The end of USAID? For this Republican aid expert, it's too early to tell

Over the weekend, a small painting of a tombstone appeared outside the headquarters of what was once the world’s largest bilateral donor: the U.S. Agency for International Development. “RIP USAID,” the tombstone read. “1961-2025.” However, according to Jim Richardson, the former director of the F Bureau — the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance — under the first Trump administration, it’s too early to say if USAID has truly reached its end. “This is certainly not the end of foreign assistance, or foreign aid, from the U.S. government,” said Richardson, speaking at a Devex Pro event on Monday afternoon. “The courts are starting to weigh in, Congress hasn’t had its first hearing yet.” Richardson spoke with Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar exactly three weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump instituted a 90-day freeze on foreign aid. In the time since, thousands of USAID staffers have been fired, locked out of their accounts, or placed on administrative leave, and hundreds of programs have been halted across the world. In Uganda, that means the spread of Ebola has remained uncontained; in Texas, that means nearly $40 million of food aid is stuck on warehouse floors. The moves to dismantle USAID — which have been driven by the Department for Government Efficiency — have happened fast, Richardson said. And while those moves have been supported by Trump, he added, the two other branches of the U.S. government still need to weigh in. “The courts will weigh in in a matter of weeks,” Richardson said. Meanwhile, he said, Congress will also get more involved in foreign assistance once lawmakers meet to discuss the federal budget in mid-March. “So this is going to happen fairly quickly,” he said. “And the question is whether the system will be irrevocably broken by then. I don’t know. I hope not.” Richardson stressed that foreign assistance is an important tool of the U.S. government and that it’s used by every administration to achieve its goals. He also talked about how USAID has never operated in a vacuum: The agency is nearly 100% earmarked, Richardson said, and USAID’s budget is controlled by the State Department. “Everybody knew what the USAID was working on — it’s all public information, published on foreignassistance.gov,” Richardson said. “As a conservative, I disagree with the direction that the Biden administration was going, but as a tool, foreign assistance can help President Trump achieve objectives around the world.” On the surface, it doesn’t seem like a view held by many in Trump’s orbit today. Elon Musk, the billionaire who heads DOGE, has posted on his social media platform X that USAID is a “criminal organization” that “needs to die.” Brian Mast, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has said U.S. citizens’ tax dollars would have “been better used by being lit on fire” than being channeled toward foreign aid. However, for Richardson, those viewpoints leave out an essential part of the U.S. government system: The interactions over time between the courts, White House, committee members, and others. Once the congressional resolution runs out in March, Richardson added, Congress will have to weigh in — and foreign assistance will be a part of that conversation. He urged the development community to push for foreign aid to stay on the agenda and to communicate with staff on Capitol Hill to help inform, educate, and apply pressure on lawmakers. “It’s a really interesting sort of time we live in and something that’s certainly unprecedented,” Richardson added. “But the challenge of going from fever pitch to thoughtful policy has been linked before.” Despite that, things are still changing. Richardson said it felt like USAID and the State Department will likely merge, given the current direction of the Trump administration’s travel. The idea isn’t a novel one; the Republicans have discussed this several times before. Before Richardson was the director of the F Bureau, he was the coordinator of USAID’s transformation task team, leading the reorganization of the agency at the beginning of the first Trump administration. “We had the same conversation about whether we should merge State and AID at that time,” he said. “And the decision was: Nope, it doesn’t make sense.” The reasons for that, Richardson said, were threefold. First, that Trump “didn’t really care.” Second, that it wouldn’t save much money, and third, that the qualifications and skill sets of USAID and State’s workforce were different. The State Department and USAID also do foreign assistance “radically differently,” Richardson said, with the former giving much smaller grants with a different approach. “But a merger is not abnormal globally,” he added. “The Brits, the Australians, the Canadians — they’ve all moved towards an integrated ministry of foreign affairs and their development agencies. This is the direction that the globe has gone.” So what does that mean, given the Trump administration wants to slash USAID’s workforce from more than 13,000 to just over 600? Richardson said he thought the agency should scale back its global footprint and refocus on doing less in fewer countries. He called out humanitarian aid and global health care — taking too much of those programs away gets “very dangerous very quickly,” he said. He also focused on USAID’s economic growth programming, noting its complementarity with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. And he highlighted programs focused on democracy, which the State Department has also prioritized. “It’s hard to say where the Hill and the White House will ultimately come down on that place,” Richardson said. “Do you really want to go to a zero involvement in education? That would be very different than what the last Trump administration wanted to do.” Much of that decision-making, he added, will be shaped by advocacy — both on Capitol Hill and within communities. There’s a need for truth-telling, he said, and to present the other side … make the arguments to the American people as to why this matters.” “It goes back to having a rational conversation about, what does the president want to accomplish. Is foreign assistance a part of that? … If so, what do we need to reform foreign assistance to look like in order to better deliver for the president?” Richardson said. “And I think that’s the conversation that eventually will be had with OMB and the White House.”