Trump and Elon Musk’s recent attacks on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will have an immediate and devastating impact on 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 an 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.
You can read, “The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action” by clicking here.
About James Ron
James Ron is an international research consultant who taught for 22 years in higher ed in Canada, Mexico, and the US. Before that, he was a consultant for Human Rights Watch and other international agencies and reported for the Associated Press.
Learn more about James on his website and LinkedIn profile. To read his scholarly articles, please visit James’ ResearchGate and Academia.edu profiles. To learn how other scholars have used his work in their own research, visit his Google Scholar page.
You can read James’ social science blog here and his personal blog here.
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