Article begins

After USAID is a series that explores the unintended, and not immediately visible, consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025. As practitioners, researchers, and critics of international development, the series welcomes the unique perspectives anthropologists have to offer on how people and communities around the world are making sense of this momentous change.

When I wrote about DOGE’s attack and eventual successful eradication of USAID nearly a year ago in Africa Is a Country , I was trying to think through the seeming paradox that this presented. I have after all spent more than twenty years critiquing institutions like USAID and the broader humanitarianism-industrial complex and yet found this wholesale destruction of an aid agency abhorrent.…