For almost 25 years, William Easterly, a New York University free market economist, was a prominent academic critic of the Foreigner Aid Program. In his 2001 book, The Evuribul for Growth: The Adventures and Tropical Misfortunes, Easterly fails to promote growth and alleviate poverty, as decades of development support in many poor countries. I write that it did. He further allegedly supported authoritarian rulers such as Ethiopia’s prime minister Meles Zenawi from 1995 to 2012. In a 2014 book, Easterly wrote:
Many of the aid programs Easterly criticised were supported by the US Institute of International Development. Created by John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, USAID is the world’s largest bilateral aid agency. In 2023, Congress allocated more than $4 billion to the project. However, on Donald Trump’s first day in office, he suspended most aid programs and signed an executive order claiming that “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy” was “often in conflict with American values.” . Ever since then, so-called government efficiency Elon Musk and his colleagues have dismantled USAID, closed their headquarters, took their website offline, and put most of their employees on leave. Last Monday, Musk wrote on his X platform, “I spent the weekend feeding USAID to Wood Chipper.”
When I called Easterly last week to ask him about these developments, his tone was far from a celebration. “It’s illegal and undemocratic,” he said of the novel tactics Musk and Trump employed. “Even if you like the idea of leaving aid, you can’t tolerate this horrifying way,” the administration says it plans to reduce the number of USAID staff from over 10,000 to around 600. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department will take over some of the agency’s operations, but details of how this will happen are scarce. Trumpmask’s approach was compared to the economic “shock therapy” introduced in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union to the east. “It was a disaster because we need to move gradually. We can’t do everything at once,” he said. “I think the same applies to the aid world. You need to move slowly, not overnight shutdowns.”
Easterly followed despite many aid programs failing to meet their goals, some of which worked well, especially in the field of public health. Recently, there have been reports that Africans are away from clinics that receive drugs to treat HIV, which is paid by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). USAID Republican President George W. Bush launched Pepfer in 2003. This is widely regarded as the greatest success of past generation aid policies. Like many other health initiatives in poor countries, it is now pending. The New York Times has identified more than 30 medical umpire programs that have stopped, including malaria treatment for infants in Mozambique, cholera treatment in Bangladesh, and screening for cervical cancer in Malawi.
Overall, USAID finance programs in over 100 countries. Selecting the list highlights what Republicans claim to show they are following a futile, “awakening” agenda, including a $1.5 million grant to promote employment opportunities for Serbian LGBTQ people. I did. and a $200,000 grant to the non-profit Sesame Workshop to support Iraqi television shows modeled after “Sesame Street.” Last week, Trump said USAID was “run by a bunch of radical madmen.” His administration’s claim that the US had spent $50 million to provide condoms to Gaza turned out to be fake news.
Esther Duflo of MIT, who shared the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize to study development and promote experimental approaches to alleviating poverty, said Trump’s decision to suspend all foreign aid programs to aid communities He told me he surprised me. It was mentioned during the election campaign. In 2003, Duflo and two colleagues founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal), a global network of researchers currently operating in dozens of countries and with hundreds of staff. did. J-Pal pioneered the practice of assessing AID interventions using randomized controlled trials, including whether paying parents to enroll their children in school. A few days after Trump’s instructions, USAID issued halt work orders for many IT funding projects, including J-Pal. Duflo said she and her colleagues are currently trying to find alternative funds, but J-Pal, as a long-established organization with various donors, will continue to do the job. “But for many smaller organizations, it’s far more devastating,” she said. “They were dependent on the US government,” Duflo added that aid organizations have told field offices to stop the project. “Even if an organization can find alternative funds, it will take time,” Duflo says. “In the meantime, everyone is sent home.”
There is great uncertainty about how the Trump-led US will respond to humanitarian disasters in developing countries, such as earthquakes, hunger and civil wars. Clemence Landers, a vice president and senior policy fellow at the Global Development Think Tank Centre, worked in Liberia and served as an advisor to the national finance minister after the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Africa. When Johnson Sirleef came to power, in 2006, Liberia was struggling with more than a decade of civil war, military dictatorship and chronic poverty. Its capital, Monrovia, had no working power system or functional medical services. “USAID was one of the first donors to jump in,” recalls Landers. “It helped to undo the Lights to set up a basic education system and a basic health system.” The head of the USAID mission in Liberia frequently meets Johnson Sirleef and acts as a strategic advisor. But the rest of the mission staff helped coordinate foreign aid, Landers recalled.
“USAID has a huge footprint in the country and that’s the heart of this,” she said. “That’s what makes the United States unique.” If Washington permanently pulls back from its leadership role in providing aid and disaster relief, there are no other Western countries with the ability and willingness to replace it. Lack of support for external engagement – there is no large assistance budget and the gap cannot be filled. “The European Union is sorting out its foreign aid. In France, facing a fiscal crisis, the budget released this week has cut its aid budget by almost 40%. In Germany, where elections are taking place, there was talk of cuts. “At this point, I’m not a European who has the resources to fill the gap,” Landers told me. “It’s a country like China.”
Although Landers highlighted the importance of foreign aid programs and the US leadership in these efforts, she also said that there was a legitimate debate about how aid should be targeted and provided. I’ve admitted. Some countries, particularly the UK, have argued that donors should concentrate their resources more in the poorest countries. This means cutting funding to middle-income countries considered strategic allies such as Jordan and Egypt. (A wealthy country, Israel is one of the biggest recipients of US aid, but most of them are military aid.) Another argument is that USAID and other agencies are far too many to large NGOs. It’s central to whether you’re focusing too much on your budget. By critics – and not enough for local organisations. “A truly ambitious and forward-looking leader could have a big agenda to modernize the US aid system,” Landers said. “There is a huge agreement that it is ripe for reform.”
