The United States Agency for International Development was the largest single source of humanitarian relief in the world until U.S President Donald Trump abruptly abolished it last year. The philanthropic community moved in swiftly to cover a small portion of the funded programs. However, only Congress can restore USAID to its intended role as an invaluable “soft power” asset that fortifies U.S. national security interests by uplifting people in poverty and encouraging democratic principles around the globe.
What happened to USAID?
In 1998, Congress reorganized USAID as an independent agency, meaning that only Congress can legally abolish it. But the law fell by the wayside when Trump returned to office on Jan. 20, 2025. That same day, Trump issued an executive order that summarily abolished USAID, which at the time had an annual budget of $40 billion.
Within weeks, a brief notice was posted on the agency’s website. All global staff and 1,600 U.S. personnel were placed on administrative leave. Thousands of foreign assistance projects around the world were terminated. Files were burned or shredded, critical data was eliminated, and the website was scrubbed of all information. Though alert employees and other stakeholders preserved some invaluable data and archived the website, the damage was done.
The task of dismantling the agency was assigned to Tesla CEO Elon Musk as head of the newly established budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal once hailed DOGE as Trump’s “best idea,” which is more than a little ironic considering the massive waste and inefficiency later attributed to the office, with USAID providing one among many examples.
Instead of assessing programs according to standards and outcomes, DOGE staff simply relied on software-generated keyword searches to summarily cancel thousands of contracted programs at government agencies including USAID.
“Many of the terminated contracts had been axed by mistake, and it was evident that no one had bothered to ask what the contracts did before ending them,” Nicholas Enrich, former executive director of USAID’s Bureau of Health, wrote in an op-ed published last month.
Since being placed on administrative leave a few months after Trump took office, Enrich has worked to build public awareness of the chaos and human misery Trump and Musk fostered at USAID. His newly released book, “Into the Wood Chipper,” chronicles the early weeks of the demolition.
“Clinical trials were stopped in their tracks, interrupting novel treatment regimens for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, threatening the lives of patients and the development of new strains of TB that could evade our antibiotics of last resort,” Enrich summarized in his op-ed. “Pregnant women in need of urgent childbirth services were left stranded when emergency ambulance services halted and clinics were shuttered. Mothers were forced into the unthinkable position of choosing which of their children to feed.”
As legal cover, the Trump administration insists that USAID still exists, having been “absorbed” into the U.S. Department of State under the purview of White House budget director Russell Vought, the same man who oversaw the creation of the notorious “Project 2025” budget-cutting playbook produced by the right-wing organization Heritage Foundation.
The ensuing global humanitarian crisis has been well documented. One such project, called Impact Counter, projected that 262,915 adults and 518,428 children would die within a year if USAID’s medical programs were left unfunded. Terminated programs include PEPFAR, a George W. Bush-era HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment effort once called a “beacon to the world” by the World Health organization. Programs fighting tuberculosis, malaria, and childhood diarrhea were also eliminated or critically disrupted.
A remnant of $19 billion has been earmarked for expenses related to closing out the agency’s remaining grant programs, though some of those funds may be transferred to the State Department, Devex reported.
Triage and the role of philanthropy
The philanthropic community has rushed to fill the spending gap. Multiple fundraising efforts totaled $125 million between February and October of 2025.
“Those funds are just the most visible that private donors mobilized,” Thalia Beaty of the Associated Press reported in October. “In those early days, even with needs piling up, wealthy donors and private foundations grappled with how to respond. Of the thousands of programs the U.S. funded abroad, which ones could be saved and which would have the biggest impact if they continued?”
One answer has come in the form of the new DIV Fund, a privately endowed relaunch of the former Development Investment Ventures division of USAID with funding from the leading foundation Coefficient Giving and anonymous donors.
Over the previous 15 years, the Ventures division established a proven, step-by-step grantmaking strategy for USAID. In sharp contrast to Musk’s leadership at DOGE, the Ventures division deployed an evidence-based sequence designed to assess promising new programs at the pilot stage and work to scale them up.
The former head of the USAID Ventures division, Sarah Gallant, is co-founder and CEO of the new DIV Fund along with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Michal Kremer, who developed the Ventures division strategy and now serves as the scientific director of the DIV Fund.
Last year, the fund raised an initial round of $20 million to support programs in the Ventures pipeline that lost funding. “The fund’s investment model has yielded clear results,” the DIV Fund reported in February, emphasizing that the model first developed at USAID is designed to “deliver the greatest impact per dollar spent.”
The fund cites examples including education programs that add three years of schooling for 80 million children in Africa and South Asia and a new mobile software for frontline health workers that now covers services for more than 400 million people in 130 countries. It has also supported the clean cookstoves public health and household economy movement, citing a program that has delivered 6.3 million new fuel-efficient cookstoves.
“Analyses show that the DIV Fund’s approach has delivered an estimated $39 in social value for every dollar invested, far exceeding typical estimates for traditional aid,” the fund emphasizes, with social value referring to a holistic measurement of the effectiveness of charitable giving.
By centering an evidence-based model for charitable giving, the DIV Fund provides corporate funders with a rationale for helping to mitigate the damage rippling out from the destruction of USAID. The organization has already raised another $28 million to fund programs over the next four years, enabling it to solicit new proposals this year along with continued support for its existing portfolio.
Meanwhile, grassroots activists are working to rouse the public and press Congress for action. The elimination of PEPFAR in particular has re-energized the ACT UP organization, which formed in the 1980s to fight for HIV/AIDS funding. In April, a group of AIDS/HIV activists disrupted Vought’s testimony before the House Budget Committee, chanting “PEPFAR saves lives — spend the money.”
Too little, but not too late
Regardless of the life-saving measures undertaken by the DIV Fund and others, private charity is no substitute for public policy. Nevertheless, Trump has proposed that private investment and bilateral trade agreements can replace what he destroyed.
If that seems like a non-solution, it is. While Trump and his willing enablers in Congress slash funding for public programs both domestically and abroad, they continue to waste billions of dollars — $72 billion, according to one estimate — in support of Trump’s misbegotten war in Iran and coddle his pursuit of publicly-funded vanity projects, including $1 billion in new security-earmarked funding for the White House ballroom project and the destructive “renovation” of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, among others.
Even so, it’s not too late. Regardless of Trump’s efforts to suppress Democratic voters in the upcoming mid-term elections, the voting public has another opportunity to exercise their voice in November and elect a new, more responsible Congress to start repairing the damage and restoring USAID to what it once was: a beacon to the world.
Image credits: Victoria Pickering/Flickr, Elvert Barnes/Flickr, USAID/Flickr, Sebastian Oliel/PAHO via Flickr, Stephine Ogutu/USAID via Flickr, U.S. Navy photo via Wikimedia Commons
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