This week on X, Elon Musk has appeared to be competing with himself to find ever more colorfully enraged descriptions of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID): from “a ball of worms” to “a viper’s nest.”
This attack on an agency intended to help the world’s poorest people, apparently spearheaded by the world’s richest person, hasn’t been limited to rapid-fire insults. USAID’s website and headquarters have been shut down. Most of its programs have been ordered to halt, despite the consequences for millions of people’s lives. Over 1,000 staffers and contractors have been fired or furloughed. The Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained access to secure USAID systems following a tussle with USAID staff.
Further, USAID’s acting administrator is now gone, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio taking over. Rubio has stated that the State Department would be absorbing some components of USAID.
In short: America’s aid organization has been shrunk, then squeezed into its foreign policy department. And more cuts may be yet to come.
This has all happened breathtakingly fast, even in the eyes of people who lived through the closure of another government development agency: the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID), which was merged into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO, later FCDO) five years ago.
“There was no consultation,” reflects Mikaela Gavas, the managing director of the research organization CGD Europe. “It was just out of the blue. Everyone was caught quite off guard by it,” says Gavas, who was a special advisor to the House of Commons International Development Committee from 2018 to 2020.
Andrew Mitchell, a Conservative member of Parliament who served as the UK’s development secretary/minister both years before and after the shuttering of DFID, is even more frank. “Part of the reason they got away with vaporizing DFID was they did it during Covid.”
“It was a disaster, vaporizing DFID. And one of the reasons was that a lot of the talent disappeared,” Mitchell continues. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) itself recognizes the risk of development capability loss as “severe”. Mitchell worries about a similar loss of expertise with the hollowing out of USAID.
The loss of funding and knowledge related to development had major consequences for the U.K. on the world stage, Mitchell believes. “Over a period of time, people saw that the U.K. was no longer a real player” in development. Before then, DFID had been an influential development agency with a track record of successes in areas like fighting malnutrition.
“The main motivator was cutting budgets,” Gavas notes of the closure of DFID. This is also an argument being deployed in the U.S., which is by far the world’s largest aid donor. But that’s only in absolute terms. As the news organization Health Policy Watch points out, the U.S. ranks 25th in terms of development spending as a percentage of gross national income (at less than a quarter of a percent).
The irony, according to Gavas, is that “machinery of government changes are exceptionally costly exercises and in all cases have reaped very little benefit,” from Canada to Australia. “With the DFID–FCDO merger, it’s extremely costly and disruptive and the disruption has lasted for years.”
A 2024 report on the DFID–FCDO merger by the National Audit Office (NAO), the U.K.’s independent agency scrutinizing public spending, found, “With unclear objectives, and the absence of mechanisms to track full costs and identify benefits, there is insufficient evidence to conclude on the value for money of this merger.” In other words, four years on, the fiscal case for dissolving the U.K.’s development agency still wasn’t clear.
Another argument put forward, in the U.K. then and in the U.S. now, was that integrating development and foreign policy organizations would allow for more coherence of the two agendas. To be fair, there may be some cases where joined-up thinking across the two agendas has been helpful, for instance with coordinating negotiations around humanitarian access in Yemen.
But that remains contested. And development and foreign policy aren’t the same thing, Mitchell stresses. “While development and defense and diplomacy are three sides of the same coin,” diplomacy tends to be more short-term; international development involves longer-term goals (in DFID’s case, reducing extreme poverty, particularly in Africa and South Asia). “Not recognizing that, melanging them together, means that you lose that clarity of purpose.”
In practice, Gavas says, a union of development and foreign policy agencies means that the former becomes subordinated to the latter. “In most cases it hasn’t been a merger, it’s been a takeover.” And that takeover typically involves shifting a focus away from the poorest countries. With the dominance of a foreign policy wing, Gavas notes, “It’s with the middle-income countries that there are sort of more geostrategic interests, and where you can essentially use aid in a more transactional way, in a conditional way.”
“It doesn’t really guarantee more coordinated policy action,” Gavas says of a merger. “And that’s because development today is much more than aid policy. It is about the climate and migration policy and so on. So just merging it with one other department, the foreign ministry, is not going to help institute that coordination or coherence of policy.”
DFID under Mitchell began to focus more on value for money, in echoes of current conversations about waste at USAID. But technical fixes couldn’t solve the real problem, which was ultimately political. “I don’t know any other policy area that has the amount of intense scrutiny that development has,” Gavas says of the U.K. No amount of belt-tightening was enough for DFID’s critics. In the U.S., too, the chaotic approach to USAID may ultimately be more about politics than economics. Misinformation about unjustified aid appears to be distracting from the larger political project to entrench executive power.
Of course, there are major differences in context. The U.K.’s case was of one government ministry being merged into another. “They were entitled to make that choice,” Mark Lowcock, a CGD fellow and the former permanent secretary of DFID, has said. Yet “the way they pursued it was reckless and destroyed the U.K.’s reputation and attracted a lot of very visceral responses from around the world. And the U.K. hasn’t recovered from that.” Though combining DFID and FCO was a shock that left lasting damage, the government had clear authority to do so.
That’s not the case in the U.S. There, Democratic members of Congress have called the shuttering of USAID illegal, given that Congress approves USAID’s funds and DOGE has no official authority. Even President Trump has appeared not completely sure about the legality of the move. However, Republican members of Congress appear to have less appetite to fight a potential merger now, compared to previous administrations.
Indeed, the climate has shifted. Foreign policy and aid have always been intermingled, in the U.S. and U.K. alike. But the early millennium now feels like something of a golden age for the idea that poverty could be ended, living standards could be lifted, and solidarity could be extended around the world. “I’m afraid we’re living in a bleak, bleak time for international development. There’s a very cold winter out there,” Mitchell diagnoses.
If the U.K. government seized upon a public health crisis in 2020 to dismantle its development agency, the U.S. government appears to be mobilizing around a manufactured political crisis to do the same now. This can be reversed—but for that to happen, Congress will need to return to a bipartisan consensus that the lives and wellbeing of people in other countries are valuable, and that cooperation enriches people across borders. This shouldn’t be controversial.
