Aid's Reckoning Is Here. Let's Not Waste It

Time to end gatekeeping and extraction in aid and domestic social impact work

The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) began on the first day of the new administration with one stroke of a pen. Over the next three months life-saving projects were terminated mid-stream, domestic and international partnerships were abandoned, small and large businesses alike that depended on the U.S. government holding up their end of the contracts were left unpaid, often for work that had already been completed. Modeling by infectious-disease mathematician Brooke Nichols warned that up to 300,000 people—over 200,000 of them children—could die from a surge in preventable illnesses such as malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia as a result of these programs being abruptly culled.

Governments all around the world lost trust in the United States. Some are moving closer to Russia or China.

The stroke of the pen also ended the careers of tens of thousands of USAID and contractor staff that had dedicated their lives to humanitarian aid and economic development in the Global South¹, myself included.

While the work of so-called "DOGE" was explained to be in the name of "efficiency," over the following three months, DOGE staff were either unaware of, or completely ignored all of the evaluations, efficiency measures and safeguards the agency already had: annual audits, impact evaluations, data-quality checks, Inspector-General reviews, and third-party monitoring, to name just a few.

All of this lacked any transparency.

That was not reform; it was sabotage.

Yes, USAID had flaws—just not the ones DOGE claimed. Yet the rubble offers a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild aid on stronger foundations.

Why I’m compelled to write about this

The loss of my job and career I had built over many years has been devastating—I've lost my livelihood, my identity, and ability to provide for my children. But it's also forced me to step back and examine what we were really doing, and whether there might be a better way forward.

The concept of positionality is crucial in social impact work—so I think it's important to first state mine. Our blind spots can derail our work. When we don't acknowledge that our perspective might be skewed, we miss crucial information and make decisions that harm the people we're trying to help.

I'm a white American woman who spent years on USAID projects, initially drawn by my own experience with economic insecurity—first in my family to graduate from college, no generational wealth, always one crisis from disaster. That background made me want to "help" when I encountered poverty globally, but it also made me assume I had something essential to offer just by being born in the Global North.

That assumption was wrong and harmful. Over years of this work, I watched Northern consultants dominate strategy sessions while local agronomists, women's cooperatives, Indigenous researchers, and other local experts were sidelined. I participated in systems that claimed "local capacity isn't there" while systematically excluding local expertise from budgets and decision-making.

Here's what I came to understand: The question we should have been asking was: after 75 years of modern aid, why do so many recipient countries still struggle?

Gatekeeping and extraction are the answers.

The first fundamental flaw in aid: gatekeeping

Northern development practitioners have become entrenched in projecting ourselves as the "experts" because our livelihoods and identities depend on it—even as we're actually learning from the communities we care enough to serve. The reflexive claim that "local capacity isn't there" isn't an assessment; it's gatekeeping that sustains dependency on Global North "expertise."

Over time, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with this dynamic. I tried using what power I had to shift power to colleagues in country offices, advocating for local leadership in strategy sessions, pushing back when communities were excluded from decision-making. But individual efforts often hit systemic walls. The incentive structures, funding mechanisms, and institutional hierarchies all reinforced the same pattern: Northern expertise valued, Southern knowledge marginalized.

As someone who benefited from this system while witnessing its failures, I have both responsibility and insight into how it actually functions. The people most harmed by aid's failures deserve to lead this conversation, but those of us complicit in the old system have an obligation to examine the dynamic and be honest about what we see.

Aid and extraction: facing the truth

The aid sector has a second fundamental flaw, which also isn’t inefficiency—it's theft. While donor countries provide roughly $150 billion annually in aid, they simultaneously extract over $2 trillion from the Global South through tax avoidance, debt servicing, unfair trade terms, and profit repatriation².

This isn't an accident or unfortunate side effect. It's the point. Aid serves as moral cover for organized wealth extraction, allowing Northern countries to feel generous while systematically draining Southern resources. Economic Anthropologist Jason Hickel's research shows the flow: for every dollar in aid, ten dollars flow from poor to rich countries through these mechanisms.

The system works—just not for the people it claims to serve. It works for Northern corporations accessing cheap resources and labor. It works for consultant classes in both North and South who mediate these relationships. It works for politicians who can point to aid budgets while ignoring extraction mechanisms. And all along it diminishes the status of the communities in the Global South.

We are the wealthiest nation in the world because of extraction from these countries. Claims that we "can't afford" aid miss the point entirely—we became wealthy by taking resources, labor, and wealth from the Global South. The question isn't whether we can afford to help; it's whether we can morally afford to continue stealing.

The Domestic Connection

The same gatekeeping and extraction logic operates domestically. Decision-making about health, economic, education and poverty challenges typically happens without meaningful input from the people most affected. Well-intentioned nonprofits and consultants—myself included—can inadvertently become intermediaries that distance resources from communities, even when our goal is to help.

Those of us with development experience can apply what we've learned about participatory budgeting, community-controlled resources, and outcome measurement to domestic work. But we need to check the savior complex at the door.

Political change will come—it always does. When it does, we'll have maybe 18 months to establish new frameworks before institutional momentum sets in. We cannot waste that window rebuilding USAID with better PowerPoints.

With international development work dismantled, development practitioners have an opportunity to apply hard-won skills domestically. The tools we refined overseas—evidence-based policy, civic engagement, adaptive management—are desperately needed here, where disinformation, voter suppression, and widening inequities are weakening our own institutions.

But this isn't just about finding new jobs. It's about building the political power needed to fundamentally change how America engages with the world. We can't create just foreign policy or fair trade relationships from a country that doesn't work for its own people. Domestic organizing is foreign policy work.

Development professionals can:

• Apply rigorous outcome measurement to state and local initiatives in housing, climate resilience, and public health

• Support electoral integrity through voter education, ballot access, and non-partisan oversight

• Build coalitions that connect domestic justice movements with international solidarity work

• Use facilitation and stakeholder engagement skills to bridge divides around shared goals

The same communities facing negative health, economic, education and poverty outcomes domestically are often the ones most harmed by extractive foreign policies. When we strengthen their political power at home, we create the foundation for international policies based on justice rather than extraction.

This moment forces us to do the work we should have been doing all along—making our own government accountable before trying to fix others.

Preparing for the Rebuild

We have time now—unwanted time, but time nonetheless—to design different systems. While we're unemployed and the sector is decimated we can start by documenting what actually worked.

The evidence shows what succeeds:

• Local ownership matters more than funding levels - Rwanda's health system transformation succeeded because the Government of Rwanda took a "whole-of-government approach" to health goals, achieving major improvements like reducing child malnutrition and 97% vaccination rates through community-based approaches³.

• Direct cash transfers outperform managed programs - GiveDirectly transfers 88-93% of donations directly to families while conditional cash transfer schemes can spend up to 63% on administrative costs over three years⁴.

• Market integration supports sustainable growth - Ethiopia's leather industry has experienced remarkable transformation over the last two decades to become an important and strategic sector⁵, showing how connecting local production to international markets creates lasting development.

These successful initiatives share one thing: they transferred power, not just resources. Most were small-scale and locally-controlled. But they hold the blueprint for what comes next.

While we work to build the political power needed to change how America relates to the rest of the world, we can:

Document these models. Academic language excludes. It’s not a dissertation. Strip away the jargon and capture how power actually transferred to communities.

Build alternative funding mechanisms. Community foundations, mutual aid networks, direct giving platforms that bypass traditional infrastructure entirely.

Train differently. Focus on facilitation, coalition building, and ceding control—not rigid project management techniques.

Connect movements. Link Global South organizations demanding reparations with domestic groups fighting the same extractive systems.

The principles that worked internationally work domestically too. Let's apply them here first.

The Moment We're In

This dismantling of USAID is devastating for the communities that depended on flawed-but-lifesaving programs. People will die because of this destruction. That's unconscionable.

But the old system was also killing people—more slowly, less visibly, but systematically. It was channeling resources away from communities while maintaining the extraction mechanisms that created poverty in the first place.

We can't resurrect that system with better intentions. We need to build something fundamentally different: resource flows that repair historical harms, decision-making structures controlled by affected communities, and economic relationships based on justice rather than charity.

The window for this kind of change opens rarely. Usually it takes a crisis to create political space for fundamental reform. We're in that crisis now. The question is whether we use it to build better or just rebuild what we had with all of its problems.

This is the moment we're in. Let's not waste it.

1. “Global North” and “Global South”
These labels have largely replaced the Cold-War terms “First” and “Third” World, which no longer capture today’s realities. “Global North” refers to the high-income, politically dominant states—mainly North America, Europe, Australia-New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea—whose power was built through industrialization and colonial expansion. “Global South” denotes regions historically colonized or marginalized—Africa, Latin America, most of Asia, and the Pacific—whose development trajectories are still shaped by that legacy.

2. OECD preliminary data show that Official Development Assistance (ODA) from Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members totalled US $152.8 billion in 2019. oecd.org In the same period, research summarized by Jason Hickel—drawing on UNCTAD resource-transfer accounts and Global Financial Integrity debt- and capital-flow estimates—finds that the Global North extracts more than US $2 trillion a year from the Global South through profit repatriation, debt service, illicit financial flows, and unequal exchange. For an in depth discussion on this read Hickel’s book titled: The Divide.

3. https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/data-driven-development-rwanda-pioneering-health-information-systems-improved-monitoring

4. https://www.givedirectly.org/research-on-cash-transfers/

5. https://www.giz.de/en/downloads/giz2023-en-ethiopia-company-profile-leather.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com