| U.S. GDP | $27,721 billion |
| U.S. federal spending | $6,135 billion |
| U.S. Agency for International Development budget | $43 billion |
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Here’s Herbert Hoover arguing for food aid to Germany in 1920 as head of Woodrow Wilson’s post-WWI European famine relief program:
“No matter how deeply we may feel at the present moment, our vision must stretch over the next hundred years and we must write now into history such acts as will stand creditably in the minds of our grandchildren … Twenty million are starving. Whatever their politics, they will be fed.”
From this start, American foreign aid programs have lasted for the hundred years Hoover imagined. The large mile-markers — the Marshall Plan, John F. Kennedy’s creation of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1962 (the agency now under mysterious attack from the Trump administration), and the second Bush administration’s launch of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation — highlight a steady national commitment spanning lots of projects, long hardship-post and conflict assignments, some ideas that didn’t pan out, and many successes.
Last year, USAID oversaw a $35.4 billion budget supporting countries from Ukraine and Kenya to Jordan and Papua New Guinea, with the largest share going to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, and other lines supporting nutrition, humanitarian relief, primary education, economic growth, clean water, and more. The administration’s attempt to dismantle the agency seems to rest on three arguments: claims of “fraud,” which appear to have no basis at all; the assertion that development and humanitarian relief are fiscally unaffordable (not correct, see below for some financials); and an argument that money doesn’t always go abroad but is at times spent in the United States. Here’s a look, through the lens of USAID’s current work in one country:
Malawi, a landlocked African nation of 19 million people west of Mozambique and Tanzania, is one of the world’s seven most “rural” countries (82% of Malawians live on the land). It is also one of the world’s seven poorest countries, with an annual per capita income of $600. USAID’s program here, at $243 million in 2024, has two main focuses:
HIV/AIDS: About half the Malawi budget, $143 million last year, goes to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention via PEPFAR grants to support health education in high school, clinic support and medicine supply, and prevention of new infections in early childhood and children. Over PEPFAR’s 20 years, Malawi’s HIV positivity rate is down by nearly half, from 13.1% to 7.1%. Sample from USAID grantees Ana Patsogolo Activity, whose work concentrates on education, awareness, and financial support for orphans, girls, and young women:
“Ana Patsogolo Activity (AP) seeks to bolster HIV prevention by decreasing young women’s reliance on transactional sex, strengthen their self-efficacy, independence, and decision-making, and serve as a bridge to wage employment or self-employment pathways for adolescent girls and young women. … APA’s enhanced package includes targeted content and strategies, namely: financial literacy for youth; voluntary savings and lending associations (VSLAs) [fpr youth] able to be employed and earn income; and locally based skills training in collaboration with rural community development agents and artisans. To support girls who are too young to engage in technical training or internships (i.e. the 10 – 14 age band), their caregivers are linked to VSLAs to improve household financial stability.”
Agricultural Development: Many Malawian smallholder farmers, formerly tobacco growers, are trying to diversify into healthier crops as worldwide smoking rates fall. “Feed the Future”, an agricultural development program run by USAID in partnership with the Department of Agriculture and other agencies, is helping them develop (or more accurately revive) a local Malawi peanut industry, with nuts destined in part for local sale and in part for export to other African markets. Some USAID money for this project does indeed go to Americans at home – for example, to scientists at the University of Georgia – and for good reason.
Georgia is a state especially renowned for peanut farming. A USAID grant supports work at the Peanut Innovation lab to help aspiring Malawi peanut growers solve two problems: productivity and safety. Malawi grows peanuts on 363,000 hectares of land, about the same as the U.S.’ 421,000 hectares, but gets only 381,000 tons of peanuts out of it — barely a fifth of the U.S.’ 1.9 million tons. Meanwhile, Malawi soil is unusually rich in an unpleasant substance called “aflatoxin” (a fungal chemical that raises the risk of liver disease), making its peanuts’ safety less reliable. USAID’s grant to the university helps apply Georgian farming techniques and science to both:
“Researchers in Malawi and the U.S. are working together to study the effects of pre- and post-harvest interventions in increasing peanut productivity and reducing aflatoxin contamination. Interventions being evaluated include planting and harvest dates and better row/plant spacing, improved disease and pest management, and several drying and storage options. Researchers are also examining the levels of aflatoxin and microbial contamination in locally produced peanut products, an area of high concern for both local and international markets. Trainings for local producers, often women, aim to lower contamination levels and support the production of peanut products at much higher quality and food safety standards.”
Over the past seven years, this work and a similar soybean program with research based at the University of Illinois, has reached 565,660 Malawians, doubling income for the farmers in the program. And since 2020, a separate program, Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, has been training Malawian officials and logistics professionals in port and customs, both to move crops out of the country to markets more easily and to facilitate the imports — machinery, fertilizer, pest control — that can help them find markets and buy useful inputs more cheaply.
In sum: In Malawi, USAID money aims to keep girls safe and improve the livelihoods of very poor farmers. More generally, PEPFAR operates similar programs in 55 countries, and Feed the Future in 20. To the criticism that this sort of work — aflatoxin research, peanut pest management, health education for rural girls — is “fraud”: obviously not. On the claim that it’s unaffordable: U.S. GDP is $28 trillion, and grows by about $2 trillion a year in nominal terms, while the overall U.S. budget is now about $7 trillion and rises by $200 billion to $300 billion a year because of rising retirement, health, and interest spending. The USAID budget is stable and appropriated, about $0.04 trillion a year. By way of analogy, at 0.15% of GDP it has an impact similar to that a $120 movie-and-ice-cream outing might have on a median-income $80,610 family: not nothing, but fully affordable and not the cause of family financial trouble. And if some of the money supports research and employment in Georgia: why would that be bad?
As with anywhere in government, aid projects should be well-designed, expenses controlled, and results more important than hopes. But none of this can justify abandoning a century of American commitment to the sick, the poor, and people in distress. Put another way, as Mr. Hoover hoped, the famine relief program in the 1920s did, in fact, embody both practical ‘acts that stand up creditably’ to later scrutiny and a larger “vision” that continues to inspire a century later. The work of USAID staff on the ground on PEPFAR health support, in Feed the Future Innovation Labs, on economic growth, democratization, humanitarian relief, and more, is in that tradition. It, too, will stand up creditably in years ahead. Those trying to tear it down won’t.
Hoover looks back on the beginning of American humanitarian aid, 1914-1920.
… the National Archives reviews his Belgium relief program.
… and a century later, foreignassistance.gov tracks modern USAID and other agency spending levels, agency responsibilities, and projects.
Malawi background:
The University of Georgia’s Peanut Innovation Lab explains the Malawi peanut program.
A USAID grantee through PEPFAR, the Ana Patsogolo project, works to prevent HIV/AIDS infections in orphans, children, and young women, operating in Botswana, Uganda, and Eswatini as well as Malawi.
And the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation helps upgrade customs and improve port efficiency.
PPI Perspectives:
PPI’s New Ukraine Project lead Tamar Jacoby has an up-close look at USAID in Ukraine.
And Paul Weinstein on the right approach to government reform.
And more on USAID:
The Democratic Voice of Burma records a quiet tragedy at the Umpiem Mai refugee camp just west of Myanmar, after a USAID-supported clinic had to close two weeks ago. Having lost access to her oxygen supplies, 71-year-old Pe Kha Lau died three days later.
A state-by-state look at USAID links to American businesses, universities, charities, and volunteer groups.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler dismantles the White House’s shoddily cherry-picked justifications for cutting USAID.
And the Center for Global Development’s Charles Kenny has both backstory on these particular projects and the larger picture.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
