Less than two years after the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was “fed to the wood chipper” by Elon Musk and tens of billions of dollars were cut from the United States’ foreign aid budget, the mid-term elections have again dramatically changed the country’s political landscape. From January, the Democrats will command large majorities in the Senate and House. Two years is a long time in politics — waves come and go — but, for now, the Democrats also appear to have a better than even chance of winning the next presidential election.
What will this mean for US aid? In the short term, the Democrats can now hold inquiries and hearings into the chaotic demolition of USAID, as well as into how a much-denuded State Department has gone about managing what is left of the US foreign aid program. In theory, given their authority over the federal budget and the fact that USAID remains a statutorily authorised agency, they could also use their legislative power to start the process of reversing some of the Trump administration’s changes. This would, however, require cooperation from the White House, which is very unlikely while Trump is its occupant.
If a Democrat is elected president in 2028, and the Democrats still hold the House and Senate, the odds of recovery are higher. But our advice to supporters of aid in the US is stark and simple — don’t count on it!
Long before the recent ransacking of US aid, one after another, conservative governments in New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom dismantled their countries’ aid agencies. In Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom aid budgets were slashed too. (New Zealand’s aid budget survived because it was jealously guarded by two idiosyncratic, yet powerful, foreign ministers.)
Worse still, in each of these countries the dismantling of the aid agency had major consequences. Expertise, which is so critical in aid work, haemorrhaged as aid officials left, and the delivery of aid often ended up in the hands of foreign ministries that were either less prepared or less interested in giving aid well. Not surprisingly, given that foreign ministries are tasked with advancing diplomatic goals, aid also became increasingly focused on doing exactly this, with little room for much else. Vague concepts like “alignment” were used to mask the inevitable aid effectiveness trade-offs associated with integrating diplomacy and development.
Eventually, the conservative governments in question were replaced. Given that parties on the centre-left had criticised the changes at the time, one might have expected the damage to have been reversed. However, in all four countries this is not what happened.
In New Zealand and, more clearly, in Canada, incoming centre-left governments did increase aid, both in absolute terms and compared to the size of their countries’ economies.
But now even Canada’s progressive government is cutting aid: reductions of C$2.7 billion over four years were announced in the 2025 budget, and the 2026 budget left them in place. In Australia, the nominal value of aid has increased under the present Labor government, but not as fast as inflation, the economy or government spending as a whole, despite Labor’s promise to “rebuild aid”. In the UK, the Starmer and Burnham Labour governments are cutting aid even more determinedly than their Conservative predecessors and, as a result, aid as a share of national income is set to fall to 0.3% by 2027–28, an almost 30-year low.
None of these centre-left governments re-established their official aid agencies. Indeed, the idea of doing so appears not to have been seriously considered by any of them. Penny Wong ruled it out as shadow foreign minister in 2017, telling the Australian Council for International Development that, whatever Labor thought of the Abbott government’s decision, “you can’t unscramble an egg”, a line she returned to as foreign minister. As a result, expertise has not returned, the processes and people required to manage aid well are still lacking and aid remains more focused on transactional foreign policy goals than it once was. None of these countries gives aid as well as it once did.
The explanation for why these centre-left governments failed to reverse the changes they once criticised varies from country to country, but several underlying features have been present in all of them. The first is that foreign ministries, and their ministers in cases where aid was formerly not controlled by foreign ministers, are not exactly volunteering to surrender the power that comes with holding the purse strings of an aid budget. The second is that, at a time when the perceived threats posed by China and Russia have dominated headlines, the centre-left governments in question have decided that issues such as reducing poverty, fighting disease and aid effectiveness are much less of a priority relative to spending on defence and national security.
And there is a final reason why, at least in the two cases that we know best, Australia and New Zealand, governments have failed to revive aid agencies: no-one has asked. In Australia, there have been campaigns to increase and protect existing foreign aid spending, and these campaigns have likely helped buttress aid against further cuts. By contrast, there have been no concerted and consistent attempts to convince governments to restore the structures and expertise required to give aid well.
Rebuilding a bilateral aid agency is not everyone’s first priority. Writing immediately after the mid-terms, experts from the Center for Global Development argued that, with US bilateral capacity so thin and the current administration uninterested, the quickest way back to US development leadership is to go big on the multilaterals.
They note that even supporters of bilateral funding concede USAID is unlikely to return during the next Congress, and that only around 700 of more than 10,000 former USAID staff moved across to the State Department. Their proposals are for Congress to restore and increase US funding for the World Bank’s concessional arm, the International Development Association, to pledge to the concessional windows of the regional development banks, to shore up the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s subsidised lending to low-income countries, and to pass low-cost technical fixes such as lifting the World Bank’s lending cap and approving the agreed IMF quota increase.
We agree that those things are worth doing, that the old agency and its counterparts in other donor countries had their flaws, and that nothing should be rebuilt exactly as it was. But the experience of the four countries above suggests a warning. Once the institutional home of development is gone, what tends to follow is not a better-designed replacement but the slow absorption of aid into foreign policy, with no agency, no expertise and no one accountable for giving aid well.
The US context is different from the four parliamentary democracies described above: members of Congress conventionally have much more independence from their parties than members of parliament, and the constitutional divide between the legislature and executive is more clear-cut.
But the underlying lesson for aid advocates in the US remains: if you don’t demand, you won’t receive. In the tumultuous world of politics, if you don’t ask loudly enough to make your voice heard amongst the din of competing interests and countervailing powers, don’t expect to get anything, no matter how recently it was snatched away and no matter how much progressive politicians condemned the changes at the time. If you want the harm caused by the recent attack on US aid to be reversed, you will need to fight, campaign and make a noise, no matter how much political momentum may appear to be on your side at present.
Controlling Congress will probably not provide the Democrats with the opportunity to restore USAID, or perhaps even reverse the worst of Trump’s aid cuts. Nonetheless, it ought to provide a chance to find powerful supporters and get the ball rolling. The high-profile, newly elected Democratic Senator for Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, has already articulated what this might look like.
If you want to reverse the damage that the Trump presidency has caused to US aid, start the fight now.
The former head of USAID’s global health team, Nick Enrich, will launch his book, “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump administration Shredded USAID” at the 2026 Australasian Australasian Aid and International Development Conference on 2 December. For the full conference program and registration details, visit the AAC2026 event webpage.
