USAID Representative Voice
BY AUSTAN MOGHARABI
There is a version of this moment that the administration would like Americans to accept: that USAID was wasteful, its mission redundant, its workforce replaceable. The evidence for these claims is thin, and it is getting thinner as the consequences of dismantling the agency become visible in real time.
But even among those who accept that the expertise was real and the investment was significant, a quieter argument is gaining ground: that none of it was America’s responsibility from the beginning. Why should U.S. taxpayers keep children alive in Africa?
It is worth answering directly. The argument is a moral but also strategic and economic one—and we have failed to make this case loudly enough.
What we did. Start with the breadth of what the agency actually did. USAID did not just deliver food and medicine.
It built water and sanitation infrastructure that kept disease outbreaks from becoming epidemics.
It supported governance reforms that gave fragile democracies a fighting chance against authoritarian backsliding.
It invested in agricultural development that created functioning economies and, in turn, markets for U.S. exports.
It funded the surveillance systems that served as the world’s early warning network for the next pandemic.
For every $1 invested in USAID agricultural programs, studies have found returns of more than $8 in economic value. The cuts put more than 200,000 U.S. jobs at risk and could cost the United States $23 billion in exports.
I have said it before, but it bears repeating: USAID was not charity. It was investment, and the American taxpayer benefited from the returns in ways both easy and hard to quantify.
What we lost. Now look at what the withdrawal has produced. An Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, declared a global health emergency by the WHO in May, is spreading at a pace that experts trace directly to the collapse of U.S.-funded surveillance infrastructure.
In Kenya, the cancellation of more than 80 USAID-funded programs, including water and sanitation projects already under construction, has left communities exposed to disease spikes those projects were designed to prevent.
And people have died. Journalists have documented deaths from interrupted antiretroviral therapy, malaria medication that never arrived, and abandoned treatment regimens.
We do not have a precise count, and we will not get one. The systems that tracked those outcomes were dismantled along with the programs. But the absence of a number is not the absence of a toll.
The suffering wrought by these decisions is not staying overseas.
Losing the race. Which brings us to the competition argument, because this is where the “it’s not our job” framing completely breaks down.
Consider the reputational damage. For every deceased child, a community watched and knew exactly why: The U.S. assistance keeping them alive was withdrawn. They know this because we told them. Every clinic, every food distribution, every water point carried the words “from the American people.” We spent decades making sure our generosity was visible. We should not be surprised that our absence is equally visible.
And where the gaps are being filled, it’s Chinese infrastructure investment, development financing, and influence purchased at scale doing the filling, in precisely the countries where USAID used to work. Russia fills the space with security arrangements that trade stability for loyalty.
The question was never whether the world would be shaped by outside powers. It is which ones, on whose terms, and with whose interests at the center.
Every dollar USAID spent abroad was a dollar that improved the standing of the United States in the world and limited our strategic competitors’ ability to advance their interests. That competition did not end when USAID did. It simply became a competition for which we stopped showing up.
What comes next? A reckoning is coming. Whoever wins the next election will inherit the consequences of these decisions. They will have to decide what to rebuild, how fast, and at what cost.
The case for doing so will be easier to make, and the path clearer, if we set the record straight now, before the decisions calcify and the institutional knowledge needed to reverse them fades further from reach.
The people who understood all this—who spent careers making these arguments, building these systems, and sustaining these relationships—are no longer in government. The knowledge they carried did not transfer to a spreadsheet when they left. It went with them.
Nearly two years on, the evidence is not ambiguous. The world still needs this work, and America still needs the people who know how to do it.
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