Devex has followed the politics, impact, and human stories of U.S. foreign aid for more than two decades. However, our team has never seen anything comparable to the upheaval of the past nine months.
Since U.S. President Donald Trump took office for a second time in January, we’ve seen the dismantling of USAID and its workforce, a global stop-work order that halted the entire U.S. aid sector, and a dramatic shift to move aid programming under the State Department.
This is not just about Washington policy debates. The administration’s “America First” foreign policy is fundamentally testing decades-long goals in global development and how the U.S. engages with the world.