The New Yorker:

The new Administration’s move to shutter U.S.A.I.D. has halted vital aid programs around the world and left thousands of development workers in a state of limbo.

By John Cassidy

For almost twenty-five years, William Easterly, a free-market economist at New York University, has been a prominent academic critic of foreign-aid programs. In his 2001 book, “The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics,” Easterly wrote that decades of development assistance from the West had failed to spur growth and relieve poverty in many poor countries. Moreover, he argued that U.S. aid programs had propped up autocratic rulers, such as Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister from 1995 to 2012, once dubbed “the man who tried to make dictatorship acceptable” by The Economist. In a 2014 book, Easterly wrote, “What used to be the divine right of kings has in our time become the development right of dictators.”

Many of the aid programs that Easterly has criticized were supported by the United States Agency for International Development. U.S.A.I.D., created in the nineteen-sixties by John F. Kennedy, is the world’s largest bilateral-aid agency; in 2023, Congress allocated more than forty billion dollars to its projects. But, on Donald Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that halted most aid programsand claimed the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy” were “in many cases antithetical to American values.” Since then, Elon Musk and his colleagues at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been dismantling U.S.A.I.D., shuttering its headquarters, taking its Web site offline, and placing most of its employees on leave. Last Monday, Musk wrote on his X platform, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

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