from the department.
Still, the list we compiled of a dozen commitments offers some insights into the administration’s thinking — from the $500,000 it spent to respond to monsoon flooding in the Philippines, to the $150 million it’s giving to American drone delivery company Zipline, to the $1.7 billion in health assistance it’s providing to Uganda over the next five years.
Read: 24 weeks, $4.7 billion spent — how aid has slowed under Trump (Pro)
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Number crunching
To get even more granular — and grimmer — Devex data cruncher Miguel analyzed the aid money that’s been committed so far. This year, the U.S. obligated around $19.4 billion in economic aid — a broadly equivalent measure to official development assistance — which constitutes a 65% drop from the year before.
But even this may offer an overly rosy picture of likely obligations going forward. The U.S. fiscal year runs to the end of September. As we noted in previous analyses, many of the current disbursements and obligations are from the last few months of the Biden administration that still fall within fiscal 2025, with most of the money coming from the now-defunct USAID.
So what does this add up to? The amount spent under Trump is likely to be even lower.
Read: How US aid obligations fell by 65% in 2025 (Pro)
In memoriam
Today, the world knows when hunger becomes famine thanks largely to one pioneering humanitarian: Nicholas Haan, who died on Dec. 2 at the age of 60.
More than two decades earlier, Haan developed the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, a tool that reshaped how the world recognizes and responds to hunger crises. Today, aid agencies, governments, and donors rely on the United Nations-coordinated system to measure food crises across countries and over time, helping direct billions of dollars in humanitarian funding that affects millions of people living through conflict, drought, and economic shocks, my colleague Ayenat Mersie writes.
Haan began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Kenya, where he taught science to secondary school students. The experience appears to have been transformative: He spent much of the rest of his life in the region, particularly in Kenya and Tanzania.
Throughout the 1990s, Haan worked across development and public health projects in the region, including leading a trachoma eradication program in central Tanzania and later working with NASA as a climate scientist. The combination was emblematic of his career: He was a practitioner who consistently worked to connect fieldwork with data, and humanitarian response with technological systems, Ayenat writes.
His work with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in East Africa, after years of failed rains pushed Somalia to the brink of a devastating hunger crisis, spurred him to create a standardized, simple five-point system for helping decision-makers understand the severity of food crises.
“Nick turned data into decisions that saved lives, and inspired many of us to do better for the people we serve,” Simon Renk, a senior monitoring officer at WFP, commented on a LinkedIn post.
“Nick and the IPC heralded a new era of a structured, rigorous systematic approach to humanitarian response,” wrote Andrew Harberd, the former emergency coordinator for FAO in Somalia. “A life well lived. A job well done.”
Read the obituary: Nicholas Haan, architect of global system to detect famines, dies at 60
+ We believe the impact of the lives of the members of our global development community is worth remembering. As we expand our obituary section, we invite you to help us pay tribute to those who have passed. If you’ve recently lost a colleague, friend, or loved one, or know someone in the community who has, please consider letting us know via editor@devex.com.
AI equity
Haan spoke frequently about the potential for new technology to make humanitarian decision-making faster, more transparent, and more accountable — in the hopes of benefiting the world’s poorest.
And perhaps no technology today is as potentially revolutionary as artificial intelligence, though the development community is still wrestling with the best ways to adopt it.
For the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, a philanthropy focused on advancing AI for public good, that means focusing less on technological novelty than on ensuring communities and public institutions can work together to build AI solutions that meet real needs, my colleague Catherine Cheney writes.
To that end, the foundation just unveiled more than $75 million in grants this year aimed at shaping how AI is used — and by whom. Recipients range from Digital Green, which is scaling AI-enabled agricultural advisory services for smallholder farmers, to Direct Relief, which is applying machine learning to improve forecasting in humanitarian medical response.
Increasingly, AI companies are also getting involved in grantmaking. Earlier this month, for example, OpenAI announced more than $40 million in grants for U.S.-based nonprofits.
“Companies are racing for ever more powerful models that have certain fundamental capacities, but those capacities aren’t translated into the layer of applications that actually serve public purposes,” Vilas Dhar, president and trustee of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, tells Catherine.
“In so many places, AI is already arriving, but it’s arriving through mechanisms that aren’t connected to community,” he adds. “We need a new set, a layer of institutions, that are able to take the incredible innovation happening in these companies and turn them into real outcomes.”
Read: McGovern Foundation’s AI grants prioritize institutions over breakthroughs
Rocking the boat
Another potentially revolutionary transformation that will impact the development community? Critical minerals — and, like AI, determining who benefits from them.
At a U.N. meeting on the environment in Nairobi, world leaders on Friday adopted a decision on critical minerals and metals that could encourage better management as the transition to renewable energy powers rising demand, Devex contributing reporter David Njagi writes.
Among other things, the critical minerals resolution calls for the equitable participation of low- and middle-income countries in international discussions around the sustainable management of minerals and metals. Some 186 countries agreed to the nonbinding text, though the United States did not vote on it.
By advancing the resolution, member states set the global standard on critical mineral governance, says Erica Westenberg, the director of governance programs at the Natural Resource Governance Institute.
“At the minimum, it does show there is growing momentum on the importance of well-governed minerals sectors,” she tells David, adding: “That this resolution came from a producer country like Colombia shows leadership can come from the global south.”
Read: Governments adopt UNEA-7 resolution on critical minerals and metals
In other news
The African Development Bank launched a pledging conference on Monday to raise $25 billion for its concessional lending arm for low-income countries, as cuts and uncertainty in U.S. support threaten to widen a funding gap. [Reuters]
South Sudan has grounded four aircraft operated by the U.N. mission over alleged illegal surveillance and smuggling, which the world body denies. [AP News]
The EU is flying more than $4.1 million of humanitarian aid into Sudan’s Darfur as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces’ capture of el-Fasher worsens mass displacement. [Al Jazeera]
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About the author
Anna Gawel
Anna Gawel is the Managing Editor of Devex. She previously worked as the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat, the flagship publication of D.C.’s diplomatic community. She’s had hundreds of articles published on world affairs, U.S. foreign policy, politics, security, trade, travel and the arts on topics ranging from the impact of State Department budget cuts to Caribbean efforts to fight climate change. She was also a broadcast producer and digital editor at WTOP News and host of the Global 360 podcast. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.
