Devex Pro Insider: What we talk about when we talk about foreign aid

This is 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. A criminal organization. Patriotic, hard-working Americans. A ball of worms. The best of America. Covert regime-change. Protector of democracy. Condoms for Gaza. Saving millions of lives. Waste, fraud, and abuse. An essential investment in national security. Radical lunatics. From the American people. The rhetoric around U.S. foreign aid has been supercharged and superpolarized since President Donald Trump took office in January. This war of words — fueled by anti-aid disinformation — has reverberated around the internet, the country, and the world, shaping strong opinions about a slice of U.S. foreign policy that previously flew under the radar. It culminated in — or deteriorated into — USAID’s dismantling and dissolution earlier this month. Now, with aid leadership transferred to the State Department and an entire sector struggling to stay afloat, the development community is faced with an existential challenge: reclaiming the story. This week, Devex contributor Lauren Evans examines a critical question about what has unfolded over the past six months. Why did Americans, who broadly support humanitarian assistance, allow — and even celebrate — the Elon Musk-led destruction of America’s foreign aid agency? It’s a question that touches on the fickle nature of public opinion, the challenges of constituent education, and — perhaps most uncomfortably — the development community’s long-standing struggle to communicate its work. And it’s a question that needs to be answered fast. The end of USAID is not the end of the story. This week The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is drafting plans to wind down PEPFAR, the highly lauded global HIV initiative. For what it’s worth, I’m told no final decision about that has been made. But the point remains: There is a fundamental rethink of U.S. foreign aid happening right now. It can’t be a one-sided debate. Read: Why don't Americans understand aid, and what do we do about it? (Pro) Background reading: State Dept takeover of USAID is an 'impending train wreck,' experts say (Pro) Telling USAID’s story As a reporter covering USAID, I was in near-constant contact with the agency’s press office. Even so, the behind-the-scenes scramble that took place between my submitting an inquiry and receiving an official comment — or “no comment” — was mostly a black box to me. In her piece, Lauren surfaces some of the underappreciated restrictions imposed on USAID that made it difficult for the agency to broadcast its achievements (the Smith–Mundt Act of 1948, anyone?). But I also found myself wondering how the agency’s own communicators viewed this disconnect between the agency’s work and its public perception. I posed that question to one long-time communications expert who has worked inside USAID — and requested anonymity to speak. They told me they were always hearing the criticism: “USAID doesn’t know how to tell its story.” According to my source, this problem with external communications was actually rooted in the agency’s struggles around internal communications. “The knowledge management, the flow of information, wasn't set up well or right. There wasn't an investment in it,” they said. In this person’s experience, here’s how that would play out: USAID implements a large number of dispersed projects with limited visibility between or across them; implementers collect and report a huge number of project-level indicators; the agency struggles to answer big-picture questions about what it has achieved. “You've got a gajillion indicators over here, but you still can't answer the question: ‘How many jobs have we created?’” they said. A better approach, the same person suggested, would have been to involve external communications experts at the outset — to ask, “What is it that we want to be able to say our work is accomplishing,” and then, “How do we distribute that information?” As the agency began to grapple with the risks and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence, some of this was starting to change, my source said. But that evolution was cut short by the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID. While USAID’s communications teams were a mishmash of institutional contractors, direct hires, and appointees, the State Department has a robust public affairs operation staffed by foreign service officers. I asked my source if that means the State Department will be able to communicate about development more effectively than USAID did. “No,” they said. “You’re not going to have the content.” Read: Is aid losing the comms war? And what do we do about it? (Pro) Collective action problem On Jan. 31, one week after the stop-work order brought USAID to a screeching halt, Sadie Healy and Meg McClure — the two-woman team behind the global health-focused firm Molloy Consultants — launched the website USAIDstopwork.com. It quickly became a reference point for media and commentators tracking the fallout of USAID’s rapid dismantling. Their goal was to assess the damage in terms that might compel influential lawmakers to do something. While others focused on the dire impacts cuts would have for disease prevention, disaster relief, hunger, and other core foreign aid priorities, Healy and McClure chose to foreground the impacts for Americans. They paired a red, white, and blue-branded website with front-and-center tallies of the number of domestic and global jobs lost due to the USAID stop-work order. They landed interviews on mainstream news outlets such as CNN and The Associated Press, where they zeroed in on specific U.S. states — Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina — likely to feel the brunt of aid-related layoffs. “State-driven data was what got people to call their senators. It's what got people agitated enough to actually learn about USAID and do something,” McClure told me. But then they ran into a problem. Healy and McClure told me that instead of providing them with the job-loss data and impact stories they needed to mount a full-throated defense, the development community stayed quiet. Most organizations seemed to lie low, hoping to dodge DOGE’s wrath. “Whether it was out of fear or strategy, that time never came. We did not come together with a unified voice to defend what we all believe in, and that's the saddest thing to me,” Healy told me, adding that some organizations issued “direct threats” to stop their employees from speaking out. Healy sees a painful lesson in this for the global health community she has been a part of: Despite a fervent focus on mission — or “the why” of their work — individual organizations have never been very good at working collectively. “That ‘why’ abruptly stops when we need to share,” she said. "I don't know that we could have made it out of this. But I do wonder if we had a unified fight, if we could have preserved more.” “United we stand, divided we fell,” she said. The PEPFAR playbook Since good news stories about U.S. foreign aid have been scarce this year, it seems worth zeroing in on one of them. This month, when U.S. lawmakers rubber-stamped the Trump administration’s request to rescind more than $8 billion Congress approved in the past two fiscal years for foreign aid, they demanded one major change: cuts to PEPFAR were off the table. There are big caveats to this victory, and I’ll get into a couple of them. But I also want to try to answer some questions that a lot of foreign aid supporters are asking right now: How did PEPFAR advocates convince lawmakers to defend the program? And are there any replicable lessons for other parts of the development community? To help answer that, I spoke to a long-time PEPFAR advocate who was involved in the lobbying effort. They spoke on condition of anonymity to protect future advocacy efforts. Here are five takeaways from our conversation: 1. Earlier attacks primed PEPFAR’s supporters After two decades of strong bipartisan support, PEPFAR has faced a rough couple of years. A five-year reauthorization process that usually sails through Congress crashed into the shoals of domestic abortion politics after a barrage of attacks from the conservative Heritage Foundation starting in 2023. The program’s legal provisions expired in March, and its path to reauthorization is cloudy. There might have been a silver lining, though. While other parts of the development community were caught off guard by the intensity of Trump’s anti-aid policies, PEPFAR’s advocates had already spent two and a half years shoring up their defenses against similar attacks. “We haven't been shying away from those tough conversations,” says my source. They emphasize, however, that the goal was never just to get PEPFAR removed from the rescissions package — it was to convince members to vote against the entire package. In that, they fell short. 2. Fact-checking works As with much of the current campaign against foreign aid programs, attacks on PEPFAR have featured unsubstantiated allegations and outright misinformation — such as afbudget director Russell Vought’s claim that PEPFAR was funding abortions in Russia, where it hasn’t operated since 2012. “There were talking points sent to Republican offices about what this rescission would include that were based on complete fabrications,” my source told me. For PEPFAR’s supporters, being able to reach lawmakers with the “receipts” to disprove those false claims was key. It was also good practice. “The rescissions process is helping us to prepare for the future, because we know the kinds of messaging that they’re going to try to use to tear the program down.” 3. Staff interest ≠ member action Congressional staffers are listening. That doesn’t mean their bosses are going to do anything about it, my source said. “There’s a lot of staff interest, but converting that to member action has been really, really difficult. That is where we’re all struggling the most.” Faced with a choice between backing Trump and supporting PEPFAR, even sympathetic offices are falling in line, my source said. 4. Specific examples beat abstract projections At this point in the aid advocacy fight, lawmakers are moved by concrete evidence from specific countries, rather than big numbers or high-level hypotheticals. “If you say that Russia and China are going to come in, give me an example of a country where that’s actually happening. If you think farmers are going to lose their jobs say, ‘In this state, X, Y and Z is happening,’” my source suggested. “They don’t want to hear these generalities anymore. They don’t believe them.” 5. Winning a battle, not the war There is no reason to think this will be the last rescissions package that targets foreign aid. And even more importantly, stopping this $400 million budget cut does little to turn the flow of funding back on for PEPFAR’s programs. “This rescissions win is a really important political win, but practically has almost no implications for us in terms of saving lives,” my source said. “They need to start obligating new funding. They need to do a country operating plan. They need to start pushing the program forward.” What it means to push the program forward is a particularly thorny question. Congress may be sending a clear message that it wants PEPFAR to continue, but they are pairing that with demands for a real discussion about winding the program down, my source said. Draft State Department plans that leaked to The New York Times this week suggest the Trump administration is preparing an opening salvo in the debate over PEPFAR’s “endgame.” That fight is just beginning. Read: How the Senate saved PEPFAR — but still greenlit billions in aid cuts Read more: Senate blocks $400M cut to PEPFAR, but it's a shell of its former self Watch: What should a responsible PEPFAR transition look like? (Pro) From our archives: Abortion politics cast shadow over PEPFAR reauthorization + 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.