After USAID: What Aid Cuts Reveal About Power, Partnership and Self-Reliance

When the United States moved to dismantle USAID in 2025, the loudest response from many major donor countries was silence. I have some thoughts about what that silence revealed—and what should come next.

The silence was telling

My first observation is how largely silent major donor countries were during the dismantling of USAID. My view is that some saw it as an opportunity to test the market: How would the global community respond? If the United States remained steadfast in its approach to development aid, how would developing countries adapt to a significant drop in funding?

Why? Because other donor countries also wanted to scale back, and some had already begun to do so. Yet many people in the development sector were optimistic—naively, in my view. Articles and LinkedIn think pieces framed the moment as an opportunity for other donor countries to step up.

Calling on major donors to fill the gap was an obvious response, but it was also misguided. The broad silence was striking, especially from countries that have spoken firmly on matters such as war and trade. The experiment appears to have worked: more major donors are now reducing their development budgets.

A revealing conversation about soft power

Another argument was that the aid cuts would diminish US soft power and risk transferring that influence to another major country. My immediate thought was: so what? If another country is prepared to fund the same essential work, why should it matter where that power is vested?

There are, of course, many considerations behind the answer. But one aspect of the debate stood out: development practitioners were, sometimes indirectly, acknowledging that development work is a tool of power, influence and even imperialism. It is a tool that can be used to shape how governments, international institutions, civil society organisations and advocates think and operate.

Self-reliance needs a practical strategy

Others urged developing countries to respond to the rapid shift in global development by becoming more self-reliant. I would add an important qualification. Development support will not disappear, but the available pots of funding may become smaller.

Developing countries, including those in the Caribbean, therefore need to be far more strategic about how they use development funding. I have managed relatively small grants that produced significant and lasting impact. One of my greatest challenges, however, was encouraging public-sector leaders to think more ambitiously about what those resources could achieve.

The potential of collaboration among governments, international development organisations and local organisations is often underused, particularly when it comes to speed and efficiency. International NGOs and civil society organisations do not always operate under the same rigid bureaucratic systems as the public sector. With transparent, trustworthy relationships, these organisations can help accelerate national goals in ways that government agencies, acting alone, may not be able to.

Development work should be approached as temporary. The job is to help countries make the greatest possible use of the funding and partnerships available while they have them.

Treat development support as temporary

My pragmatic advice to development practitioners is to approach development work as temporary, whatever your role. Beyond delivering individual projects, your responsibility is to help countries maximise the funding available to them. The aim should not only be to support developing countries in achieving their goals, but also to help them achieve those goals faster.

In this context, sustainability means more than designing an intervention that can continue after a grant ends. It also means strategically navigating the bureaucratic bottlenecks that often stall national projects.

When the right systems and safeguards are in place, NGOs and international NGOs can function as effective extensions of government. They can provide additional human capital to ministries that are often under-resourced. They can also bring ambitious new perspectives rooted in contextually relevant, real-world experience—based on how governments actually operate, rather than on a repetition of paternalistic ideas about “global best practice.”

The funding landscape is changing. The most useful response is neither to wait for another major donor to recreate the old system nor to pretend that developing countries can close every gap overnight. It is to use the resources that remain with greater ambition, stronger partnerships and a sharper focus on lasting national capacity.