Why don't Americans understand aid, and what do we do about it?

If you ask the average American whether they believe in helping people in other countries — with food, with vaccines, or in the wake of a natural disaster — they will, in all likelihood, say “yes.” Now ask those same Americans whether the U.S. should be distributing foreign aid. Far fewer will agree it’s worthwhile. In the months following the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s become clear that there’s been a communications breakdown between what the agency actually did and how the public perceived its work. While no communications strategy on Earth could have stopped USAID’s demise, many in the sector feel that more could have been done to build the case for aid. “I wonder to what extent we — the humanitarian and human rights community — need to look back at whether we screwed up, whether we lost our constituency,” The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said while moderating a panel at the Aurora Prize Human Rights & Humanitarian Forum in May. “This used to be a bipartisan issue, and we lost a lot of America. We lost a lot of Britain. We lost a lot of folks around the world.” The fact is, 8 in 10 Americans believe that the U.S. should provide medicine, food, and clothing to people in low-income countries, with Democrats only slightly more supportive of such aid than Republicans. When tragedy strikes, the country has historically put its money where its mouth is: After a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, nearly half of American households donated to the relief effort. But when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fed USAID into the woodchipper, as he gleefully phrased it, few outside the industry seemed to care. Americans claim to support humanitarian assistance, and yet, USAID was destroyed overnight with little fanfare. Why? ‘A culture of not blowing your own horn’ Prior to its elimination, few Americans understood what USAID was or what purpose it served. Partially, this lack of information is rooted in law. In 1948, Congress passed what was known as the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibited materials produced by the U.S. government for foreign audiences from being distributed domestically. Ironically, the intent was to keep government propaganda from shaping public opinion through mass media, which could pose a threat to democracy. But what it also did was squelch the ability of USAID to explain its activities abroad to domestic audiences, said Patrick Fine, a longtime USAID official who held top posts at the organization for nearly two decades. When Fine joined the agency in 1988, “we were told, as part of our orientation, that there are these restrictions on trying to sway legislators or the public to favor the work that USAID was doing,” he told Devex. That edict wasn’t just the law, but became part of the fabric of how the agency talked about its work. “There was a culture of not blowing your own horn.” At the same time, the professionalization of aid, with its attendant focus on evidence and testing, has made much of its surrounding language increasingly elusive to most Americans. Those who don’t know their M&Es from their MFIs may have felt alienated and tuned out as a result. This is hardly an issue exclusive to aid — get deep enough into law, medicine, or engineering, and the average American is bound to run into unfamiliar jargon and an alphabet soup of off-putting acronyms. One difference, however, is in exposure, explains another former USAID official, who asked not to be named. Consider USAID’s lack of messaging in contrast to how the military markets itself. Polished, high-octane ads for the Army or Air Force have long been a fixture at American movie theaters, where cinema-goers of all ages are dazzled in between trailers by the power of the country’s might. “The smear campaign … has been effective, and made people not opposed to helping others, but believing that the U.S. government was doing it in a corrupt way.” --— Patrick Fine, former USAID official The purpose of these ads was technically for recruitment. But they were also powerful PR for the country’s defense complex. You don’t have to understand the minutiae of military terminology to understand that a stealth fighter pulling into a barrel roll is awesome. These ads, the source said, are “inspirational, patriotic and well-produced productions. And USAID has never been allowed to do something like that. Ever.” ‘Waste, fraud and abuse’ If USAID’s culture of quietly doing its work without fanfare created a communications vacuum, the country’s right has been steadily working to fill the void. Aid has long been considered bipartisan, with former President George Bush’s 2003 rollout of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, long celebrated as proof that bold, lifesaving initiatives could transcend politics. But that attitude has been in decline since President Donald Trump’s first term, fueled by an increasingly persistent narrative that it’s a waste of taxpayer money. Meanwhile, much of the country has come to wrongly believe that aid spending is orders of magnitude higher than it actually is. Multiple polls have consistently found that Americans believe around 25% of the entire federal budget is spent on interests abroad, when in reality, that figure is around just 1%. But if the embers of misinformation were being fanned before, the second Trump administration poured kerosene on the flames. Both Trump and Musk spoke widely of the agencies’ rampant “waste, fraud and abuse,” using cherry-picked information and in some cases, outright lies to support their claims. In January, Trump contended that $50 million in USAID funding was “being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” and that “they used them as a method of making bombs,” — an assertion that was patently false. The White House also published a list of initiatives it saw as “radical,” for example, $70,000 for a “DEI musical" in Ireland, and another $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia. While it was perfectly fine for the administration to take issue with projects that didn’t align with its conservative values, it left out a lot of crucial context, said Nidhi Bouri, a former USAID deputy assistant administrator who now leads the strategic communications group Stand Up For Aid. In fact, the vast majority of USAID’s budget went to initiatives that Americans support, such as the $15.6 billion it spent on disaster relief and humanitarian aid, or the $10.6 billion dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS. “I do think it really has resulted in a lot of confusion or misunderstanding amongst different parts of the country in terms of what foreign aid is,” she said. Fundamentally, Americans have decoupled their genuine belief that helping out abroad is a worthwhile endeavor from the institution that was responsible for actually doing it, Fine explained. “The smear campaign … has been effective, and made people not opposed to helping others, but believing that the U.S. government was doing it in a corrupt way that did not reflect American values,” he said. Many say it’s also imperative to frame the work being done abroad as directly tied to America’s own interests. USAID’s activities often protected Americans — from containing diseases such as dengue and mpox to supporting U.S. farmers through the purchase of American-grown agricultural commodities, Bouri said. Explaining these activities in concrete terms is far more meaningful than speaking in generalities about “aid,” which “a lot of people aren’t going to get,” she added. This message could resonate with “America First” Republicans who view aid as more of a transactional tool to advance U.S. foreign policy. That same message could also resonate with Americans outside of Congress and the White House who don’t often see the connection between foreign aid and what might happen in their own backyards. The role of lawmakers Aid communications is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Appealing to lawmakers is an entirely different challenge than appealing to donors or the public, since they’re constantly changing, explained one communications advisor for a major aid implementer, speaking anonymously given the precarious political climate. “A lot of the seasoned lawmakers that have traditionally supported foreign aid are leaving or are already gone, and new folks come in that, frankly, have never heard of it,” the source said. Often, the process of winning the hearts and minds of skeptical decision-makers has involved taking them abroad and showing them projects firsthand, so they can see the impact they are having. “That kind of educating effort is just blood, sweat, and tears. It’s rolling up your sleeves and really pounding the pavement,” the source said. For a long time, this strategy appeared to work. Prior to January, prominent Republicans actively defended aid’s role in promoting American interests. Before he became secretary of state, Marco Rubio had historically supported foreign assistance, once calling U.S. global engagement “critical.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who chairs the state and foreign operations subcommittee, previously derided a proposal to slash global development funding as “insane.” And yet when Trump announced USAID’s demolition, no Republican members of Congress attempted to stop it. Many parroted Trump’s claims that USAID’s activities have become overly ideological, without explicitly endorsing that it be demolished completely. When it was officially destroyed, there was little protest. “The average politician in this country is not going to fall on his or her sword over foreign aid,” the USAID source said. Others have actively embraced the “America First” mindset, framing aid as a quid pro quo proposition and blaming recipient countries for failing to adequately defer to American interests. In discussing funding to fight AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Rep. Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that several countries in sub-Saharan Africa should be cut off from aid because they frequently voted against U.S. propositions in the United Nations. “These were some of the biggest recipients of PEPFAR, and they were giving the United States of America the least amount of support,” Mast argued. The future of aid communications USAID is gone, and the process of reimagining foreign aid’s next phase remains incipient. Still, one thing is clear: Americans need to understand, better than they did before, why this work not only matters, but how it fits with their own ideals. This may mean, for example, ditching vague and opaque language, such as “foreign assistance,” and talking instead about specific programs and interventions. As William Herkewitz, USAID’s former head of communications for missions in Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Kenya, pointed out in a recent opinion article, the agency successfully forestalled the deaths of at least 2 million people during a drought that ravaged the Horn of Africa in 2022. The tax burden on each American household to save those lives broke down to about $6 a year. And yet, Americans had no way of knowing about these efforts. “Though America had just completed one of the most successful humanitarian responses in modern history, we didn’t even attempt a victory lap,” he wrote. “We merely shared some ineffective social media posts and moved on to the next disaster. It is baffling in hindsight.” As the world becomes more polarized, there is a fresh opportunity for new lines of communication to form across ideologies. At the Aurora conference, Kristof noted that as PEPFAR was being rolled out in 2003, much of the liberal world took issue with its emphasis on abstinence, rather than celebrating the lives it saved. These divisions have only deepened in the subsequent 20 years. “I don't know that we have done nearly enough to build bridges between secular bleeding hearts and Evangelical bleeding hearts,” he said. Bouri agrees. Faith-based organizations have enormous sway in much of the country. In many cases, the desired outcomes are the same as their secular counterparts, even if the language with which they’re discussed is different. “The vast majority of foreign assistance programs are the types of interventions that people believe in,” she said. Finding common ground, rather than being waylaid by word choices, will be essential for whatever version of aid comes next. “I do really think public opinion matters,” Bouri added. “And I think foreign aid, until this point, was never partisan. And I don't think it's an issue that actually is partisan once people understand what it is.”