Who's Missing From the FY26 Table
A Field Reorganizing Itself
USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service announced the FY26 priority countries for Food for Progress: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ecuador, Morocco, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Up to $226 million in new cooperative agreements over five-year projects ranging from $28 to $35 million each. Proposal teams are forming right now, and notice who’s not at the table.
I worked for Land O’Lakes Venture37 for a decade. That organization and many others that usually are in the space aren’t there. Not because they have decided not to bid this year, but because they no longer exist. The orgs still bidding are fewer, and the gaps are real.
I want to talk about why the names that are missing are missing, because the answer says something uncomfortable about how this field actually works.
How Food for Progress is structured
For readers who don’t live inside this work, a quick explainer.
USDA’s Food for Progress are federal cooperative agreements, which means they don’t pay profit or fee. The implementing organization takes American agricultural commodities, sells them in the country where the project is implemented, and uses the proceeds to fund the project’s activities. Those proceeds are not the implementer’s to keep, and they have to be spent on the project as specified in the agreement. For-profits can technically apply but rarely do, because there is no profit advantage to be had, which means whoever wins these awards operates under the same financial constraints regardless of tax status.
So how do these implementing organizations actually pay for the things that aren’t project-specific? The HQ finance team, legal, monitoring and evaluation methodology, country offices, and all the shared infrastructure that makes any of the work possible.
There is one mechanism for that, and it’s called indirect cost recovery. Every implementer with a federal portfolio negotiates a Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreement (NICRA) with what is called its cognizant federal agency, meaning the agency that provides the largest share of its federal funding. That rate gets applied across the org’s whole federal portfolio, and it is the only way to recover shared infrastructure costs from federal awards.
The NICRA system is built on the assumption that an org’s federal portfolio is reasonably stable across multiple agencies over time. There’s a five-year cognizance rule, and negotiated rates apply to all federal awards. The whole structure assumes the floor doesn’t drop out from under you.
What happened when the assumption broke
USAID closed on July 1, 2025, with eighty-three percent of programs cancelled and the remaining functions transferred to the State Department. NICRA cognizance for affected organizations transferred too, with a new email address at AQM-NICRA@state.gov for orgs with transferred awards.
The structural problems are several layers deeper than the email address suggests.
The cognizance rule is sticky by design, which means an org whose USAID portfolio collapsed in early 2025 still technically has USAID, now State, as its cognizant agency, even if its real federal portfolio now consists of a couple of USDA awards. Cognizance can’t legally shift quickly. State also inherited a system that was already failing audits: the 2024 USAID Office of Inspector General audit found the agency was tracking NICRAs in an Excel spreadsheet called “NICRA Tracker,” with automation planned for 2025, the same year the agency was dismantled. Whatever State got, it isn’t infrastructure built for this scale.
The math problem is the layer underneath all of it. The fixed indirect cost pool didn’t shrink when the USAID portfolio did. The HQ staff are still there, the country offices are still there, the compliance infrastructure is still there. But the direct cost base those costs get applied to has collapsed, so the rate is the same and the dollars are not.
Venture37, briefly and honestly
Venture37 was structurally tied to American agriculture through Land O’Lakes, the cooperative, which is the kind of structural alignment that should have made it durable in this exact moment, when the political climate favors American agricultural interests and the FFPr program continues. It folded anyway.
The international development work had to fund itself out of its own portfolio, and when the USAID side of that portfolio collapsed, the remaining USDA work could not carry the indirect costs. The parent company was not going to absorb the gap, and the math didn’t add up. That is the whole story. There are political and contextual layers around it, but the mechanism is the math.
What this is not about
It is not about whether the work was working, and it is not about evaluation findings or which organizations were better at impact or worse at it. The decisions about which orgs continue and which don’t are being made on financial structure, and impact is not what’s deciding this.
I want to sit with that for a minute, because I think it deserves more weight than it usually gets.
We spend our careers, those of us who do this work, trying to make impact legible to the people who decide where resources go. We build measurement systems, we run evaluations, and we produce findings that are supposed to inform resource allocation. The whole point of evaluation, in the version of it I was trained in, is to put evidence in front of decision-makers so the decisions get better. And then a moment like this comes, and the resource allocation happens on financial mechanics that have nothing to do with any of it. The orgs that survived didn’t survive because the evidence said they should, but because their financial structures could absorb the shock.
That’s not a critique of the survivors, who are doing what they have to do. It’s a question about what the evaluation work was for.
Two questions that don’t sit easily together
There are really two existential questions running underneath this moment, and they don’t sit easily with each other.
The first is financial. Can the math add up. Can the org carry its indirect costs. Can the cooperative agreement model survive the collapse of its largest funder. This is the question that decided who’s at the FY26 table and who isn’t.
The second is about the vision of the work. What is this field for. Who is it accountable to. Whether it is actually doing what it says it’s doing, and whether the answer to that question matters to the people making the resource decisions.
In social impact, we often act as if the second question is the one that drives everything, because it’s the one we built our methodologies and our careers around. But moments like this one make it hard to keep believing that. The financial question is the one that’s actually deciding outcomes right now, and the vision question is being answered by what survives, not by what the evidence says should survive.
I don’t think these two questions can be collapsed into one, and I don’t think one is more real than the other. But they are pulling in different directions, and the pulling is what this moment is exposing.
Lingering questions
There’s a lot I can’t claim about this moment, and I want to be honest about that.
I don’t know whether the broader field is being reshaped in some patterned way, because the surviving orgs are an idiosyncratic mix and any pattern I might claim would be too clean for the actual data.
I don’t know whether the orgs at the FY26 table now will still be at the table in five years, because the math problem doesn’t go away just because you survived this round. I don’t know whether the State Department’s AQM-NICRA team can actually handle the volume of renegotiations coming, or whether orgs are going to spend years in indirect cost recovery limbo. I don’t know whether there is any version of the federal cooperative agreement model that survives this transition, or whether something different replaces it.
What I do know is that the proposal teams are forming and the work continues for the orgs that can still carry it. The question I am sitting with as an evaluator is what we owe to the work that didn’t get to continue, and to the people who did it, when the reason it stopped had nothing to do with whether it was good.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio that helps mission-driven organizations clarify and amplify their impact.
