Don’t eliminate USAID — fold it into State to maximize resources 

During the first Trump administration, there was serious talk of merging the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ultimately, the effort was abandoned due to the lack of any recognizable cost savings, in addition to the differing skill sets of the two workforces and a fear that the focus of both organizations would be diluted. Instead, the State Department focused on technological improvements, as USAID drilled down on effectiveness, results and aligning programs to policy. 

Fast-forward four years and the Biden administration, coupled with congressional directives, has transformed USAID into a vanguard of woke ideology. 

Although America still needs a powerful foreign assistance tool in its arsenal to combat malign influence from China and others, solve the migration crisis and bring prosperity to the homeland, it is clear the president has lost faith in the institution. But the institution itself is not what’s important; it’s ensuring that these efforts overseas continue to make America safer, stronger and more prosperous. Reforms are essential to ensure this happens. 

As part of those reforms, the Trump administration appears to be moving toward a merger of USAID with the State Department to ensure the very best in policy alignment. The details here matter, though: done poorly, and this merger will result in limited results at a higher cost. If done well, however, foreign assistance can be an effective and powerful tool that America needs to advance President Trump’s agenda.  

Here are a few ideas of how such a merger could work. 

1. Establish and empower real leadership. One of the continuing failures of U.S. government foreign assistance efforts is the lack of clear and accountable leadership. We can fix that by having a deputy secretary-level director of foreign assistance lead all federal foreign assistance efforts — including exerting real control over the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, along with all the other assistance programs scattered across 20 different federal government agencies — to ensure all foreign assistance programs align with broader U.S. foreign policy goals and document impact. 

2. Consolidate other agencies under the State umbrella. While merger of every foreign assistance program into the State Department is likely unrealistic and unwise, Congress could and should merge smaller aid agencies that have been built up over the years. These include the US-African Development Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. There is little value in these continuing to exist outside our core foreign policy and assistance structure. Simply put, it’s merely bureaucratic redundancy.  

3. Create a single foreign service. The time has come to combine the State and USAID foreign services. In fact, we should combine all the U.S. government foreign services, including those at the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. Having a more unified presence at embassies around the world will result in great efficiency and a greater impact. 

4. Provide unified humanitarian assistance. Humanitarian response is currently divided between the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration at the State Department and the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance at USAID. There was an attempt during the first Trump administration to combine these two bureaus, but the attempt failed due to congressional opposition. Should they be eventually merged, it is essential that the business model of the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance become the dominant approach of the new bureau. Population, Refugees and Migration almost exclusively uses large and unaccountable donations to United Nations organizations for its efforts; the bureau uses a mix of NGOs and faith-based organizations to deliver life-saving assistance, the impacts of which we can more easily track. 

5. Establish a single global health bureau. As is the case with humanitarian efforts, there are two similar health bureaus: the State Department’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy and USAID’s Bureau of Global Health. State focuses on policy, and USAID focuses on implementation. Combining these could result in better health outcomes at a lower cost. Congress should also consider merging the global programs at Health and Human Services into this single Global Health Bureau at the State Department.  

6. Combine regional bureaus. There are corresponding regional bureaus in State and USAID. It would be relatively simple to combine them, and doing so would eliminate duplication and confusion about the foreign policy of the United States. These new bureaus should focus on foreign policy goals versus managing foreign assistance programs, which should be left to the foreign assistance experts elsewhere in the department.  

7. Retain the technical capacity of USAID. We can’t lose what makes USAID unique in the federal government; while the State Department implements some foreign assistance (which also must be heavily reformed and realigned), USAID’s workforce and processes far exceed those of the State Department when it comes to developing and monitoring assistance programs to ensure effectiveness and efficiency. Regardless of how much foreign assistance the United States funds, we need the technical capacity of USAID staff to ensure it is built for purpose and has impact. As such, many of the remaining technical bureaus at USAID should remain whole when transferred to State.  

Lastly, we ought not forget the lessons of history. In the late 1990s, Congress merged the U.S. Information Agency into the State Department to ensure that our policy and our global public engagement were appropriately aligned. While this might have seemed right at the time, 25 years later we realize that the U.S. has lost the Information Agency’s unique technical capacity — and American foreign engagement is worse off today because of it.  

We can’t allow that to happen to our foreign assistance capacities. Getting it right will require the administration to work closely with Congress. It will also need to be done in conjunction with reforming and right-sizing the State Department, which has remained largely unchanged since 1947. But, if done correctly, the results of such a merger could be transformative.  

Jim Richardson is the former director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the Department of State (2019-2021) and former coordinator of USAID’s Transformation (2017-2019) under President Trump.