A Year Into USAID’s Wreckage, the Public Wants a Chisel, Not an Axe

The morning USAID’s operations began winding down in early 2025, roughly $72 billion in annual commitments started to unravel across clinics, food depots and conflict-monitoring outposts on four continents. A year on, Echelon Insights and the Rockefeller Foundation went looking for the constituency that supposedly wanted the agency gone. They struggled to find one. What they found instead, in a survey of just over 2,000 voters fielded in mid-June, was a public that had never really turned against foreign aid at all.

The headline number is modest enough to be believable. Americans opened the survey favorable to foreign aid by 54 to 35 percent, a net of plus-19. Hardly a groundswell, but not the rejection the past year of cuts might have implied either.

Dig into what people actually mean by “foreign aid,” though, and the picture shifts. Treated as a bare umbrella term, the phrase leaves plenty of Americans cold. Broken into the specific things it pays for, it wins almost everywhere. Humanitarian relief and heading off disease outbreaks each drew 90 percent support. Global health and preventing terrorism, 84. Even the program areas that come dead last on the list, democracy promotion and countering the influence of China and Russia, still clear 72 and 67 percent respectively. It seems a lot of the hostility attaches to the label rather than the work.

The one percent problem

Then there is the money. Ask Americans how much of the federal budget went to foreign aid before the cuts and most of them are spectacularly wrong.

Only about a third guessed the figure was under five percent. Roughly the same share reckoned it was at least 20 percent, which is to say about the size of the entire Social Security programme. Eight percent thought foreign aid ate up more than half the federal budget, a sum that in reality would swallow Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and defense combined. The true figure, in the last full year before the cuts, was 1.04 percent: $72 billion out of a budget of $6.93 trillion.

Tell people that, and something shifts. Once respondents learned the real number, 78 percent judged one percent to be about right or, more often than you might expect, too low. That verdict held up across the aisle, from 86 percent of Democrats down to 64 percent of the survey’s MAGA supporters, defined here as Republican-leaning voters who back Donald Trump over the party itself. Given the chance to set aid at two percent, which would roughly double the old budget, seven in ten went for it.

Ebola does the arguing

If cost softens people up, threat closes the deal, and nothing in the survey demonstrates that as sharply as Ebola. Concern about the virus reaching American soil splits neatly along party lines to begin with: 69 percent of Democrats worried, against 40 percent of Republicans. Then respondents were told about the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and specifically that experts have pointed to US aid cuts as a factor in how fast it has spread. The partisan gap all but collapsed. Three in four Americans came out for restoring funding to fight the outbreak, and Republicans, less rattled by the disease itself, swung behind the specific fix by a 38-point margin. It’s a tidy illustration of how self-interest and humanitarian instinct can pull in the same direction rather than against each other.

When Americans were asked whether aid ought to be conditional on direct trade benefits back home, just 18 percent said it always should be. Humanitarian framing consistently outperformed the transactional kind. Fully 70 percent said they would back restoring funds after reading expert projections that the cuts could cause more than 9 million deaths by 2030, a number that lands with more force than talk of leverage.

None of which makes the public a pushover. The Americans who stayed cool on aid to the end were not asking for it to disappear; they were asking for receipts. Independent audits topped their wish list at 49 percent, followed by hard evidence that programmes actually blunt threats to the US, and firm end dates so nothing runs on forever. Only 16 percent said no assurance on Earth would move them.

The through line, the authors argue, is information itself. Favorability climbed 16 points over the course of the survey, from 54 to 70 percent, and the ascent did not depend on any single killer message. Facts about cost mattered. So did stories of impact, girls returning to school in formerly Boko Haram-held Nigeria, farmers in Peru planting food instead of coca. So, plainly, did simply telling people what foreign aid is. Among MAGA supporters, the group most sceptical at the outset, net favorability travelled all the way from minus-17 to plus-10 on nothing more than being handed the same facts as everyone else.

An oddly hopeful diagnosis for the aid world, a year into the wreckage. The public it thought it had lost turns out to have been mostly under-informed rather than opposed, and the fix it wants is not another sweeping reinvention but a sharper, better-audited version of what already existed.

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