"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer
Thank you for this brilliant piece. As a development economist with 25 yrs working in the aid machine I have cited all the greats Easterly, Moyo, O Hirschman et al and been personally attacked and threatened by the Lords of Poverty. I no longer believe these people have any productive part to play in Aid 2.0… i look to support brilliant Global Majority expertise.
I have written about this in my book and as part of what I now dub “the linkedin wars” where false narratives abound. You’re my new hero, thank you for your moral integrity and professionalism
"The public did not abandon the foreign assistance system" is a weird premise since the vast majority never think about foreign aid. LinkedIn, like Twitter/X, is not reality. DOGE was not a publicly demanded attack on foreign aid. If you want alternatives to Western aid, just look at Asia. Regional development banks and family philanthropies are driving innovation. I lost my job, along with thousands of others, when USAID was defunded, but I'm not obsessing over obtuse policy arguments. Whining is a terrible business model.
Ugggh. No. "The sector" didn't refuse reform. You're victim-blaming, as a lot of the development sector does. The missing piece is Congress - who writes the laws, does the oversight, pays the bills, earmarks funds. Congress never took up reform - despite multiple efforts and decades of advocacy. There's a lot to be said about who and why Congress didn't move, but laws are laws and federal bureaucracies are very attentive to rules and process and political risk. So, reform without any political empowerment to do so is risky - impossible really.
Lecturing people and organizations that have been horribly damaged by illegial and immoral vandalism about how this is all really their own fault is your choice. Blech.
You are right that Congress writes the laws, holds the purse, and shaped much of what was possible inside the US bilateral system. Anyone who worked on US foreign assistance knows how much congressional architecture constrained the reform options that were actually on the table. I am not pretending otherwise.
Where I would push back is that the piece is not about USAID specifically. It is about the global sector. Congress did not constrain how INGOs structured themselves. Congress did not stop European donors from localizing. Congress did not prevent the UN system from reforming itself. The localization decade was a global commitment that every major INGO and major donor signed on to and almost no one delivered on. That happened across thirty years of donor pressure, in jurisdictions Congress has no authority over. The Congress argument explains a slice of the story. It does not explain the whole story.
On the events of 2025. They caused real harm and were done in ways many of us found deeply wrong. That is true and I have not pretended otherwise. It is also true that the sector was in deep structural trouble before any of that happened. Both can be true at the same time. The first does not invalidate the second.
I am not saying the people who lost their jobs deserved it. I am saying the structure they worked inside had been failing on its own terms for a long time, and the collapse exposed what was already there. You can read the piece and conclude that framing is wrong. The argument is on the page.
You can pretend this article isn’t about USAID, but you would not be writing it if it weren’t for the destruction of USAID.
The reason for that is because the US used to be by far the largest global donor. And as Gawain points out, USAID managed quite a bit of reform, despite virtually every dollar being earmarked by Congress, federal acquisition regulations, and major priority shifts with every new administration. I will never argue US foreign assistance was perfect, but these pieces expose a lot of questionable thinking- as though USAID wasn’t changing, and not changing fast enough, simply because it didn’t want to.
Same tired bullshit again. Do you know how many articles and LinkedIn posts I’ve read, exactly like this? You offer nothing- boring critique of a system you grew fat from. Oh my god, an industry that has specific terms and acronyms for things? Fuck off. You’re the consultant who writes a 100 page report: 99.5 pages of desk research, and two paragraphs of recommendations. But oh, you’re so brave for saying this!
Foreign assistance, like anything in the world, could always improve. But to pretend as though there wasn’t constant self-reflection and attempts to improve using data is completely disingenuous. Usually we were so far up our own asses we could see our tonsils. If anything, aid suffered from too much analysis- too much meddling from Congress, too many studies to see if the previous studies were correct, changing course every five years to try the new idea.
But some fucking billionaire junkie asshole came in and destroyed it. I didn’t deserve to have my job and career destroyed Dan. All the staff abroad didn’t. The other 250,000 of us didn’t deserve this Dan. But luckily I have some rich CEO prick to tell me I did.
I read this carefully. The job loss, the colleagues, the people abroad you worked with, that is real grief and I am sorry. None of that should have happened the way it did. You are right that I spent thirty years inside the system and benefited from it. I poured my working life into it. I do not pretend otherwise. The piece is partly a reckoning with that.
On the substance you are also right that there was no shortage of analysis. The sector studied itself constantly. My argument is not that we failed to look. It is that we kept pointing outward when we did. INGOs said donors had to change. Donors said INGOs had to change. Both said the UN had to change. The localization decade was the cleanest example. Everyone signed on. Almost no one divested. The reform was always something other people had to do.
That is what I think we are now paying for. You can read the piece and conclude I am wrong about that. The argument is on the page.
Take care of yourself. This year has been brutal for a lot of people.
"the sector as a whole acted as if the warnings applied to someone else." Just wrote about being back in Uganda for the first time post USAID. Its more a spiritual piece vs hard data. I've had plenty of time analyzing hard data. I think its time for everyone to move on. US has enough problems to focus on. USA is not the USA of 1991, Uganda is not the Uganda of 1991. Thanks for this. https://natybrava.substack.com/p/the-grammar-of-deficit-how-to-talk
'We built an insider vocabulary. Theories of change. Logframes. Indicators.' these are not insider words and phrases - these are the stuff of post war strategy development and project management.
We have corrupted and had theorists claim business and military tools; often corrupting them to the point of making them next to useless and serving only a function to keep people 'busy' ticking boxes and coordinating the processes no longer serving strategy into planing into doing and facilitating feedback loops.
Back to self referencing, self reverential and self reflecting - broaden out, even if only with the power of LLMs, and see just how the industry has been far from inventive and incredibly innovative in building itself.
'Foreign assistance once had a public rationale that could be explained in a paragraph. National interest. Security. Prosperity.'
The critical elements, again, are we still are not taking the steps to view the aid and development industry as an industry. A mature industry where more and players and actors chased a finite amount of customers (customers are the people/organisations able to pay for the product and services being proffered). The challenge, or the latest fad of problem, is.....And this is where the confusion has crept in.
What exactly is international development and humanitarian response. Yes, the pictures come in of short-term responses pulling people from earthquakes and solifluction. But the interminable marketing of capacity development and then stating there is no capacity so we have to go and respond to (yet another emergency)?
Surely the points are being missed in terms of, say, Oxfam campaigning to right off sovereign debt now in private hands? But this does not need huge organisations where a CEO can expound about revenue streams and number of people employed.
Accept the industrial nature in looking at the markets, what the market is in terms of customers and the products and services - then we start to understand the situation in similar vein felt and expressed need and the priority for limited finances. Then the debates change as to liberating finances and employing the near limitless resources beyond dollar bills whilst noting the constraints increasing imposed by global environmental conditions.
"about the 2025 collapse" Is is a collapse? Surely a number of the settings where aid has been pumped in have perpetuated the false equilibriums never to allow the words durable solutions and sustainable development to be entertained.
In the manner politics and conscience-salving has worked, we have perpetuated falsehoods in terms of the basis for quality of life and living growth.
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer
Thank you for this brilliant piece. As a development economist with 25 yrs working in the aid machine I have cited all the greats Easterly, Moyo, O Hirschman et al and been personally attacked and threatened by the Lords of Poverty. I no longer believe these people have any productive part to play in Aid 2.0… i look to support brilliant Global Majority expertise.
I couldn't agree more. I am writing a follow on piece that makes that exact point.
I have written about this in my book and as part of what I now dub “the linkedin wars” where false narratives abound. You’re my new hero, thank you for your moral integrity and professionalism
"The public did not abandon the foreign assistance system" is a weird premise since the vast majority never think about foreign aid. LinkedIn, like Twitter/X, is not reality. DOGE was not a publicly demanded attack on foreign aid. If you want alternatives to Western aid, just look at Asia. Regional development banks and family philanthropies are driving innovation. I lost my job, along with thousands of others, when USAID was defunded, but I'm not obsessing over obtuse policy arguments. Whining is a terrible business model.
Ugggh. No. "The sector" didn't refuse reform. You're victim-blaming, as a lot of the development sector does. The missing piece is Congress - who writes the laws, does the oversight, pays the bills, earmarks funds. Congress never took up reform - despite multiple efforts and decades of advocacy. There's a lot to be said about who and why Congress didn't move, but laws are laws and federal bureaucracies are very attentive to rules and process and political risk. So, reform without any political empowerment to do so is risky - impossible really.
Lecturing people and organizations that have been horribly damaged by illegial and immoral vandalism about how this is all really their own fault is your choice. Blech.
You are right that Congress writes the laws, holds the purse, and shaped much of what was possible inside the US bilateral system. Anyone who worked on US foreign assistance knows how much congressional architecture constrained the reform options that were actually on the table. I am not pretending otherwise.
Where I would push back is that the piece is not about USAID specifically. It is about the global sector. Congress did not constrain how INGOs structured themselves. Congress did not stop European donors from localizing. Congress did not prevent the UN system from reforming itself. The localization decade was a global commitment that every major INGO and major donor signed on to and almost no one delivered on. That happened across thirty years of donor pressure, in jurisdictions Congress has no authority over. The Congress argument explains a slice of the story. It does not explain the whole story.
On the events of 2025. They caused real harm and were done in ways many of us found deeply wrong. That is true and I have not pretended otherwise. It is also true that the sector was in deep structural trouble before any of that happened. Both can be true at the same time. The first does not invalidate the second.
I am not saying the people who lost their jobs deserved it. I am saying the structure they worked inside had been failing on its own terms for a long time, and the collapse exposed what was already there. You can read the piece and conclude that framing is wrong. The argument is on the page.
You can pretend this article isn’t about USAID, but you would not be writing it if it weren’t for the destruction of USAID.
The reason for that is because the US used to be by far the largest global donor. And as Gawain points out, USAID managed quite a bit of reform, despite virtually every dollar being earmarked by Congress, federal acquisition regulations, and major priority shifts with every new administration. I will never argue US foreign assistance was perfect, but these pieces expose a lot of questionable thinking- as though USAID wasn’t changing, and not changing fast enough, simply because it didn’t want to.
Same tired bullshit again. Do you know how many articles and LinkedIn posts I’ve read, exactly like this? You offer nothing- boring critique of a system you grew fat from. Oh my god, an industry that has specific terms and acronyms for things? Fuck off. You’re the consultant who writes a 100 page report: 99.5 pages of desk research, and two paragraphs of recommendations. But oh, you’re so brave for saying this!
Foreign assistance, like anything in the world, could always improve. But to pretend as though there wasn’t constant self-reflection and attempts to improve using data is completely disingenuous. Usually we were so far up our own asses we could see our tonsils. If anything, aid suffered from too much analysis- too much meddling from Congress, too many studies to see if the previous studies were correct, changing course every five years to try the new idea.
But some fucking billionaire junkie asshole came in and destroyed it. I didn’t deserve to have my job and career destroyed Dan. All the staff abroad didn’t. The other 250,000 of us didn’t deserve this Dan. But luckily I have some rich CEO prick to tell me I did.
I read this carefully. The job loss, the colleagues, the people abroad you worked with, that is real grief and I am sorry. None of that should have happened the way it did. You are right that I spent thirty years inside the system and benefited from it. I poured my working life into it. I do not pretend otherwise. The piece is partly a reckoning with that.
On the substance you are also right that there was no shortage of analysis. The sector studied itself constantly. My argument is not that we failed to look. It is that we kept pointing outward when we did. INGOs said donors had to change. Donors said INGOs had to change. Both said the UN had to change. The localization decade was the cleanest example. Everyone signed on. Almost no one divested. The reform was always something other people had to do.
That is what I think we are now paying for. You can read the piece and conclude I am wrong about that. The argument is on the page.
Take care of yourself. This year has been brutal for a lot of people.
Brilliant perspective seldom seen in this discussion.
"the sector as a whole acted as if the warnings applied to someone else." Just wrote about being back in Uganda for the first time post USAID. Its more a spiritual piece vs hard data. I've had plenty of time analyzing hard data. I think its time for everyone to move on. US has enough problems to focus on. USA is not the USA of 1991, Uganda is not the Uganda of 1991. Thanks for this. https://natybrava.substack.com/p/the-grammar-of-deficit-how-to-talk
'The sector also became poor at distinguishing between defending the mission and defending the machinery' Who would fall on their sword?
'We built an insider vocabulary. Theories of change. Logframes. Indicators.' these are not insider words and phrases - these are the stuff of post war strategy development and project management.
We have corrupted and had theorists claim business and military tools; often corrupting them to the point of making them next to useless and serving only a function to keep people 'busy' ticking boxes and coordinating the processes no longer serving strategy into planing into doing and facilitating feedback loops.
Back to self referencing, self reverential and self reflecting - broaden out, even if only with the power of LLMs, and see just how the industry has been far from inventive and incredibly innovative in building itself.
'Foreign assistance once had a public rationale that could be explained in a paragraph. National interest. Security. Prosperity.'
The critical elements, again, are we still are not taking the steps to view the aid and development industry as an industry. A mature industry where more and players and actors chased a finite amount of customers (customers are the people/organisations able to pay for the product and services being proffered). The challenge, or the latest fad of problem, is.....And this is where the confusion has crept in.
What exactly is international development and humanitarian response. Yes, the pictures come in of short-term responses pulling people from earthquakes and solifluction. But the interminable marketing of capacity development and then stating there is no capacity so we have to go and respond to (yet another emergency)?
Surely the points are being missed in terms of, say, Oxfam campaigning to right off sovereign debt now in private hands? But this does not need huge organisations where a CEO can expound about revenue streams and number of people employed.
It probably does not give space for more 'I told you so' articles and books to which I have contributed -https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/united-nations-own-reformation-paul-crook-tjkoe/ andhttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/water-womens-rights-only-goals-matter-paul-crook-qtcpe/
Accept the industrial nature in looking at the markets, what the market is in terms of customers and the products and services - then we start to understand the situation in similar vein felt and expressed need and the priority for limited finances. Then the debates change as to liberating finances and employing the near limitless resources beyond dollar bills whilst noting the constraints increasing imposed by global environmental conditions.
"about the 2025 collapse" Is is a collapse? Surely a number of the settings where aid has been pumped in have perpetuated the false equilibriums never to allow the words durable solutions and sustainable development to be entertained.
In the manner politics and conscience-salving has worked, we have perpetuated falsehoods in terms of the basis for quality of life and living growth.