USAID Saved Lives and Wasted Money: Should It Have Been Destroyed?

Waste, fraud, and abuse. Those were the charges levied against the United States Agency for International Development — better known as USAID — when its operations and funding were frozen in January 2025. In the months that followed, the agency was all but dismantled, relegated to a handful of pencil-pushing staff in a dusty, ignored corner of the US State Department. Facing a fire-and-brimstone assault from President Donald Trump and his inner circle, the gutted organization and its supporters proved unable to stand against the tide.

According to the people who defended it, USAID was responsible for saving millions of lives across the globe and giving tens of millions more a chance to thrive. According to the people who dismantled it, the agency spent over half a century robbing the American taxpayer blind and allowed a deep, terrible rot to fester at the beating heart of US foreign policy. Both sides cannot be entirely right, and yet both are pointing at something real.

Now that USAID has been transformed into a burnt-out husk, the harder question arrives. Was it worth it? Should the agency have been destroyed — and what does its near-disappearance mean for the world?

Key Takeaways

USAID was created in 1961 as a Cold War instrument to export development rather than products, projecting American goodwill while improving millions of lives, and before Trump’s second term it handled well over half of all US foreign aid.
Total US foreign aid amounts to roughly one percent of the federal budget, with USAID responsible for about a third of that — a small slice of spending that nonetheless became a powerful political symbol.
Credible, good-faith criticism of USAID predates Trump’s more outlandish claims: aid dependence, undercut local economies like Haiti’s rice farmers, failures to prevent collapse in Afghanistan and Sudan, and money flowing to hostile actors.
Defenders point to flagship programs — above all PEPFAR, credited with saving 25 million lives — and to wartime support for Ukraine, Ethiopia, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen as evidence the agency was worth saving and reforming, not destroying.
A core dispute is whether money saved would actually reach Americans in need; supporters argue dismantling a rare, durable aid program is far easier than rebuilding one in an era of political gridlock.
USAID has been cut from roughly ten thousand positions to about fifteen, with some 83 percent of its programs canceled, even though the president cannot formally abolish it without Congress.

The honest answer is that the USAID story, like the world it tried to serve, is complicated — and understanding those complexities is the only way to judge whether the right choice was made.

What USAID Was Built To Do

USAID was a product of the Cold War, assembled by the Kennedy administration in 1961 to unify a patchwork of efforts that had begun before, during, and after World War II. In the early Cold War years, US allies such as South Korea and South Vietnam badly needed foreign aid, as did many Latin American nations. The agency was created not to export a product, but to export development. The intent was twofold: to improve the lives of millions of impoverished people, and, at the same time, to project an image of the United States as a force for good across the globe.

The design had a deliberate logic. USAID could distribute aid and assistance without being seen as an arm of the State Department or the American military. It could operate with a measure of autonomy, carry on and expand its mission largely by itself, and remain versatile and flexible enough to handle the shifting needs of low-income nations worldwide. That independence was the point — a development agency that could move without the fingerprints of hard power all over it.

By the end of the 1960s, USAID had already proven it could deliver, most prominently as a leader in the effort to eradicate smallpox. From there it grew into a fixture of humanitarian work everywhere. Prior to the start of Trump’s second term, USAID was responsible for well over half of all American aid dollars sent abroad — and America, in turn, has been the world’s largest provider of foreign aid by a wide margin for decades.

Putting The Numbers In Perspective

In the Western world, only Germany comes close to American aid spending. Globally, you could argue that initiatives like China’s Belt and Road could give the United States stiff competition. But the scale of US generosity is striking precisely because of how little it costs at home: the sum total of American foreign aid represents roughly a one-percent expenditure of the federal budget, with USAID responsible for about a third of that. For all the political heat it generated, this was never a budget-defining line item.

The breakdown of USAID’s 2023 spending shows where the money went. Nearly seventeen billion dollars went to items related to governance, 10.5 billion to humanitarian assistance, seven billion to health, 1.1 billion to education, a billion to infrastructure, and more — plus 3.5 billion dollars in administrative expenses, by the program’s own accounting. By region, roughly seventeen billion went to Europe, mostly Ukraine; twelve billion to sub-Saharan Africa; nearly two billion to South and Central Asia.

By nation, the 2023 fiscal year’s top ten recipients of USAID spending were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Syria. That list — heavy with war zones and fragile states — captures both the moral case for the agency and the practical questions that dogged it.

Setting The False Claims Aside

Before weighing the substantive criticism, it is worth clearing away the noise. Many of the most outlandish charges leveled to justify taking what amounted to a chainsaw to the institution do not survive contact with the evidence. The claim that USAID funded bioweapons research to create COVID-19, that it promoted atheism across the globe, or that it funneled cash to Jeffrey Epstein — those claims are demonstrably false. Many of the other accusations from Trump’s second administration range from the exaggerated to the untrue to the downright silly.

There is little value in piling onto the work already done by fact-checking outlets that have addressed those claims in depth. More importantly, the sensational charges are almost beside the point. Long before any of them entered the discourse, there were already serious, intellectually rigorous arguments — not just from conservatives, but from many corners of US and global society — holding that USAID should be either dismantled or severely pruned back.

Those arguments are rooted in real, practical concerns about real, genuine USAID programs that critics describe as a bad deal for American taxpayers. The public is perfectly capable of reckoning with those questions without being distracted by easily memeable claims that fall apart under scrutiny. So the serious debate begins where the spectacle ends.

The Trouble Abroad

The first set of substantive criticisms concerns USAID’s performance and efficacy overseas — and there is no shortage of them. Perhaps the most salient is the problem of dependence: nations that come to rely on USAID instead of improving their own circumstances, or that have been robbed of their ability to develop because of USAID programs.

The clearest examples come from aid-reliant developing nations that do not develop as quickly as they could, or even stagnate, because of the knock-on effects of an influx of free foreign goods. A large volume of foreign aid can change the entire complexion of a national economy. Nations that can count on reliable medical support from global doctors and nurses have less need to train their own.

Nations that rely on foreign partners to build sanitation facilities, water pumps, or food-processing plants do not need to ensure their own people learn to do the same. In some cases, stagnation is exploited by a developing nation’s leaders, who keep their people poor and hungry once USAID support is established, in order to siphon away the revenues those people generate.

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Even well-intentioned governments that understand foreign aid will be around for the long term do not merely have the option to plan around it — it would be redundant to invest in homegrown industries that foreign aid already covers. Without any incentive to do the costly short-term work of weaning off, these nations fall into the trap of reliance. Some fall more enthusiastically than others, but even governments that would very much prefer not to depend on foreign aid find that weaning off is an expensive process that must be carefully managed. Managing it well was never USAID’s strong suit.

When Aid Undercuts The People It Means To Help

USAID can do far worse than foster passivity. When programs are designed poorly, aid can make it impossible for locals to compete. Consider Haiti, where a massive influx of free rice arrived courtesy of USAID beginning in the 1980s. At the time, Haiti could grow rice on its own soil, and had farms doing precisely that. The country still needed food aid, but it could grow rice just fine.

The trouble was the math facing ordinary families. Once Haitians had the choice between buying rice from local producers or receiving USAID rice given to the country free of charge, they naturally chose the free option. American food aid undercut the island’s rice producers, forced them to close, and created a situation in which nearly all of Haiti’s rice is now imported. Most of Haiti’s food needs are met by aid — not because the country lacks agricultural capacity, but because farmers were undercut so badly they converted their operations to cash crops Americans will pay for.

That pattern has repeated around the world: nations suffering famine or acute shortage watch their agricultural industries wither in the long term in exchange for short-term relief. Instead of teaching a person to fish, the result can be paying that person to throw away the fishing rod and return to the bread lines twice a week for life. The same dynamic appears in medicine, in water infrastructure, in nearly every sector.

Efforts that might build the means of production are ignored; efforts that might foster innovation, or inspire community leaders to improve their own lot, are discouraged. From an American vantage, that is, charitably, a failure of planning.

The Eritrea Question And The Failures To Prevent Collapse

In some places there is evidence that foreign aid may not even be necessary. Eritrea, in the African Horn, made the highly unusual decision in 2005 not only to expel USAID and other aid organizations but to actually tax the import of foreign aid into the country. The leader who made that call, Isaias Afwerki, still runs Eritrea today, and he explained to the Financial Times that the decision was born of a desire to force the country to “struggle even harder” to build its own capabilities rather than relying on the rest of the world.

A 2025 Financial Times report describes some impressive results from doing development the hard way: life expectancy in 2024 that outpaced both the sub-Saharan and continental averages, universal primary education, and real public-health improvements. Eritrea remains a nation with many ongoing problems, plenty of them developmental, yet it boasts better life expectancy than Rwanda and better electricity infrastructure than Uganda — both of which receive over a billion US dollars in aid each year.

Then there is the argument that USAID is supposed to prevent collapse and conflict and has repeatedly failed to do so. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan were each among the top ten recipients of US foreign aid in 2024. If the agency is meant to build stability and act as a bulwark against conflict and dictatorship, it has failed spectacularly.

In Afghanistan, vast aid before the 2021 collapse did nothing to prevent Taliban rule. In the Congo, after decades of American money, the eastern insurgency is stronger than it has been in years, fueled by Rwanda — itself a heavy recipient of US aid. Sudan is mired in civil war, South Sudan appears poised to follow, and in Yemen American aid has proven an ineffective tool against the Houthis’ grip.

Even if aid slowed these slides, the question lingers: is it worth billions just to ensure a sinking ship sinks a little slower?

Aid To Adversaries, And The Quiet Forms Of Waste

Compounding those concerns is the uncomfortable reality that USAID funding often flows to nations working actively against American interests. The United States still sent three-quarters of a billion dollars in foreign aid in 2024 to an Afghanistan now run by the Taliban. A similar sum went to Yemen in a year when the US deployed major maritime and air assets to rein in the Houthis, who control most of the country’s settled areas, including the capital.

American leaders are staunch military supporters of Israel, yet still spend nearly a billion dollars annually on the Hamas-run enclave of Gaza. The Taliban drink water from pumps the US built; Hamas eats food sent by America; Houthi fighters wounded in American air strikes are treated in hospitals America funds.

Even where aid avoids those traps, problems remain. Audits typically find very little aid blatantly stolen before it reaches its intended recipients, but corruption is more complicated than outright theft. USAID rarely hands cash directly to governments. More often it ships raw materials that can be misused or misallocated, hires local contractors and partners who can benefit from internal corruption, and pays US-based companies that function as a diet version of America’s sprawling military-industrial complex — complete with the bloat, cost inflation, and misuse of funds the comparison implies.

Finally, even where some programs demonstrably save lives, fill bellies, or build schools and hospitals, those successes do not excuse the failures of programs that produce no such results. An institutional aversion to cutting ineffective programs — partly to protect the ones that work — leads to continued investment in failing initiatives and a broader unwillingness to critically examine and improve programs that could perform far better than they do.

The Trouble At Home

A second set of criticisms is rooted in American concerns. The simplest starting point is the sheer size of USAID’s budget relative to the cost of addressing dire problems within the United States. In fiscal year 2024, USAID spent a grand total of 21.7 billion dollars, and it does not take long to examine alternative uses for that money and see the political problem.

The comparisons are pointed. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would take roughly twenty billion dollars a year to end homelessness in America — a figure covering permanent housing, case management, mental-health treatment, substance-abuse assistance, and more. Merely paying people’s rent would cost about eleven billion annually. Ending hunger in the United States would cost around twenty-five billion a year.

Doubling federally funded cancer research would take less than eight billion.

Other domestic problems dwarf even that. Ending child poverty in the United States would require over a hundred billion dollars each year; ending all poverty in America, closer to two hundred billion. The opioid epidemic costs the nation well over a trillion dollars annually, and preventable or treatable illness costs over seven hundred billion each year. Set against those needs, the question writes itself for many taxpayers: how can America justify siphoning off tens of billions a year and handing it to other countries?

Programs The Public Never Signed Off On

Beyond scale, critics object to programs that conflict with the wishes of the American taxpayer or simply do not seem vital to American interests. Support for initiatives benefiting women and girls can change many lives for the better, but that does not automatically make them a critical form of foreign aid. Sympathy for the plight of women and girls worldwide, the argument goes, does not by itself justify the spending — especially when those programs compete both with American domestic needs and with other aid priorities like fighting deadly disease or averting famine.

The friction deepens with programs that drive a wedge through America’s politics. Initiatives to support gay, lesbian, or transgender people abroad place the US government, for practical purposes, in a controversial position on a politicized issue. Other programs draw fire for doing too much — covering the cost of driving people to routine checkups, testing water quality six times a year when three would do, or ensuring children have access to art or music. Nice things, perhaps, but not, critics insist, a foreign-policy priority.

There is also the matter of aid to nations that do not appear to need it. Rwanda draws roughly forty percent of its revenues from foreign aid, yet still finds the means to support a large-scale insurgency in the Congo. Gaza and the West Bank sit under the control of Israel, a nation with the capital to support the people who live there. Jordan and Egypt are among the biggest recipients; Kenya receives nearly a billion dollars a year; and relatively wealthy nations like Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia, and even some in Europe receive aid as well.

The Accountability Gap

This feeds a structural argument. If US aid money disappeared, nations hosting important US-backed initiatives would likely find ways to foot the bill. And if some nations lost their allocations and then declined to cover the gap themselves, would that not suggest those programs were never truly essential? Remove the funding, the reasoning goes, and the excess that kept corrupt international elites comfortable should be redirected toward the critical initiatives that genuinely matter.

That is not merely an abstract worry. In South Sudan, critical equipment in neonatal intensive-care wards has reportedly been sold off to line the pockets of elites, leaving doctors to replace ventilators by hand — work that foreign aid was meant to pay for. The dysfunction is real, and it cuts against the comfortable assumption that aid money is always well spent.

The deepest grievance may be the disconnect between the American taxpayer and the people making spending decisions. Once money reaches USAID, it is largely spent at the program’s discretion, with limited oversight from the executive branch. In day-to-day operations, that autonomy is defensible; the alternative would make aid distribution hopelessly inefficient.

But over time it produced a situation in which all manner of questionable or controversial programs were funded without the public ever feeling consulted. There is a vast difference between a parent giving a child a hundred dollars in allowance and that same parent learning the money was spent on booze and OnlyFans. That sense of betrayal — at what many perceive as an irresponsible misuse of funds — became remarkably easy to evoke, after decades of spending by people who did not seem to expect the public to ever check in.

People feel their money was spent on things they would never have agreed to. That is a real problem.

What USAID Actually Accomplished

The critiques are not exhaustive, but neither is the case against telling the whole story. USAID’s advocates insist the program was worth saving, and the strongest place to begin is with what it accomplished — especially in the programs running at the moment of the Trump administration’s cutoff.

The most important is almost certainly PEPFAR, the HIV/AIDS relief program launched in 2003 under President George W. Bush. USAID was not the only agency involved — the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and others all played roles — but USAID was the conduit that allowed PEPFAR to be implemented abroad.

Since its inception, PEPFAR has provided over 120 billion dollars for HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and research across more than fifty countries, and by 2023 it was credited with saving 25 million lives, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. The program has drawn conservative fire, partly over allegations that it promotes abortion, but the vast majority of its sexual-health funding goes toward helping people avoid contracting the disease through intercourse.

PEPFAR performs a mission that, globally, only PEPFAR is equipped to handle — and it makes up just 0.08 percent of America’s annual budget. Although technically exempted from aid restrictions after intense backlash, it is unclear whether aid is actually flowing on the ground. Because of the nature of HIV and the viral-suppressant treatments required to manage it, a long-term cutoff means millions will lose access to treatment and die. A Boston University mathematician who models infectious diseases estimated that over 23,000 adults and over 2,400 infants had already died because of the cutoff through March 20, 2025; at the time of writing, that impact tracker placed estimates at over forty thousand adult deaths and 4,300 among children.

Lifelines In The World’s Worst Crises

PEPFAR is the headline, but the agency’s footprint in active war zones tells the rest of the story. In Ukraine, now in its fourth straight year of Russian invasion, USAID supports hospitals, rebuilds critical infrastructure, and keeps schools open. It has been instrumental in repairing water and electricity systems deliberately targeted at scale by Russia, particularly in winter months when a loss of power can mean death by freezing.

The agency built bomb shelters across the country, helped resettle displaced civilians, and kept provincial and municipal governments operating when they might otherwise have shut down. It has been critical for veterans’ rehabilitation — physical therapy, prosthetic limbs, long-term treatment for soldiers with horrific injuries. Because of USAID, disease rates in Ukraine stayed low for a nation at war, and the country’s agricultural sector — a breadbasket that keeps tens of millions alive worldwide — kept functioning rather than collapsing.

The story repeats across the globe. In Ethiopia, USAID provides food and water to populations battered by famine and civil war while combating malaria and trying to keep fragile peace among armed factions. In Yemen, it has kept millions alive through one of the worst humanitarian crises of the past decade.

In Somalia, it stabilizes communities attacked by the jihadist group al-Shabaab, expands education for vulnerable populations, and props up organizations feeding and protecting a country largely abandoned by an inept federal government. In Syria, it kept millions alive through more than thirteen years of civil war, providing shelter and sanitation to the displaced. The pattern is consistent: food, shelter, water, and medicine; the fight against tuberculosis, polio, and malaria; and the bare-bones health and education infrastructure societies need to climb out of poverty.

The Payoff: Why Defenders Say Cutting Is The Wrong Fix

Defenders concede that good intentions do not automatically justify spending to an American taxpayer. People need food, water, and housing in the United States too, and a government does bear a primary responsibility to its own citizens. The counterargument is not that those concerns are imaginary, but that they do not tell the whole story and are not enough to justify gutting the program.

Everything is a trade-off, and the budget is in some sense zero-sum: defund USAID, and you free money for domestic needs. But there is ample reason for pessimism that money taken from USAID would actually reach Americans in need. In the long view, dismantling the agency would undo decades of work that produced one of the only times the modern United States agreed to fund long-term, comprehensive aid at all.

No matter who holds the White House, getting the American government to commit to aid — foreign or domestic — is a Herculean effort. Harder still is building programs designed to address systemic problems rather than short-term ones.

Disease prevention, the opioid epidemic, homelessness, global development — these are precisely the challenges America’s leaders have historically struggled most to tackle, and political gridlock has only made it worse. USAID represented a rare instance where the US government managed to build a comprehensive aid organization, keep it funded and adaptable, and retain enough support to prevent collapse. The Trump administration has not put forward any detailed plan for a domestic program to take its place, and the political system offers no real way to hold the administration accountable to its America First rhetoric. If you trust the administration to follow through, fair enough; but a large share of the American public — also made up of taxpayers — has made clear it does not.

A Dollar Goes Further Abroad, And Broken Programs Can Be Fixed

There is a second difficult reality: American dollars do not stretch as far at home as they do elsewhere. The US is wealthy enough that people who technically live in poverty on US soil might take home an amount that would let them live like royalty in some nations where USAID’s impact is greatest. Critical medicines cost far less outside the American healthcare system.

Food-distribution programs are cheaper to run. Schools, hospitals, and infrastructure can be built for a fraction of US costs. An amount of money that would save or improve one American life might save or improve five lives abroad, or ten, or a hundred — which raises a stark and uncomfortable question: is an American life really worth more than the life of someone else across the globe?

Supporters do not pretend that every program works. If a program is not working, the answer — shared by supporters and opponents alike — is to stop investing in a failed status quo. The disagreement is over what comes next. For supporters, the response to a broken or underperforming program is to improve it, not to slash it. If the system is slow, lethargic, and resistant to change, that should be fixed; but a program that can be rehabilitated should be rebuilt and put back to work rather than discarded.

Used effectively, humanitarian aid is the kind of investment that fixes problems today and prevents them tomorrow. Communities given enough food to survive a famine keep the manpower and physical strength to plough fields and grow the next harvest. Children who are the first in their families to reach an eighth-grade education can pass that education to their own children.

A village that gets a clean-water well today still has it decades later, and a community educated about HIV will see less HIV. Looking at steady aid spending and persistent suffering and concluding that nothing improves underestimates how bad conditions truly are. The idea that a great deal of good has already happened can coexist with the idea that the work is not finished.

Sorting The Silly Spending From The Substance

There is, to be fair, genuinely silly-sounding spending under the banner of foreign aid: tens of thousands of dollars for an opera performance, more for a fashion show, more for nice-but-not-dire renovations on a local statue. Much of that comes through smaller discretionary funds given to officials acting as ambassadors or diplomats stationed abroad, who spend in ways that probably would not pass the smell test before Congress. But there is a crucial distinction: most of that discretionary spending runs through the State Department, in programs unrelated to USAID. Lumping the agency in with those items and canceling it on their account is a misunderstanding at best — and disingenuous at worst.

Even genuine USAID initiatives that drew opponents’ ire reward a closer look. The most important programs contain elements critics may find objectionable, but those elements usually have clear reasons behind them. PEPFAR includes contraception and safer-sex components precisely because they help people avoid contracting HIV through intercourse. USAID support to Ukraine has included grants to media outlets — support that keeps those outlets from being bought up by corrupt oligarchs and politicians, so they can investigate the very corruption used to justify cutting Ukraine’s funding in the first place.

Then there is the claim that defunding USAID is necessary to break global dependence and force nations to stand on their own. Proponents tend to frame this as unpleasant but effective electroshock therapy; opponents reach for the image of quitting an addictive drug cold turkey. The alternative to going cold turkey is not staying addicted forever — but yanking aid away abruptly provides no alternative path, misses the chance to build programs that could make a nation stronger, and puts real people at immediate risk of starvation, disease, and war, plus long-term risk of exploitation and underdevelopment. Quitting aid cold turkey is not the same as quitting a drug cold turkey; the risks are far greater, and they fall on far more people.

The Difference Between Reform And Demolition

It is worth emphasizing that the vast majority of USAID’s supporters are not arguing the Trump administration should never have touched it. A new administration reviewing aid to see whether it aligns with its priorities is entirely ordinary. As Rachel Bonnifield, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, put it to the Associated Press: “For a new administration to come in and review aid to see if it’s in line with their view of the American interest and their policy priorities, their general orientation, in theory this is totally normal and appropriate. Elections have consequences.”

The objection is not to review or reform. It is to wholesale destruction. There is a meaningful line between trimming, restructuring, and tightening oversight on one hand, and dismantling the entire apparatus on the other. The first is governance; the second forecloses the possibility of the very improvements both sides claim to want.

And the foreign-policy value of USAID as a tool to strengthen America itself — its role in soft power and influence — is a vast subject in its own right, one this account only gestures toward.

What remains is a debate that resists tidy resolution. There are real, salient reasons for a person’s faith in USAID to be shaken to the core; those reasons existed before Trump, and if the agency survives him, the critiques will survive too. There are equally real reasons to believe USAID was important, even essential, and that the United States loses something by discarding it. What helps no one is the absence of honest dialogue about which is which.

What Remains, And What Comes Next

The current prognosis offers USAID’s supporters little reason for optimism. The organization has been cut from roughly ten thousand positions to about fifteen in total, now placed under the direct authority of the State Department. The share of canceled USAID programs stands at 83 percent of its prior load. Trump does not appear able to formally abolish the agency without congressional approval, but he seems to have achieved the next-best thing from his opponents’ perspective: a thoroughly neutered body, stripped of any real ability to advance its mission, whose skeleton crew can do little but collect paychecks and represent an organization that now exists in name only.

Whether that outcome is something to celebrate or condemn depends on which set of concerns you find more compelling — the decades of credible criticism about dependence, waste, and misaligned spending, or the millions of lives the agency is credited with saving and the rarity of building such a program in the first place. The goal here is not to change minds or prescribe a stance. People who would defend USAID will argue more effectively by understanding why others want it gone; people who would dismantle it will argue more effectively by understanding why others want it to stay.

As for whether the change is permanent, that may have to wait for the next administration to decide. For now, an agency that spent more than six decades exporting American development to the poorest corners of the earth has been reduced to a quiet placeholder — and the world is only beginning to feel the difference.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. HomeFronts is his deep dive into geopolitics, modern conflict, military history, and the civilian and societal dimensions of global events.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was USAID and why was it created? USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, was established in 1961 by the Kennedy administration as a Cold War instrument. It unified earlier aid efforts to export development — not products — with the dual aim of improving the lives of impoverished people abroad and projecting the United States as a force for good. It operated with relative autonomy from the State Department and the military.

How much did USAID actually cost the United States? Total American foreign aid amounts to roughly one percent of the federal budget, and USAID was responsible for about a third of that. In fiscal year 2024, the agency spent 21.7 billion dollars. PEPFAR, its flagship HIV/AIDS program, made up just 0.08 percent of the federal budget on its own. The spending was politically charged but small relative to the overall budget.

What is the strongest criticism of USAID? Several credible criticisms predate the more sensational claims. They include fostering aid dependence, undercutting local economies — as when free USAID rice destroyed Haiti’s domestic rice farming — failing to prevent collapse in places like Afghanistan and Sudan, sending money to hostile actors such as the Taliban and Houthi-controlled areas, and spending at the program’s discretion with limited public oversight.

What did USAID accomplish that its defenders point to? Above all, PEPFAR, which has provided over 120 billion dollars across more than fifty countries and was credited with saving 25 million lives by 2023. Beyond that, USAID supported Ukraine’s wartime infrastructure and hospitals, fought famine and disease in Ethiopia, kept millions alive in Yemen and Syria, and stabilized communities in Somalia threatened by al-Shabaab.

Did cutting USAID have measurable human consequences? Yes. Because HIV treatment requires continuous access to viral suppressants, a long-term cutoff threatens millions. A Boston University mathematician modeling the impact estimated over 23,000 adult and over 2,400 infant deaths through March 20, 2025, with later estimates exceeding forty thousand adult deaths and 4,300 among children attributed to the disruption.

Could the money saved be redirected to American needs? That is the central dispute. Critics argue 21.7 billion dollars could help end domestic homelessness or hunger. Supporters counter that there is little guarantee the savings would actually reach Americans, that dismantling a rare durable aid program is far easier than rebuilding one amid political gridlock, and that no detailed domestic replacement has been proposed.

What is the current status of USAID? The agency has been cut from roughly ten thousand positions to about fifteen, placed under direct State Department authority, with 83 percent of its programs canceled. The president cannot formally abolish it without Congress, but the surviving skeleton crew has little ability to carry out USAID’s mission, leaving an organization that effectively exists in name only.