American politics symbolized by the closure of USAID, reflecting a shift in international relations and policy.

The Great Foreign Aid Experiment

Foreign aid is bad. It’s bureaucratic, top-down, inefficient, promotes corruption and dependence, and does not get to where it’s needed. That has been the common refrain. A recent, novel addition to those complaints is that aid does not return sufficient economic value to the donor. Now, thanks to the US government’s dramatic shift in foreign aid, we have a natural experiment to test the hypothesis: no more counterfactual models, economic pontification, and ivory tower theorising. We’re going to get the data!

Inflation-adjusted global aid transfers have increased steadily from US$35 Billion in 1960 to $190 Billion in 2021. In that time, alongside broader economic and technological advancements, we have seen dramatic global improvements in infant and child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, and extreme poverty rates.

From 1961 to 2024, the general, global approach to foreign aid was shaped by the Kennedy administration’s passage of the Foreign Assistance Act (1961). Kennedy’s approach marked a shift from ad hoc post-WWII aid programs to a structured, long-term commitment to development. Its purpose was “[t]o promote the foreign policy, security, and general welfare of the United States by assisting peoples of the world in their efforts toward economic development and internal and external security, and for other purposes.” The bill reorganised US aid and created the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Since then, global approaches to foreign aid have evolved, especially after the Cold War, incorporating humanitarian assistance, economic development, and global health initiatives.

While approaches to foreign aid have evolved since the early 1960s, there have been persistent calls for radically restructuring aid. The general nature of the complaint has changed little. Aid is bureaucratic, top-down, inefficient, promotes corruption, and does not get to where it is needed: Bauer (Dissent on Development, 1976), Hancock (Lords of Poverty, 1989), Maren (The Road to Hell, 1997), Sogge (Give and Take, 2002), Easterly (White Man’s Burden, 2006), Moyo (Dead Aid, 2009), and Deaton (The Great Escape, 2014).

Thanks to the new Trump presidency, we will have an unexpected and dramatic test of the value of aid. He gave us a quasi-experimental (natural experiment) test. One of the many Executive Orders he signed on inauguration day was “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid”. He determined that:

“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilise world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”

We can dismiss any notion of equipoise, the idea that there is some real or dramatic doubt about the direction of effect. The great bottom line (spoiler alert!): people will suffer and die.

As the modern masters of sprawling cruelty, the US Government set about withdrawing hundreds of millions of dollars of aid. By the 28th of March (one month and one-week post-inauguration), the impact of the terminated funding is already affecting direct and indirect services to millions of people in low- and middle-income countries. The effects are so interconnected and global that the only real question is not “Will it be bad?” but “How bad will it be”?

Infectious diseases, big (HIV/AIDS, TB, Malaria) and small (Onchocerciasis, Filariasis,…) will lose prevention, treatment and management funding. Maternal and child health services, including sexual and reproductive services, have been gutted. Multilater, UN agencies have lost funding, as have international NGOs, national NGOs, and small civil society organisations.

But perhaps we should look at the cup half full and celebrate. The grand experiment is finally here. For decades, sceptics have argued that aid is ineffective, stifles self-sufficiency, entrenches corruption, and moves the needle of human progress insufficiently far. Now, at last, we will see an aid-free world through a lens of unvarnished reality. No more speculation, no more hypothetical debates. The world’s poorest countries will become their own control group.

The beauty of the US experiment is its scope. Unlike carefully designed studies of aid effectiveness from behavioural economics labs—where researchers squabble over metrics, counterfactuals, and model assumptions—this will be a real-world, systemic demonstration.

And of course, when the numbers start rolling in—the maternal deaths, the malnutrition rates, the outbreaks of diseases once thought to be on the retreat—there will be no shortage of explanations.

There is nothing surgical about the US Government cuts to aid, nor are they simply recalibration. They have declared ideological war against the world’s most vulnerable, and we will count the consequences in human lives.

If the sceptics were right, we should see a golden age of self-reliance and local ingenuity, unshackled from the oppressive hand of foreign assistance. If they were wrong—well, the numbers will tell their own story.

Will anyone care to listen?

Trump v. Thucydides

Today is one month and one day(!) since the inauguration of Donald J. Trump for his second term as President of the United States (US).

In that time, he delighted in claiming dominion over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and the Palestinian territory of Gaza. He has humiliated treaty allies, cuddled up to recently acknowledged enemies of the US and her (former?) allies, and threatened trade wars against friends and foes alike. He has unleashed Elon Musk on the federal bureaucracy, effectively closing congressionally legislated departments. He has withdrawn life-saving medicines from millions of people around the world and declared ethnic cleansing a US policy.

Donald Trump is stomping on the norms of US democracy. He has the constitutional pardon power in one hand and US Supreme Court protection from prosecution in the other. He is basking in the absolute power of a monarch and turning the global, rules-based order (of which the US was the principal architect) into a plaything.

Louis XIV of France (reign: 1643–1715)—the “Sun King”—owned canons bearing the inscription Ultima Ratio Regum (“The Last Argument of Kings”). It was a pun-filled reference to the idea that the ultimate recourse of a ruler is violence. He was reminding friends, enemies, and subjugates that when his laws (canon) failed, his capacity for violence (cannon) would triumph.

Political Realists see Louis’s cannons as reifying the political idea that “might is right” (MiR). That is, power and not morality ultimately determines outcomes. As they watch Donald Trump tear down democracy and attack the global rules-based order, they make coded references to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides—hero of Realpolitik and the guy who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War. It is to him the phrase “might is right” is attributed, based on a brief passage known as the Melian Dialogue.

The dialogue is a brutal exchange between envoys from Athens and the leaders of the small island of Melos—the same Melos famous for the statue of the Greek goddess Venus (“di Milo”). The Athenians explained that neutral Melos would have to side with Athens in their war against Sparta or be destroyed by the larger army of Athens. They did not prevaricate of sugar-coat the delivery of their message. And it is this exchange that has been reduced to MiR.

There are, however, significant problems with this position. First and foremost, Thucydides never actually wrote, “might is right”—not even close—and the suggestion that he did becomes a self-serving distortion used to justify ruthless power politics. Thucydides actually recorded the Athenian envoys saying, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

To be pedantic—necessarily so—he actually wrote, “οἱ μὲν δυνάμενοι πράσσουσιν, οἱ δὲ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.”

The nuance in translation is crucial. The standard English rendering, “The strong do what they can…” relies on the modal verb “can,” which in English (and in French with pouvoir) suggests freedom of will—the idea that those with power act as they choose. But ancient Greek had no direct equivalent to modal auxiliaries like can or must.

The critical verb here is δυνάμενοι, a participle of δύναμαι (to be able). Rather than conveying a sense of willfulness, it implies something closer to necessity—that the strong act as circumstance dictates in accordance with their power, just as the weak yield because they also have no choice. This translation reflects the broader Thucydidean theme that power operates under the constraints of ἀνάγκη (necessity).

It is tragedy rather than psychopathy that is the binding relationship between Athens and Melos. Melos, for all its appeals to justice, is doomed. It refuses to bow to Athenian demands and is annihilated. However, the fate of Athens itself is no less bleak. The logic that drives The Athenians to subjugate Melos ultimately consumes them as well, leading to their downfall in the Sicilian Expedition and, eventually, their total defeat in the war. The same compulsion that led them to destroy Melos leads to their destruction.

Thus, when “might is right” is used too quickly to explain the actions of a leader, there is a danger that political scientists give moral cover to the immoral. They fall back on relativistic notions that the whim of the caveman with the bigger club determines societal norms.

Donald Trump is not acting out of tragic necessity. He does not wield power because it has to be wielded. It appears that he does what he does because he is an aggrieved psychopath who revels in the opportunity to put metaphorical kittens in a sack and drown them.  

Thucydides would not recognise Donald Trump as any of the actors in the Melian Dialogue.

There was no necessity to put millions in the path of death by withdrawing life-saving treatment. There was no necessity to propose the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. There was no necessity to threaten to take a NATO ally’s territory. There was no necessity to begin to tear down the multilateral system.

A socially and fiscally conservative leader might share many policy objectives with Donald Trump and his followers. There is no necessity, however, to reach those objectives by choosing the most cruel and destructive path possible.

Donald Trump is not a brilliant or tragically compelled leader; he is a psychopath.

A dark, dystopian government data center filled with towering servers and flickering computer screens. Dust-covered books and old research papers sit abandoned, while glowing terminals display files. A lone researcher, illuminated by the cold blue light of a monitor, desperately tries to recover lost data from a corrupted drive. The atmosphere is eerie, with dim overhead lights and an air of secrecy, symbolizing the slow decay of knowledge in a forgotten digital vault.

The Purge

The Trump administration has started one of the most significant assaults on human knowledge in centuries. Well-collected, curated and communicated data are facts—an evidence base. When facts contradict a political narrative, they are dangerous. The US government has realised the danger and begun The Purge. The government will now establish new “facts” to replace old facts. Purge-and-replace is part of the process of state capture. Evidence represents dissent, and the government must crush dissent. Reality is altered.

Until a week ago, successive US governments had invested in a data, evidence-based policy enterprise with generous global access. It was a resource for the world that supported research and evidence-based decision-making. And, unless the information was classified or subject to privacy laws (e.g., HIPAA for health data), anyone could look at everything from labor and criminal justice statistics to environmental and health data.

Going, going … !

Starting late last week, government websites began to disappear; among them, the USAID website vanished without a trace. All the development evidence USAID published has disappeared. If you try to reach the website today (2 Feb, 2025), you will get a message from your internet provider informing you the site does not exist. Perhaps you have the wrong address…or maybe it was never really there. (Queue spooky music.)

Individual pages on government websites are also disappearing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) webpage, for example, providing evidence-based contraceptive guidelines has vanished. A week ago, the guidelines helped people exercise their reproductive choice using the best available evidence. But facts are dangerous. The idea of personal autonomy in reproduction runs counter to the authoritarian narrative of the current US administration. CDC is being scrubbed clean.

Data are also disappearing. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) is a longitudinal survey of adolescent health risks coordinated by the CDC. If I search the CDC website for “YRBSS”, I get links. If I follow the links: “The page you’re looking for was not found”. This loss of data is a tragedy. A quick look at PubMed reveals the kind of research that has used YRBSS data: everything from adolescent mental health to smoking. Without those data, no one today could do the same kind of research that was done before. Trends in adolescent health are lost and we will not know about any emerging health risk factors. It is hard to know precisely why the YRBSS has disappeared. However, in keeping with the religiously conservative nature of the current US government, maybe it is adolescent sex that is too dangerous for people to know about.

The US government is not content with just removing facts. They also want CDC scientists to rewrite their research to adopt a single, approved, authoritarian view of the world. Their research must conform to the Trump government’s ideology. An approach which is oddly reminiscent of Stalin’s insistence that Soviet researchers adopt the dead-end genetic science of Trofim Lysenko.

The CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not merely its own internal periodicals…. The move aims to ensure that no “forbidden terms” appear in the work. The policy includes manuscripts that are in the revision stages at a journal (but not officially accepted) and those already accepted for publication but not yet live.

It hasn’t happened yet, but I have to wonder what will happen when the US Government targets PubMed and PubMed Central—exceptional scientific resources provided free of charge to the world by the National Library of Medicine (NLM)? NLM could be directed to purge from the database all abstracted data on every journal article that contains ideas that do not support the government’s worldview: gender, transgender, climate change, vaccines, air pollution (from fossil fuels)…. Commercial providers could still abstract those articles, but the damage would be enormous.

The vaccine denier, Robert F. Kennedy, junior, is currently being confirmed as Secretary of Health. He believes the widely debunked, fraudulent claim that vaccines cause autism. What happens when he decides that the National Library of Medicine should selectively purge evidence debunking the vaccine-autism link? Will that mean vaccines cause autism in the US (a “US-fact”) but not in the rest of the world (a “fact-fact”)? Researchers in universities and institutions that can afford subscription services can avoid such excesses, but that will not be the case for many Global South researchers who rely on PubMed for their research, nor will it be the case for the general public, who also have free access to PubMed.

I have focused on health because it is the domain I know the best. There is, however, almost no factual resource of the US government that will be safe from the purge. Facts that endanger a Trump administration political narrative must not be allowed to exist.

The US government is a climate-denying administration that has again pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. It has already targeted climate change research. Justice, labour, and population statistics that do not conform to the US government’s socially conservative, racist and xenophobic views about the world will also be in danger. Trade data that don’t support Trump’s political narrative of a “golden age” will need to be adjusted.

One of the great tragedies is that, now that the US government has shown itself to be institutionally disinterested in (or actively opposed to) facts, it has endangered the value of its entire evidence-based policy enterprise. If you visit a US government website in a year, will you trust the content? You shouldn’t. Instead, you should ask yourself what political interest influenced the information. Researchers, policymakers, journalists—everyone— will need to parse US government websites like they parse information from any other authoritarian regime. Sadly, research coming out of US universities will also require extra scrutiny. Where we trusted the voices before, now we would need to ask, has US government policy biased it, what is the nature of the bias, and can we manage the bias?

Sometimes, it will be easier to ignore US research altogether because verification carries a cost.

There are small glimmers of hope. Archive.org (the Wayback Machine) has historical snapshots of US government websites, including some data snapshots, such as the YRBSS. These snapshot are BTP (befor the purge). Unfortunately, the archive is not as easy to navigate as the World Wide Web nor as easy to navigate as dedicated government websites. The value of the archived information also relies on the snapshot being taken at the right time to capture the latest BTP information. The CDC contraceptive-use guidelines purged a few days ago, are available on archive.org from a snapshot taken on 25 December, 2024. Assuming the CDC made no BTP updates since the last snapshot, the information is up to date…for now. Of course contraceptive guidelines evolve with new data and new technology and they will be out of date in the coming years.

If we are to survive the worst damage of The Purge, other government and non-government institutions worldwide will have to step into the breach. Historical data may need to be reconstructed and curated from sources such as archive.org. The Pubmed and Pubmed Central databases should be copied before the US government corrupts them. Where US data are still available, copy them. Outside the US, we will need to put in place prospective mechanisms to collect valuable global data that we can no longer trust from US sources.

…going…

We cannot assume that the facts from US government sources will remain uncorrupted tomorrow because they are uncorrupted today. The preservation of the truth will require resources and investment.

… GONE!

Welcome to The Purge

When the U.S. ‘leans out’ of Global Health

The most powerful country on the planet has just ‘leaned out’ of global health. Will the Global South take the opportunity to ‘lean in’?

Yesterday, at a lunchtime talk at the World Health Organization (WHO) Headquarters in Geneva, Dr Madhukar (Madhu) Pai spoke on “Shifting Power in Global Health”. His presentation drew on ideas he had recently published (with Bandara and Kyobutungi) in the Lancet. The talk picked up on a consistent theme—the entrenched power of the Global North in global health—often white and male, but not necessarily.

One of the ideas Pai promoted was that of “allyship”. Rather than leading in global health fora, he suggested that Global North researchers, practitioners, and policymakers need to become allies of Global South counterparts. The role is to encourage and support those from the Global South in leadership.

In the online chat, one attendee wrote,

“I also want to challenge the notion of allyship. I think what we need is people with power and privilege to ‘lean out’ and make space at the table for folks with less power to exercise their leadership.

In other words, worry less about being an ally. Get out of the way, and people in the Global South will have the space to step in.

The comment was particularly pertinent given the stated intention of the United States (US) to withdraw from WHO. WHO is the global body with the most sweeping engagement in global health and the US was about the ‘lean out’—a perfect natural experiment.

The Executive Order (EO)—“WITHDRAWING THE UNITED STATES FROM THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION”—was signed by Donald Trump on his inauguration, 20 January, 2025.

Trump tried to withdraw from WHO in 2020. He left it too late, and Joe Biden was able to rescind the order. Not this time! The new EO also pauses support for WHO immediately. Section 2d of the EO states, in part:

(d) The Secretary of State and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall take appropriate measures, with all practicable speed, to:

    (i) pause the future transfer of any United States Government funds, support, or resources to the WHO;

    (ii) recall and reassign United States Government personnel or contractors working in any capacity with the WHO;

The decision to withdraw is very unwise—a disservice not only to people in the US but to the global community. It jeopardises lives both domestically and internationally. However, if the goal is for those with power and privilege to make room at the table for others to lead, this structural shift could enable that. If the US withdrawal is unavoidable, the focus should be on leveraging it for the greatest possible positive impact.

It remains to be seen how aggressively the US government will enforce the immediate pause of “funds, support, or resources” (S.2(d)(i)). What is clear, however, is that funding will likely cease swiftly. There may be a brief trickle as any existing commitments are untangled, depending on whether the new administration feels compelled to honour agreements made by its predecessor. Regardless, the relationship with WHO is effectively ending. The same applies to the expertise of government employees and contractors (S.2(d)(ii)), which the US will also withdraw.

But what about the “support or resources” mentioned in S.2(d)(i)? The US withdrawal from WHO could also extend to the engagement of US universities and research institutions. This could include collaborative projects involving third parties where US institutions and WHO are partners. The extent of the impact will largely depend on how far the Trump administration is willing to go. Given its history, it could act aggressively to enforce the directive and interpret it permissively.

At its most extreme, the administration could target funding to US universities and research institutions, arguing that any expenditure providing even nebulous “support or resources” to WHO is a violation. US Universities could be endangered if the funds they have received require approvals from the State Department or the Office of Management and Budget. A single dollar of perceived “support” might jeopardise tens of millions in funding for these institutions. The mere threat of such action could intimidate university administrators, compelling them to redirect activities and disengage from collaborations involving WHO (even tangentially).

We have already seen billionaires and news organisations engage in “anticipatory obedience”. Why would we imagine that universities would be any less callow?

The danger here is two-fold. The first problem, as identified by Wiyeh and Mukumbang in their Lancet letter responding to Pai’s article, is the question of capacity. If the US expertise from researchers, practitioners, and policymakers vanishes, how much of the resulting gap can realistically be filled by the Global South? If stakeholders from the Global South oppose the current power structures of global health, they must ‘lean in’ as the US ‘leans out’. While they cannot fill the void entirely, they may be able to occupy some of the vacated seats at the table.

The second issue is the risk of alternate state capture. Any nation willing to fill the funding void left by the US withdrawal could justify claiming significant influence at the tables previously dominated by the US. WHO must engage in careful and strategic negotiation to prevent one hegemon’s “leaning out” from enabling another to capture its place. The true goal is to diversify representation, and there is little to celebrate in simply replacing one dominant voice with another—from whatever geography they originate.

There is no joy in the US withdrawal from WHO. Working together, however, WHO and countries in the Global South could use this unsought “opportunity” to address structural flaws in the power distribution of global health. Ideally, other significant Global North countries working in global health will support these initiatives—or at least get out of the way. Following Wiyeh’s and Mukumbang’s suggestions, building leadership and technical capacity, amplifying diverse voices from the Global South, and prioritising equitable partnerships will not only strengthen WHO’s ability to adapt but also create a more inclusive and resilient global health system in the face of this challenge.