Welcome to the first installment of a special Saturday edition of Devex Pro Insider from Senior Reporter Michael Igoe. For the next few months, this newsletter will tackle some of the biggest questions about the future of U.S. foreign aid, with insider reporting and analysis delivered straight to your inbox.
U.S. foreign aid is in a strange state of suspended animation. What remains of the U.S. Agency for International Development is mostly occupied with its own “responsible decommissioning” — i.e., shutting itself down — while the State Department structure that will absorb the agency’s remaining programs does not yet exist.
USAID staff both in the U.S. and abroad know they will be out of a job soon, but they face a maddeningly opaque competition for limited State Department jobs, paired with a foreign aid hiring market that has been flooded and decimated at the same time. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump is asking Congress to rescind billions of dollars of foreign aid funding for contracts and grants the White House already terminated, in what looks like an effort to lend after-the-fact legitimacy to actions that are currently the subject of multiple lawsuits — and which some predict could eventually end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.