Trump and Elon Musk’s recent attacks on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will have an immediate and devastating impact in low-income countries.
On 20 January 2025, Trump issued a blanket “stop work” order to all of USAID’s partners, and his administration fired the majority of USAID’s 10,000 plus workforce. As of 2024, USAID funding reached 141 countries, worth $42.5bn in 2023.
But all was never well in the world of international aid. My co-authored article in International Security, “The NGO Scramble,” has been heavily cited in the scholarly literature, and highlights all manner of problems with the international aid business. While liberal scholars often portray international assistance as a unequivocal public good, the reality has always been more complex. Our article notes serious concerns as a result of inter-NGO competition for business and short term contracts, which create all manner of perverse incentives
So, whilst Trump’s intention may be to destroy foreign aid, my own work, as well as that of many scholars in the field, would propose reform rather than elimination.
To read “The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action,” please click on this ResearchGate link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249564160_The_NGO_Scramble_Organizational_Insecurity_and_the_Political_Economy_of_Transnational_Action
Check out my other posts on personal themes at www.jamesron.net, or on social science topics at www.jamesron.org. My main website is www.jamesron.com.
You can read more of my academic articles on my Research Gate and Academia.edu pages.
