The Crisis of International Development under Trump
Michael Gubser—
In March 2025, I spoke at a career day for Virginia high school students interested in international affairs. Many of the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in my session were despondent about their prospects for jobs in development, diplomacy, and other global fields, fearing that the United States was canceling its foreign commitments at precisely the time they were nurturing their own. I tried to reassure them: At their age, I said (with the glibness of age), it is easy to assume that today’s politics mark a permanent foreign policy shift. Yet things change rapidly, and I urged the students to pursue their interests in college and beyond, since five years hence the national and global scene will undoubtedly look different.
My words sounded somewhat hollow even to me. The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has shaken my confidence, devastating friends and colleagues in multiple countries and forcing them to end vital assistance. Bilateral and multilateral aid programs continue across the globe, but countless people who depend on US provisions for lifesaving medication or needed textbooks and agricultural supplies face terrifying cuts. There is plenty to be despondent about.
When he created USAID in 1961 by combining various agencies in the US foreign aid architecture, President John F. Kennedy evinced a far different mood—an optimism that seems almost quaint today. In segregating development assistance from the government’s day-to-day conduct of foreign policy, Kennedy hoped to protect foreign aid’s long-term improvement mission from frequent policy disruptions and from accusations of merely serving the national interest.
Even if this separation was often honored in the breach—USAID, after all, was soon pulled into the Vietnam War—the distinction between aid and foreign policy had important ramifications. It allowed the United States to cast itself as a generous superpower, an image that sometimes redounded to its benefit by offsetting the militarism of American foreign wars.
Of course, international development has long been politically fraught, and I have numerous criticisms of the aid strategies that have prevailed since World War II. But DOGE’s closure of USAID is little more than political cruelty, a move designed to hurt as many beneficiaries and waste as much personnel experience as possible. It won’t promote reform, and it will hardly save money. Foreign aid, after all, consumes barely 1 percent of the annual US budget (though many Americans think its portion is far higher). Perhaps it is this marginality, combined with USAID’s relative independence and international reach, that made foreign aid such a tempting target of America Firsters.
But US budgetary marginality is a poor measure of international development’s significance. Development is the story of the modern world—an incantatory term that evokes a range of hopes and aspirations, from prosperity and freedom to health and education, held by billions of people around the globe. In its common usage, development designates the transformation of a society from poor to rich, agrarian to industrial, often as part of a planned and managed process.
Although development aid is a minor US budget line, it plays a major part, for good and ill, in many African and Asian ledgers, supporting programs that bolster schools, clinics, and economic growth. In the twentieth century, development was a central concern of Chinese nationalists trying to unify the Middle Kingdom; global leaders forging the Bretton Woods system; African politicians navigating independence; American officials courting Cold War allies; and Central American peasants caught in civil wars. As Deng Xiaoping declared in a 1992 tour of southern China, development is the “only hard truth. If we do not develop, then we will be bullied.” Development was, in the words of historian H. W. Arndt, “everyman’s road to utopia,” the path to a better life.
Today, it behooves development professionals to remember the immense resonance of their field. The sheer scope of the enterprise makes it treacherous terrain, of course. Development has been used to justify war, tyranny, and other forms of domination. But it also speaks to real aspirations, especially those of the world’s poor—a point worth recalling as Musk brags of feeding USAID “into the wood chipper.”
USAID’s closure should also be a time for rethinking international development. Too often, aid planners treat development largely as a technical enterprise—like fixing a car or healing a sick body—that can ignore local context and history in favor of scientific solutions transportable from one country to another with only minor adjustment to local circumstances. But if the term’s varied meanings suggest anything, it is that development has long been tied up with the hopes of those who embrace it.
In its most capacious understanding, there are as many developments as there are developing communities, and practitioners should not think solely in terms of uniform technical solutions to poverty but also act as agents of the myriad ideas originating in cities and villages around the globe. The history of development shows not only that people from many continents have imagined brighter and more egalitarian futures—something that historians such as Adom Getachew and Greg Grandin have recently chronicled—but also that many communities have endeavored to build these visions from the ground up.
What can aid practitioners do to promote these hopes in a time of crisis? Here I want to highlight an important but often underappreciated advocacy role that development professionals can play. In addition to their expertise in project management and implementation, aid practitioners have extraordinary experience working across cultures with officials, colleagues, and communities in many countries. They attend local events and build local friendships, read local papers, learn local languages, and circulate in local cultures and institutions. Too often they are called on chiefly to implement plans drawn up in Western capitals, even when those plans reflect little awareness of communities they know well. Although administrative deadlines and home-office mandates eat up much of their time, their deep local knowledge and active partnerships can be tapped to inform novel program designs and aid strategies.
Even as the current administration disparages global knowledge, US development practitioners might turn the tables, not only defending the value of foreign aid but also carrying ideas back from other countries to shape more collaborative approaches, drawing development insight from local interlocutors and experiences. Aid workers can act as cultural translators, champions of local participation in decision-making, and advocates for the global exchange of persons and ideas—functions rarely tapped in the hierarchical structures of today’s aid practice. It is precisely now, when these structures are reeling, that global experience is most needed to encourage new thinking—and when students aspiring to international careers long to hear from professionals actively engaged in this effort.
Michael Gubser is professor of history at James Madison University. He has published three books on European intellectual history and international development.
