The politics of foreign aid

Julianne Weis worked at USAID for nearly eight years. When the agency effectively closed in 2025, she went to the Hill to start advocating for foreign aid. Julianne and Clara discuss:

• The current political situation of foreign aid

• Why messaging (still) matters

• The role of whistleblowers during the DOGE crisis

• The next USAID-like agency

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Clara Collier: You were at USAID for many years, and you also co-founded Aid on the Hill, which is an aid advocacy organization. Do you want to start by briefly talking about your USAID background?

Julianne Weis: Sure. So I am a global health researcher by training. I spent many years in various African countries doing global health research. I then worked at USAID in global health research, in one of the offices in the Global Health Bureau, focused on implementation science research — particularly behavioral science, actually social behavior change. I worked at USAID for about seven and a half years.

In January 2025, we were effectively all laid off. They did keep a really small group of essential staff that they used to essentially close down USAID through July 1, 2025. And then there was another group that went on to the end of 2025, but that was truly a few dozen people from 15,000 of us worldwide.

The more important part was that all of our programs were paused in January 2025. They sent stop-work orders to every single aid project around the world, and in that moment, I just had complete, true panic about what would happen if they succeeded. I started going to the Hill to advocate for restoration of the life-saving projects. And the momentum just grew and grew and grew. We really filled a gap and a need — an information gap. That was the main thing: Congress was just getting no information from the State Department about what was actually happening. We were this really key sort of watchdog player at that time. And so it then became Aid on the Hill, which is now a fully fledged advocacy organization — funded and everything, but I don’t work there anymore.

Clara: One reason I really wanted to talk to you is that I hear a lot of conversations about, how should we reconstruct foreign aid — what should it look like what should we do — and much less on the politics. But of course, as we all learned last year, foreign aid is a political question. So what do you see as the political situation with foreign aid right now? Who supports it, who’s against it, which constituencies actually matter for making sure that there is robust political support for aid in the U.S.?

Julianne: I think it’s a way more hopeful story than people think. I think the narrative that foreign aid is a completely politically toxic area just does not bear out in the data at all.

There’s been a lot in the last year — a lot of focus group and survey data digging into this issue, including with Republicans in red states. Surveys and focus groups, as any researcher knows, can be very biased, but when the story is presented as, hey, this is what America is capable of doing, this is what foreign aid can achieve — there was just data that came out about the enormous bipartisan support for PEPFAR, for example. Life-saving support, really effective programs, things that truly make a difference, that don’t cost a lot of money in comparison to the U.S. budget. When that story is told, there’s an enormous amount of support for it. I think the problem is that when they attacked USAID, they had to make the case for that. And so they absolutely flooded media with misinformation about aid and about waste, fraud, and abuse.

All these lies about what aid was doing were just completely flooded across the media. And so people assumed everybody was buying into this narrative. I do think there’s probably a 30% of the American public that will never be behind this. But it is not at all the majority. Even among Republicans, it’s not a clear partisan line. There are actually people on the far left who are also very skeptical and dismissive of USAID. In the DSA — the Democratic Socialists of America — platform, they called for the abolishing of USAID and talked about it as an imperial, CIA-front kind of thing. So it’s not a straightforward “right versus left” or “Democrat versus Republican.” It’s a bit more complicated than that.

But overall, what we’ve seen from a lot of the polling and survey data, and from doing advocacy and activism, is that the conversation of America being a good player on the world stage and doing really effective foreign assistance is actually a very compelling argument, a compelling policy point, that rallies a lot of different kinds of people.

The PR of foreign aid

Clara: Do you think the aid and development community was failing to communicate this previously?

Julianne: Yes, absolutely. I do agree with that postmortem, that aid was really bad at this. Yes, I do agree.

Clara: What were the biggest mistakes?

Julianne: Okay, so foreign aid is inherently very complex in a lot of ways. But I think we overcomplicate it from a communications point of view. There’s a lot of apology about aid, because there are inherent power dynamics, there’s neocolonialism, there are problematic elements of foreign assistance. We don’t want to go back to like 1985 Live Aid, pretending or assuming that all people in African countries are just desperate and starving. There are ways that we need to overcome those narratives.

But the biggest mistake was just not talking about the huge successes. Global health has been enormously successful. The reductions in child mortality in the last 20 years are astonishing. That is a huge success story. And when people understand that we were actually making an impact, they’re way more likely to support it. It’s kind of like climate change as well: If people only hear things that are bad or hopeless, then they just disengage entirely. But if they know that there are ways that you can actually have a huge impact — there’s a malaria vaccine, we’re coming out with a new TB vaccine, we’ve had huge strides in global health — leaning into those positive narratives and the impact would serve us a lot better than being too apologetic, too hidden, too reductionist, or being like, “It’s too complicated to tell this story.”

Clara: When we were doing a lot of PEPFAR coverage last year, people who were more PEPFAR-skeptical would often say, “Well, is it supposed to last forever? Why are we doing this if there’s no progress?” And you’d have to explain, “No, no, no, no. There’s been a lot of progress.”

Julianne: Yes. I was actually on a webinar this week, and Samantha Power mentioned that. She said a big mistake was that we didn’t communicate that aid was a graduation model.

Clara: Of course, it’s also the case that implementing that graduation model is hard.

Julianne: Yes. And there’s just so much that’s misunderstood. I have family that consume a lot of very right-wing media. And my mom sent me this meme. She’s like, “I don’t agree with this at all, Julianne. I just want you to see what’s out there and what people are seeing.” And it was a meme of a picture of an African wattle-and-stick home. And it said “Africa pre-aid.” And then it was another picture of the same exact wattle-and-stick home: “Africa, this many trillion dollars later.”

So reductionist. Just the idea that we’ve thrown all this money away, nothing has happened. And that’s really, really untrue. So it’s hard, because you want to make the case for aid and talk about the problems that are there — like, “this is a big problem.” There are still huge problems. Children are dying of diarrhea.

There are tremendous water and sanitation issues. But I think focusing so much on the problems has not served us well, in the sense that people have all these excuses — “oh, that’s not our problem to solve,” or “well, we’ve given all this money already,” all these different kinds of things. Whereas if we talk about, “hey, we did this and this is the outcome, and look how cool” — like, oh, now South Africa is doing this or whatever — then it helps people realize, we’re all in this together. There’s no perfect communication strategy.

I’m not going to say it was all aid’s fault that we had to communicate it — “if we had communicated better, Elon Musk wouldn’t have done this” — because I think he would have done it anyway. He had a clear vendetta and clear intention to tear down the U.S. government. So I’m not going to do victim-blaming. But yes, we definitely did that.

Does Congress matter?

Clara: This actually relates to my next question, which is: There’s the issue of how to build public support for aid. But then you have to ask, does that actually influence Congress? And now on top of that we also have to wonder, does Congress matter?

I think you’re right in saying that Musk was probably going to try to do what he did anyway. He was already convinced by all these conspiracy theories. But if there had been much more public support for aid, what difference do you think that would have made in the moment? Would other actors have responded differently? And should that influence the strategy going forward? Maybe we shouldn’t even think of that as a repeatable thing you can plan for.

Julianne: That’s really hard. I don’t think there was anything we could have done differently, because I heard from a Republican senator’s chief of staff that in those early months, USAID was the number one constituent-call issue from their red state.

Clara: In favor or against?

Julianne: In favor. Saying, “Why are you cutting foreign aid? You’re killing people.” That was in large part — this I can say — it was Utah. That was the state. It was because of the tremendous advocacy work of groups like Mormon Women for Ethical Government, who were sounding the alarm.

So I know that there were lots of constituent calls. I know there was a lot of media attention. Republicans at that stage — Trump had just come to office and they just were not going to publicly push back against him. They just were not going to do that. What they did instead — and this is what they all told us and assured us, and it did end up happening — is they restored the budget for the following year. They restored the funding, and they put all these checks on the State Department. But they had decided they were going to sacrifice USAID — let them have USAID, we’ll continue to do PEPFAR under the State Department, we’ll still do all the good life-saving work, and we’ll restore that, don’t worry, but we can’t step in and stop this.

And I’m like, it’s really frustrating, because the State Department is just not staffed up. They’re not equipped to do aid at the level that is necessary. There have been tremendous implementation issues, and there will continue to be. So I think there was a naïveté, but I do think Congress did as much as they were willing to do as a Republican Congress, in the first year of a new administration.

If Elon Musk had gone after USAID later, it might have been different. Look at the Department of Education, which actually still exists. That was one they said they were going to demolish. It’s actually still there. They’ve kind of been like, “Oh, never mind.” I mean, it’s been greatly reduced. There have been humongous RIFs across all of the federal government. But I think the timing of it meant there was really nothing they were going to do, because it was so early in the game. If Musk and DOGE had gone after USAID later, they would have pushed back more. But there just wasn’t much time.

Does constituent voice matter to Congress — yes, 100%. It very much does. Does anything Congress does matter? In normal times, it matters a lot. In this administration, it doesn’t matter very much, because the executive branch is just kind of doing whatever they want regardless of congressional intent. And that’s not just with foreign aid. Look at NIH, look at NSF — Congress has restored all these budget lines. They’ve even demanded that, you know, you have to fund this program, you need to hire staff, you need to do these things. Congress is actually pushing back, and that is because of constituent voices, that is because of advocacy. But the executive branch is completely rogue, does not care about the law. That’s really difficult.

Clara: So where does this leave aid advocates? Is the goal to build enduring support for the future when the administration is less insane? Should the focus be more on figuring out checks on executive power? What does it make sense to focus on?

Julianne: I still think it makes a lot of sense to focus on the immediate — on staving off the worst harms. There’s too much talk about the future of foreign aid that is ignoring what’s happening right now. And you still need to be engaged with what’s happening right now, because Congress, again, they did appropriate all this money. The State Department has all this money that they should be spending, that they could be spending. They are spending some of it. They are doing global health work. So it’s really important to still be engaged in the immediate, to ensure that at least something passable is happening, that HIV treatment continues, that humanitarian aid continues.

In the longer term, it’s hard for me to think about, how do you create executive-branch checks that will actually hold? Technically we have them in our Constitution and in our law. They just don’t care. What do you do when you have absolutely shameless judges? It’s an authoritarian takeover. I don’t know if you can legislation-proof this kind of thing.

USAID does still legally exist. It’s still there, because Congress would have had to pass a law to abolish it, which they haven’t. But it’s been effectively shut down just by all the money being taken away, the staff being taken away, the power of it being taken away.

What makes the administration act?

Clara: I do want to push, though. What is the role of advocacy in this situation? One thing you said earlier was that when USAID was actually being demolished, there was a very active attempt to control the media narrative around it, which suggests that on some level they do feel constrained by public opinion. They do care.

Julianne: Yes. That’s absolutely true. And I do think that’s why DOGE stopped. That’s because it was so deeply unpopular. That’s why DOGE went away. That’s why they didn’t demolish the Department of Education. So they are absolutely constrained by public attention.

They were trying to get the narrative out in front, saying that USAID was only wasteful and that all the reports of deaths from aid cuts are a lie and all that. So that’s why I said, focus on things that are happening now, to ensure that they’re still programming the money, they’re still getting money out the door, they’re still supporting essential services that the U.S. has committed to. And the way to do that is by continuing that media spotlight — because you’re right, they can be shamed. When Nicholas Enrich at USAID put those memos out in March, April, whatever, in 2025, that completely changed the game, because he proved —

Clara: Explain this incident, for people who may be less familiar with it.

Julianne: So when they had done the stop-work order, they said that they would have a waiver for life-saving assistance. They had put the majority of USAID staff on administrative leave, or fired all the contractors. There was a core small group of essential employees that were supposed to be continuing to implement the waivers and shut down USAID.

Nicholas Enrich was one of them. And he put out a memo to the public. He sent it to the New York Times and he sent it to different media, documenting very, very clearly that the waiver system was not working, that no aid was happening, that everything was still stopped, that the response to Ebola in Uganda was completely stopped, that all humanitarian aid was stopped, that nothing was moving forward.

Up until that point, Rubio, the State Department, Pete Marocco, all these people had been saying, “Don’t listen to NGOs. We’re not stopping life-saving aid. We’re still doing life-saving aid. Everything is fine.” And Nick Enrich’s memos demonstrated very publicly that that was a lie. He was a whistleblower from inside USAID.

We had been on the Hill at that point doing advocacy for a while, and Congress was pushing State Department. They were like, “Okay, now show us, what are the projects that are active?” They were trying, but the State Department was just ignoring Congress entirely. But after the media reports from the memos, all of a sudden the State Department turned on a bunch of life-saving programs again.

That was the ticket that actually restored the most essential programs. It was still very rocky in the months after that. It was not immediate. It was still really difficult. But it was because of the media attention and shaming. So in this right moment, that still matters, because it’s still very messy. You need continuous advocacy — that public shaming and advocacy, dual-hat, to make sure that — you’re seeing this around the global health MOUs, the memoranda of understanding.

There is a lot of press about those. There was that Stephanie Nolen article in the New York Times about HIV coming back in parts of Zambia. That kind of reporting really, really does anger the administration, and it will force them to act. So yeah, maybe it is more positive — the idea that the executive branch can be held to account.

Will this ever, could this ever happen again? It seems, in my view, unlikely. But there’s no law that you could write that would prevent this from happening, because there are already laws that should be preventing this from happening, and they did. I think it will always be the role of active civic engagement.

Clara: I should say, I’m not sure how optimistic I am about public shaming, but I think it’s important to be realistic about what levers actually exist.

Julianne: I completely agree with you. It’s a big reason why I have spoken to media for this whole year. From the beginning, I was sending things to media, talking to media, trying to get other colleagues to talk to media. I think that’s extremely important when you see illegal things happening, when you see things that are extremely dangerous and going to lead to the loss of lives. That’s when you have to sound the alarm publicly, and not just try to work from the inside. Working from the inside is not enough.

Clara: Do you think that was an issue early on — people were too reluctant to go to media?

Julianne: Yes, 100%, and it still is. There are a lot of shenanigans still going down. It’s hard. I understand people have jobs and livelihoods and they don’t want to lose them.

And there really is this tug-and-pull of, “Can I do more good from the inside?” I think it’s a mix. It’s not cut and dry. I know there are a lot of people doing really good things on the inside. But when Nick published his memos, there were a lot of USAID people who were angry at him that he did that. And I think that’s bananas, because he was clearly really effective. But a lot of people were like, “No, we just have to keep working from the inside.” That’s a very civil servant attitude. But it’s just not normal times. These things are not normal.

An independent aid agency

Clara: One thing I know that Aid on the Hill, at least, has advocated for is the importance of having an independent aid agency. Right now, aid runs through the State Department. And this is not unusual internationally — many countries do operate this way. Why do you think it’s important to restore USAID or some other independent aid agency outside of State? And what kind of appetite there is for that right now?

Julianne: Yes, I do think it’s better served independently. Look at happened with, say, DFID turning into FCDO in the UK — and Canada, Australia — those are the three examples always cited of when an independent agency was folded into the foreign office. We can see when this happens that diplomacy suffers in some ways, and also the quality of foreign assistance suffers. It becomes much too entangled. They are separate skills, they are separate expertise, they are separate intentions. A person that is a diplomat is serving a country’s interests and trying to work with that country to further America’s interests.

That is actually different than if your goal is, say, reducing malaria deaths in this province. And while foreign aid is of course related to soft power, it’s related to foreign policy, there are ways that an independent agency can operate more neutrally. Even if it’s tied with America, it does have an air of neutrality. Even the idea that the State Department now wants to do all aid branded just with the American flag — that can be really risky. There are a lot of places where that can really backfire. It’s not actually a good idea, from a development perspective or a humanitarian perspective.

When you fold development inside a diplomacy apparatus, it’s just never going to have the expertise or the impetus. The reason for it is not going to be, we are reducing poverty, we are improving global health. It’s always going to be much more tied to America’s goals. And that’s what the Trump administration wants, because it’s all America First. It’s all about the country and about America’s benefit.

Clara: I want to play devil’s advocate for a moment here, because I think a lot of people would say, what’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t aid serve America’s goals?

Julianne: Maybe this is my politics coming out.

Clara: I know, but I think it’s important to articulate a response.

Julianne: You’re right. Well, in my opinion, it’s in America’s interest to have other countries be developed and thriving and providing services for their populations. It’s in America’s interest to live in a safe, prosperous world. That is good. But the way to ensure that countries achieve those goals of development are not always explicitly tied to a U.S. company, for example.

If our intention is first benefiting America, that can actually backfire and not be good for that country, and then we’re not actually achieving that development goal. I just think it’s in America’s interest that the DRC and Uganda have their own national epidemic-control apparatus. That is good for America, because that means we are not dealing with outbreaks in America — we are controlling outbreaks at the source. And not “we,” but the countries themselves are doing that. If that always has to be tied back to an American company, an American CDC, an American whatever, that’s really limiting the tools in our toolbox. And it’s really limiting how we’re partnering with that country. The country could lose trust with us. They could say, “You don’t actually care about us. We’re going to go work with somebody else. We don’t want to work with you.” Whereas America used to be seen as a true partner.

America had a very different position than China on the world stage. China was giving loans. China is not giving aid — if they’re giving loans, they’re bringing Chinese workers in to build a road. America would work with the country, do government to government, just full-on give the funding directly, work with partners like they build a hospital. It would be no-strings-attached. It is really difficult to quantify how important that is, and how we have now ruined that. But I don’t think it’s ruined forever. I talked to a lot of people from different countries — just this week, I talked to a colleague who’s from the Philippines, and he’s like, “Do you think USAID is going to come back? I really hope USAID comes back,” and he has some story about USAID and the Philippines doing this or that. And again, what USAID was doing was seen by the population as something benefiting them and building them up, and not just, “Oh, they’re doing this to get something for America” — which is how aid is being framed now.

That’s a very long answer, but I really, really do believe it’s better served as an independent aid agency. In terms of, is there appetite for that — it’s to be determined. There are a lot of people who are like, “Oh no, it’s never going to come back.” Other people are too optimistic — like, “Yeah, they’re going to restore USAID.” It’s not USAID. I think that’s important. If they want to just build out the Millennium Challenge Corporation or something, I don’t know, that’s fine. I just think it’s really important to have expertise in international development, and economics, and global health, and epidemiology. These are clear skill sets. USAID had all of these. It was the most highly educated federal agency — more than NASA, more than NIH — because these are actual skills of how you do development. It’s complex. It’s difficult. It’s something you can’t just wave away. It’s a clear skill set that should be fostered in an agency.

The next USAID

Clara: These people obviously are still there. What would it take to make that happen?

Julianne: I think a lot of people would come back. Absolutely. I personally probably wouldn’t. There’s a lot of trauma from what happened last year. It’s difficult. I think it would almost feel like a sacrifice. It would feel very scary, because you’d just always be waiting for the shoe to drop again. But there are a lot of young professionals going into the fields of international development, and I think they could do it. It doesn’t have to be bigger. It could be smaller. It could be more targeted. I think that’s fine. But there absolutely has to be something restored.

Clara: USAID was huge. It did a million different things. If there’s a new USAID-like organization, how should it be targeted? Should it be focusing on health and life-saving aid?

Julianne: I don’t think it should just be health and life-saving aid, because so much of global health problems are actually governance problems. So I do think it’s important to have really strong support for governance-type programming, like taxation — those kinds of really boring things.

Clara: How was that handled before?

Julianne: It was a huge part of USAID’s work. I think that’s really critical. I do think it could be more targeted. There were always new things being added, and never anything really taken away. It could be better designed for what countries actually need and want, and not always what DC wanted. There are ways it could be more flexible in how the aid projects were designed, and who was setting the agendas. I mean, everybody who worked at USAID would have said it was absolutely due for reform. It was not in any way perfect. It should never be restored as it was, exactly. If this is the chance to build something better, yes, let’s do that.

This is related to one of the problems with PEPFAR — PEPFAR has been enormously successful, but PEPFAR was such a vertical program at the outset, and it created essentially parallel health systems, which is just not ideal. And I understand why it did that. Again, it was very effective. But in the last years, it was really shifting to more of a health-systems approach, and having HIV be much more integrated into primary healthcare. So there are definitely ways it could be better.

Clara: You said something about how programs could be more focused on what partner-country governments need than what DC needs. How do you do that structurally? Because it seems like everybody agrees, and everybody has agreed for a long time, that this would be good. But it keeps not happening. It seems that it’s just very difficult to arrange those incentives for an organization that ultimately is based in DC and hires people in DC and is accountable to American political pressure. What do you think can be done on a structural level to combat that tendency?

Julianne: I always said the DC offices for USAID were way too bloated. There was so much — I worked in Washington DC, but a huge amount of my time, most of my time, was actually supporting the country offices, supporting the missions. Because they were super, super understaffed. So I think a great way to make things more country-led is to just completely decentralize it and have the missions — like, have the Kenya office — have much more control over the budget, and the planning, and everything.

So they’re not always responding to Washington requests, but really having things be country-led, and then regionally. And I would say, restore the foreign service national staff. Foreign service nationals were the institutional knowledge. They were there for many, many years. They would stay in an embassy working on development, having the relationships with governments, but they were not empowered as leaders. Foreign service officers would be cycling through every two to three years, and then they would be the ones —

Clara: Just to make sure I understand this, can you explain this role in a USAID mission?

Julianne: For example, in Malawi, the USAID mission in Malawi was 90% foreign service nationals. Those are people from Malawi that worked for USAID. They worked there for years — some for 20 years.

The majority of the workforce of USAID were foreign service nationals — people from the countries. I guess people don’t realize that. These are extremely educated, incredible people, that know the country, know the government. But USAID had this legacy colonial structure, where the mission directors and the health office directors and all top leadership were still American. They were foreign service officers who would cycle through on different tours. They’d go to Kenya for three years, then to Malawi for three years, they do these different tours, and they were the ones that would make the decisions.

There were a lot of amazing FSOs that were good at listening to local FSNs and local partners. But there were a lot who were not good, being very honest here. If I were to resurrect USAID and do something different, I would say hire FSNs back and give them much more power to decide what works with their partner government, with their civil society partners, with their communities. Give much more of that power locally. That’s what I would do.

Clara: We’re coming up on time. Is there anything else that you really wish people understood about aid and aid advocacy, that you feel they’re getting wrong?

Julianne: That it’s not hopeless, and that the story is not over. They restored the funding. There is humongous will in Congress to do something better. There really is. I know people don’t believe that, but it’s true — they do actually want to get this right. There is an intention to fix what happened. There really, really is within Congress. The executive branch is a different story. But Congress is listening, and they are worth engaging.

And whenever we talk about aid and aid effectiveness — you just cannot beat the scale of working at a government-to-government level, at a U.S. government level. They just have a different positionality in these different countries as a partner than any NGO or philanthropy. They will never be able to operate at the scale of government. So it’s really critical to get that government piece correct — better, more effective. It should not just be ignored. We can’t just work around it.

It’s difficult, it’s challenging, I know it’s frustrating — but we really have to contend with it, or else we’re just going to be doing side projects and then ignoring these enormous governance challenges that continue to play out. A lot of development and aid issues come back to issues of governance, and issues of government capacity, and state capacity, and those kinds of institutional, structural challenges that we keep facing. So we have to deal with them.