Foreign aid reorg under Trump

An updated version of this blog has been posted here.

A memo has leaked with the outlines of a plan to reorganize the structures of US foreign aid. Read it here. I want to capture a few initial thoughts here.

• The memo is progress and advances the policy and political debate beyond the chaos and cruelty of the last few weeks. Trump Administration intentions were hinted at previously, but never articulated. Here, at last, is an effort to say what they want.
• It’s not especially innovative or new. Most of the ideas have been proposed by others, in fact, it looks a lot like an old proposal from Todd Moss from 2011.
• It’s not well-written and still reflect a shallow understanding of US foreign aid, policy reform. A lot of the writing suffers from the same sophomoric logic that so much of MAGA does. MAGA hates expertise and is trying to eliminate it anywhere they can. And it really shows.
• One of the main ideas is to bring USAID more tightly under State Department. This is an old idea that goes back decades, waxing and waning. There’s an inherent tension in foreign aid about whether it’s mainly meant to benefit the donor or the recipient. If aid is primarily a tool of “soft power” and meant to reward friends and support American geopolitical strategies, you support tighter control, under State. If you think aid should support universal, humanitarian principles and also care about the outcomes, you support more independence and expertise in USAID. Trump clearly sides with the former camp which is a legitimate position, although destroying USAID isn’t a necessary outcome. 5. Other countries have subsumed independent international assistance agencies into their foreign ministries in recent years including Australia, Canada, and the UK. There are plusses and minuses. If you care about development and humanitarian response, it’s generally not an improvement.

You get the point, even if AI doesn’t.

• This memo is, I think, the first time I’ve seen the Administration actually reference Congressional mandates and legal obligations in the context of foreign aid. They’ve been acting as though there’s no constraining law or Congressional mandate until now — and it’s gotten them into trouble with the judiciary, if not with Congress. Because laws matter and constrain what the executive can do.
• Agriculture, food systems, and nutrition seem to be abandoned in this reorganization. Humanitarian food assistance will survive, but Feed the Future does not. That’s a shame. The Global Food Security Act was reauthorized and the Global Malnutrition Prevention and Treatment Act was passed by Congress in 2022 with bipartisan support.
• Other issues and themes that are being cut or eliminated are predictable give these are Trump and his henchmen: reproductive health, human rights, democratic governance, anti-corruption.
• Marocco has made a lot of sweeping statements about how the President and the American people have lost faith in foreign aid. Does this bureaucratic adjustment restore that faith? How? The memo is heavy on “ensure taxpayer dollars deliver Maximum Impact” but doesn’t offer much on how this is achieved. “Taxpayer” is mentioned at least 10 times. “Humanitarian” only 5 times. Poverty, hunger, and human rights do not appear.
• All the complexity and each of the organizations that populate US foreign aid is there for a reason. Most people agree that it’s too complex, with too many overlapping mandates and processes. But it’s not arbitrary and there are historical reasons and legacies reflected in the status quo. As with any complicated system that is important, it’s worth understanding things before making changes. Changes to programs that keep millions of people alive could kill people. And indeed, people are dying as a result of the wreckless destruction wrought upon USAID and State Department. Notably, much of the complexity and internal contradiction is the result of laws and mandates that Congress has imposed rather than bureaucrats or special interests. Unraveling the knots, therefore, will require Congress.
• In particular, there are a lot of checks and balances and accountabilities laden in the US foreign assistance system. It’s part of why the whole system is complicated and cumbersome. There are decades of hard-learned lessons on how to implement programs and spend money. Trump, Elon Musk, and Pete Marocco claim there’s a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse. Yet, for all their scraping, they have barely found anything worth mentioning. In fact, the system seems to have worked pretty well.
• There’s no reason this paper could not have been written and released weeks ago, or months ago. Congress could be holding hearings on the proposed reorganization now. With majorities in Congress, Republicans could have put much of this into place in time for next year’s budget. It all could be achieved in an orderly and legal way. There’s no reason the Trump Administration had to stop work, fire thousands of public servants with no notice, cancel thousands of contracts and leave partners in the lurch, communities without schools and clinics, sick people without medicines, hungry kids without a bit of life-saving peanut-butter paste. Many, many people are dying unnecessarily. There’s a terrible deficit of dignity and humanity in this change and there should be an accounting for that. Trump, Rubio, Musk, and Marocco have blood on their hands.

…. to be updated and continued.