Who's Left at the Table
How the money reorganized
In late February of this year, in a five-day stretch, the US government signed three new foreign assistance awards that together moved more than two billion dollars. Two went to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. One went to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. After almost a year of very few sizable new awards, the money started moving again, and it moved to a small number of places.
In April I wrote about the orgs that are missing from the FY26 Food for Progress table and why (Who’s Missing From the FY26 Table). The Center for Global Development released an analysis last month that lets us see the other side of that picture: where the money actually went.
The data, plainly
Charles Kenny at CGD pulled new contracts and assistance awards from USAspending.gov for the main non-military foreign assistance accounts, covering January 20, 2025 through March 30, 2026. In the last year of the Biden administration, the same accounts issued 2,604 new awards totaling $8.881 billion. In the Trump administration’s first 14 months, the same accounts issued 345 new awards totaling $3.482 billion.
The top 10 recipients took 94.8% of those new dollars. UNOCHA alone took 57.5%. UNOCHA, the Global Fund, and the International Organization for Migration together took roughly 80%. If you want to look at the data yourself check out usaspending.org. That is the picture. Money is moving again, and it is moving to a small handful of multilateral institutions and to government-to-government bilateral arrangements.
The frame being applied
Kenny calls this shift “mostly a good thing in and of itself.” That language borrows, deliberately or not, from the localization argument that has been alive in development discourse for at least a decade. Localization advocates have argued for years that fewer, larger, more flexible agreements with actors closer to affected people would be an improvement on the US contractor-and-cooperative-agreement model. That position has integrity and a long literature behind it. I am not going to argue against it.
But the data does not show that movement.
The distinction that matters
A pooled fund managed by UNOCHA in New York and Geneva is not closer to affected people than a cooperative agreement with a US implementer that ran country offices staffed by nationals. A contribution to the Global Fund is not closer to affected people than a maternal and child health program working through district health offices. A bilateral arrangement between two governments routes funds through national systems, which is a real shift, but national governments are not the same as affected communities. Some bilateral arrangements will move decisions and resources closer to people. Others will reinforce the patterns those people have been organizing against for years. The architecture does not produce the outcome on its own.
Localization, as the term has been used, has meant shifting decision-making and resource control closer to the people the work is meant to reach. What the data shows is something different. It shows fewer institutional addresses, mostly in Geneva, Rome, and Atlanta, plus partner government capitals, holding much larger flows.
The geometry
The architecture now has fewer addresses, with larger flows per address. In many cases, the money is more distant, not less, from the people it is meant to reach. The accountability surface is smaller and harder for an affected community to access than it was under the old model, not larger and more open. The new architecture may turn out to be better than the one it is replacing on a range of dimensions, including lower transaction costs, fewer intermediaries taking a cut, more flexibility, and faster response. Those are real possibilities. They are not, on the evidence so far, what localization meant.
A practitioner note
I have been in rooms where the localization argument was made well, and rooms where it was made badly. I have helped write proposals that claimed local ownership while routing most of the real decisions and most of the money through US headquarters. The frame has always been available for use in either direction. The question now is which direction the current consolidation is actually moving in. The early data suggests upward, not outward.
Lingering questions
I don’t know whether the new bilateral country-to-government arrangements will move decision-making toward affected communities, or whether they will replicate the same patterns at a different level of government. I don’t know whether the multilateral pooled funds now receiving most of the money will invest in the partnership and learning infrastructure that affects accountability, or treat affected populations as recipients of disbursements. I don’t know where the new consolidation is functioning closer to true localization, and what makes those cases different from the rest.
What I do know is that the money has started moving, and it is moving to a small number of places. That picture deserves to be looked at on its own terms, before any frame gets placed over it.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio that helps mission-driven organizations clarify and amplify their impact.
