What USAID’s Demise Means for Our Work

Many people have asked how Faith in Action International’s work is impacted by Elon Musk’s dismantling USAID.

Musk’s actions violate the constitutional separation of powers and have already caused great harm across the world. USAID provides lifesaving aid to people in desperate situations. Closing USAID is a tragedy. Musk has also targeted faith-based charities serving refugees and others in need in U.S. communities, hurting vulnerable people at home and abroad.

Our international network does not rely on USAID or other government funding. We support people organizing in dozen countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Eastern Europe to hold their governments accountable, rather than manage foreign-funded projects. However, there are two countries where the funding freeze is having a direct impact on our work.

-In Haiti, $217,000 in funding that OPODHA secured to help small farmers adapt to drought is now frozen. If this funding is not released it will increase hunger and make it harder for Haitians to feed themselves.

-In E Salvador, COFOA has lost $145,000 in funding from a USAID subgrant to support leadership development and civic education in marginalized communities.

In both cases the funding now frozen resulted from people organizing to change how USAID has operated in their countries. With support from many people in the U.S. who understand how interconnected we are globally, we’ve pushed aid agencies to follow local priorities and work through local organizations.

We expect that USAID funding will not go away entirely but will be folded into the U. S. State Department.  This could reinforce the worst tendencies of foreign aid – less focus on fighting poverty, humanitarian crises and civic efforts to hold governments accountable; more political use of aid to reward and punish countries, including support for authoritarian governments; and even greater reliance on for-profit contractors.

The alternative is clear but hard.  Human agency – people getting off the sidelines into the messy work of organizing their neighbors and making demands on their governments – is the path to lasting development. We cannot survive or thrive as humans unless we work together to change our communities, countries and the world. And this work will only succeed if we connect to each other internationally,  because our biggest problems – from climate change to the spread of unaccountable authoritarian governments – are global.

Basic decency and faith teach us that we share a common fate and must do everything in our power to promote human dignity. As we work to mitigate the harm from USAID’s demise, we will continue building a growing network of grassroots organizations that make it possible for people to drive development in their communities and countries. We will continue pushing agencies and foundations interested in development to listen carefully to people meant to benefit and support people’s efforts to channel domestic resources into solving social problems. There are no shortcuts to good disciplined and strategic organizing. We are not required to complete the task but neither are we allowed to set it aside.