The U.S. government’s aggressive shuttering of USAID in 2025 dealt a devastating blow to international development, with consequences felt by millions of people worldwide.
Programs that delivered life-saving medical care, expanded access to clean and reliable water, and supported smallholder farmers through agricultural extension — boosting productivity, incomes, and resilience to climate and market shocks — were abruptly disrupted.
More broadly, USAID’s work across education, economic growth, humanitarian assistance, democracy and governance, climate mitigation and adaptation, natural resource management, and gender equality played a critical role in improving livelihoods, resilience, and human well-being globally.
The benefits of foreign assistance did not stop with partner countries; Americans gained as well.
USAID’s investments helped reduce global instability that can lead to conflict and costly military interventions, expanded export markets for U.S. businesses, protected Americans from pandemics and transnational threats, and strengthened U.S. diplomatic influence and national security. All of these benefits were achieved for pennies on the dollar, while generating goodwill toward the U.S. through visible, sustained, and locally aligned assistance — delivering a steady pipeline of intangible but vital assets: trust, cooperation, and influence.
The benefits of foreign assistance did not stop with partner countries; Americans gained as well.
I spent over a decade with USAID, most recently serving as the Climate Adaptation Team lead. Our team served as a primary technical partner with USAID mission counterparts and host country partners to manage climate risk across development sectors like agriculture, water, and infrastructure.
This holistic approach brought the lens of climate risk to the development agenda. Our goal was to help people prepare for and manage extreme weather and climate change. We worked to shift the focus away from disaster reaction and toward planning ahead and managing hazards before they become disasters, thus protecting lives, livelihoods, and human dignity.
Planning ahead took on many forms, from investments in long-term local capacity, to strengthened market systems, improved weather forecasts and early warning systems, to more resilient infrastructure and nature-based solutions. Looking back, I recognize a common feature shared across the diverse portfolio of USAID investments: We all fostered trust.
Trust is far easier to break than it is to rebuild.
The hard truth is that by disrupting and dismantling its diverse portfolio of overseas development assistance, the U.S. lost its credibility as a reliable and trusted partner. Trust is far easier to break than it is to rebuild. Decades of hard-earned goodwill and development gains — accumulated over USAID’s 60 year history — were undone shockingly fast. Rebuilding confidence in the U.S. will be difficult but not impossible.
Building back credibility and the internal capacity to deliver results can start by reestablishing a clear organizational home with the authority, technical expertise, and field presence to act over the long term. Delivering predictable and consistent assistance over time will signal to partners that U.S. engagement is once again grounded in long-term cooperation rather than short-term political cycles. Without that foundation, even well-intentioned commitments will struggle to translate into results.
And, importantly, the U.S. public must be treated as shareholders with a ready appetite to understand the outcomes of these investments and why they matter to U.S. interests.
Unmanaged risks abroad do not stay abroad.
Rebuilding U.S. foreign assistance is not only a moral or diplomatic imperative, but a cost-effective strategy for managing risks that directly affect U.S. lives and interests. Because climate risk has become a dominant driver of development setbacks, climate adaptation must be mainstreamed across all development programming of the future. Climate change is a collective problem that requires collective solutions. No country, the U.S. included, can address it alone. But within a broader international ecosystem, and by pairing finance, technical capacity, weather and climate information, and on-the-ground delivery, the U.S. can again play an important role in strengthening climate resilience.
In Peru for example, USAID worked with local communities to access public and private financing that incentivized the conservation and restoration of headwater ecosystems, thus improving water security for downstream urban areas where water demand and climate risks were increasing.
In Pakistan, thousands of schools were destroyed in the devastating floods of 2022. By contrast, USAID had built schools to flood-resilient standards — these schools withstood the floods and avoided reconstruction costs, thus underscoring the value of integrating climate adaptation from the start. Done well, this line of investment reduces the loss of life and livelihoods, strengthens global stability, and spotlights U.S. leadership at a fraction of the cost of crisis response or conflict.
A renewed U.S. re-engagement on international climate adaptation should follow an approach focused on restoring trust, rebuilding delivery capacity, and prioritizing real-world results. Doing so will require fully integrating climate action across the development enterprise, rejoining key multilateral climate agreements and finance mechanisms, and committing predictable funding to durable, locally-led solutions.
The approach on climate adaptation in particular should emphasize measurable risk reduction in people’s lives. This can include working with countries and communities to create strong and bespoke multi-hazard early warning systems that motivate response, climate-resilient infrastructure, food and water security, climate-informed public health systems that anticipate and manage heat, disease, and air-quality risks, and practical support for countries facing unavoidable climate impacts.
Unmanaged risks abroad do not stay abroad. The longer the U.S. fails to cooperate with partners on managing risk, the more likely those unaddressed threats are to spill across borders and reach our shores.
