Issue No. 70

Hard Power Reigns Supreme: The Death of USAID

An internal memo reported by the Associated Press and US court disclosures has revealed the scale of the Trump administration's intended evisceration of USAID. Last month, Washington ordered a 90-day suspension for all USAID programmes, sending the established aid and development sectors into a tailspin and immediately severing thousands of programmes across the world. Waivers could be nominally applied for, but it appears that the depth of the cuts will be permanent, with the Trump government apparently seeking to eliminate 5,800 of the 6,200 multi-year USAID foreign aid contracts, an equivalent of USD 54 billion in assistance. 

The gutting of USAID overnight has already upended decades of established humanitarian and developmental assistance across the Horn of Africa. The status quo of post-World War II development politics by the US-- the world's largest single humanitarian and development benefactor-- appears to be over. For decades, America sought to negotiate developing nations into its geopolitical orbit through a combination of soft power tied to humanitarian and development assistance underpinned by the world's largest economy and military. This was further accompanied by investment in the US-shaped multilateral order, resulting in grand undertakings such as the UN's Millennium Development Goals, which lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Today, however, with Trump's return, there has been a breakneck shift towards a more aggressive and full-throated transactionalist form of realpolitik. Little consideration appears to have been given to how the USAID cuts will impact the US's standing in African countries compared to China and Russia.

It is not only the US cutting foreign aid budgets, but major European nations are also slashing their development assistance programmes as well, albeit for different reasons. Just this week, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that a rise in defence spending would be funded by a concurrent cut to foreign aid from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3%. With their economies struggling, France and Germany, too, have announced budget slashes to their development programmes in recent months. And the Netherlands has announced massive cuts using diction that could have been copied from Elon Musk's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Foreign aid's soft power has firmly given way to hard power for Europe, accelerated by the upending of the transatlantic US-Europe alliance by the Trump administration in the face of Russian aggression.

Meanwhile, for those in the Horn of Africa, the services and programmes that will be inevitably rescinded by these cuts will not be filled by the state. Even before the suspension, the intersecting crises of mass displacement, armed conflict, endemic corruption, and humanitarian emergencies meant that fragile governments in Mogadishu, Addis, and elsewhere would have struggled to provide the most basic services-- even if they wanted to. The 'state' in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan has shrunk, with international aid long filling the gap of meeting unprioritised but essential needs, be it emergency housing, food or vaccinations. But despite the savaging of development assistance, there will be no sudden about-turn from governments in the Horn of Africa, with these administrations in survival mode and struggling to control ever-diminishing territory. As part of this, they are also disinterested in governing in the interests of the broader population and are instead increasingly focused on sustaining a narrow sub-section of their constituencies. Investing in child polio vaccinations does nothing to maintain a fragile ruling political coalition.

In turn, the severing of USAID will fall most heavily on the worst-off citizens of Horn nations. There are other countries, such as Angola and Nigeria, where the state has the theoretical wealth and institutions to adjust and should be able to step in to fill aspects of the void left by the development industry, but that is not the case in the Horn of Africa. Significant percentages of the populations of South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia were already wrestling with malnutrition or starvation, which is further feeding into a loop prioritising those at imminent risk of death. This dynamic is likely to be only accentuated by the deep cuts to US and British aid, with long-term developmental assistance drawn down.

Reports from Ethiopia and Sudan in recent days have underscored just how quickly the already dire humanitarian situation is set to deteriorate. Emergency food assistance is nominally protected, but with USAID a mess and the website still down, there is no simple way of continuing as normal or accessing funds. In Sudan, the BBC and others have reported that the suspension of humanitarian assistance has closed nearly 80%, over 1,100, of the emergency communal kitchens to support impoverished Sudanese. It is estimated that nearly two million people struggling to survive have been affected by their closures.

Ethiopia is another of the most aid-dependent countries, with almost 16 million people reliant on donated grain last year. Much of this grain is surplus from the American corn belt, distributed in sacks with the US flag across Ethiopia by the World Food Programme and others. But local partners are unclear about their future and what is now permissible to spend funds on. Projects, including polio vaccination and the dispensing of malaria medication, have also been halted. Many of these cuts pose broader threats to global health as well, with the US government one of the principal funders of research into epidemics and pandemics.

Whether the aid industry can adjust-- and it will have to-- is the next central question. Although some would protest the terminology of 'industry,' aid delivery has developed, for better or worse, into a more bureaucratic and more technically diverse machine. Today, extensive monitoring and evaluation is the norm, not the exception, particularly in complex socio-political contexts such as Somalia. A degree of wastage remains an issue, and there are trade-offs, including delays, administrative complexity and oversight, that prevent a degree of nimbleness and introduce costs that could otherwise be spent on immediate aid. The scale of the whole sub-industry of monitoring, coordination, and evaluation is immense- particularly in the Horn, where some of the highest transaction costs exist due to the region's deep insecurity. 

Aid and development assistance programmes for governments, agencies, and charities are nevertheless fundamental to the lives and livelihoods of millions across the Horn of Africa. It will be impossible, however, to fill the void left by reductions in nearly USD 60bn in US assistance, and many will surely die because of these cuts. Whether these aid 'industries' can pivot towards higher-impact, lower-cost projects remains to be seen, but they have little choice if they are to survive as instruments of 'soft power' in this new era of realpolitik. And, in the meantime, there is a real danger that elites in countries most affected by these cuts, including those in the Horn of Africa, will circle their wagons and protect their own privilege, passing on the pain of austerity to those least able to cope.

The Horn Edition Team