What foreign aid cuts damaged beneath the surface

The 2025 contraction of foreign aid – marked by the dismantling of USAID and a broader donor pullback – set off two urgent debates. One is about the human costs of the cuts themselves, and the other is about how assistance should be structured going forward. GFI and GW researchers set out to inform the second, documenting what was happening to the underlying architecture of the system even as the immediate crisis dominated attention.   Our latest research brief, featured in the Devex Newswire, discusses what has changed beneath the surface.