Devex Pro Insider: Congress has (finally) entered the foreign aid chat

This is a special Saturday edition of Devex Pro Insider from Senior Reporter Michael Igoe. In an era of upheaval, this newsletter tackles some of the biggest questions about the future of U.S. foreign aid, with insider reporting and analysis delivered straight to your inbox. Jan. 24, 2025, has become a "where were you?" moment for the global development community. For me, it was a dash from the gym to my laptop to break the news of a global stop-work order that brought the entire U.S. foreign aid system to a standstill. For many of you, it was the day the funding stopped, the clock began ticking on sector-wide layoffs, and the projects providing lifesaving HIV medications and nutrition assistance went dark. A year later, the "chaos" predicted by my initial sources has settled into a rigid new reality. The U.S. Agency for International Development, as we knew it, is gone, replaced by a State Department-led model that has yet to prove it can deliver on the mission. Outside the boxes of bureaucracy and budgets, we’re witnessing seismic upheaval. What is the mission of U.S. foreign aid in 2026? Is it to lead a global cooperative push toward sustainable development that expands the benefits of a rules-based international order? Or is it to seek and seize transactional “wins” that put America first? Was it ever one or the other, or has it always been a tug-of-war between them? I’ve been struck by how much the collective effort to process what occurred over the last year has broadened into a more sweeping reexamination of the entire project of U.S. foreign assistance. It feels like the floodgates have opened for a debate about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the U.S. aid system that existed before 2025 — though everyone I talk to seems to agree on one thing: There is no going back. It feels strange to call Jan. 24 — the date of the stop-work order — an “anniversary” when we don’t yet know what path it has put us on. A better word might be “fracture.” At every level, from the individual to the institutional, what we assumed about the future has splintered into very different possibilities. I don’t want to downplay the enormous personal toll that U.S. development professionals and their families have experienced over the last year, but another story is the way many of them have reclaimed agency and transformed loss into motivation. One example of that is the growing number of U.S. development professionals now running for political office. For the system as a whole, I think the fight is just beginning. The events of the past year were dramatic, but in a strange way, they also lacked substance. There was a stop-work order, and then a series of cascading events that seemed to outpace the systems meant to manage them. There was very little opportunity for real debate amid the fog and disorientation. So maybe it’s a better sign that the first thing I’m focused on in 2026 is the epitome of process and deliberation. Does a $50 billion bipartisan appropriations bill for foreign aid mean that things are returning to normal this year? No. But hopefully, it means we can at least have the debate. Read: Trump dismantled USAID. Now these aid workers are running for office Plus: $50B US funding bill a welcome surprise, but will it see light of day? (Pro) A compromise budget, but can it hold? This month’s release of a compromise $50 billion appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026 represents a critical — albeit complicated — turning point in the story of post-2025 U.S. foreign aid. The deal, struck between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, reflects some of the massive changes that have taken place over the last year, but also offers a rare glimmer of stability following months of institutional dismantling. The $50 billion top-line figure represents a roughly 16% cut from the previous year. That is a weighty reduction, but it is also a significant departure from the Trump administration’s original vision. Lawmakers effectively rejected the president’s request for a 47.7% slash to the budget, providing nearly $20 billion more than the White House had proposed. After months of unilateral action by the White House — shuttering buildings, terminating awards, rescinding funds — and little pushback from Congress, it's significant that lawmakers have staked out a unified position. This compromise suggests that, despite the administration's efforts to deconstruct the sector, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is still willing to fight for a baseline level of global engagement. It is also significant that the White House has — at least for now — signaled its intention to go along with the plan. On Jan. 14, the Office of Management and Budget, which has aggressively sought to slash aid funding even in the face of congressional appropriations, released a “statement of administration policy” in support of this budget bill. The statement strikes a victorious tone, welcoming lawmakers’ agreement to “realign foreign aid by significantly reducing spending, eliminating wasteful and harmful programs, consolidating accounts, and creating the new America First Opportunity Fund” — a flexible funding account that the White House has asked for. But at this moment, those line items feel secondary to what could be the defining question of the year ahead. For those of us tracking this fault line between two visions of America’s role in the world, it’s no longer just about how much money is being spent on foreign assistance and for what, but who actually controls it. The shadow of executive power looms large over this budget bill. If it is passed and signed, it will serve as a high-stakes test of whether Congress can reassert its authority over foreign assistance. Lawmakers have written new transparency and oversight guardrails into the bill in an attempt to do that. That seems to be the negotiation that is holding this process together, as InterAction’s Lisa Bos told my colleague Adva Saldinger this week in a Devex Pro briefing. On one side, an effort to “affirm [the administration’s] vision for foreign assistance.” On the other side, “guardrails and constraints.” A key question for 2026 is whether that compromise can hold. Read: Congress may pass a $50B foreign aid bill. Will Trump spend the money? (Pro) Putting the budget into action The other question hanging over all of this is: Who’s going to do the work? Readers of this newsletter need no reminder of the wholesale hollowing out of the U.S. global development workforce that took place over the last 12 months. One of the issues I reported on regularly when I focused on USAID was the agency’s long-standing struggle with strategic workforce planning. In the few years before USAID’s dismantling by the Trump administration, it felt like these challenges — with burnout, retention, and equity — were coming to a head. Institutional support contractors were forming unions to press for better benefits. Some were even staging coordinated protests. The agency was understaffed and overstretched by a world in crisis. Now the vast majority of those USAID employees have been dismissed, along with more than a thousand State Department colleagues and huge numbers of contractor and NGO partners. If Congress passes a $50 billion foreign aid budget bill this month, who is going to implement it? “Let's say the Europe and Eurasia bureau staff at State decide they want to do a basic [education] program in Tajikistan. At USAID, the Europe bureau would just have walked across the hall to the basic ed office, and they would have found all the best practices on basic ed around the world. But there's no office across the hall now at the State Department. There is no basic ed office. There's no [water and sanitation] office,” Jim Kunder, a longtime U.S. foreign aid expert, told Adva this week. The administration already seems to be turning to some familiar — even formerly out-of-favor — options. While Trump officials have railed against United Nations agencies, they just pledged $2 billion in humanitarian relief funding to the international body. “The $2 billion represents a test for the U.N., an opportunity to demonstrate its usefulness to an administration seeking to rebuild a global humanitarian relief system that it largely dismantled in its first months in office,” my colleague Colum Lynch writes. No one would argue that the old U.S. aid system was perfect. Even before January 2025, it sometimes felt like it was teetering on the brink of systemic crisis. But something I often heard from battle-tested USAID veterans was that most of the agency’s problems stemmed from some previous attempt to solve another problem. The hard part isn’t telling everyone what’s broken; it’s finding ways to make it work. Exclusive: Inside US-UN plan to remake funding for humanitarian crises + The Trump effect: Explore our dedicated page to catch up on all the latest news, in-depth analysis, and exclusive insights on how the Trump administration’s policies are reshaping U.S. aid and global development.