Covering USAID: Scientific evidence for reporting on foreign aid

[00:00:33]

ELENA RENKEN: Hi, everyone, and welcome to SciLine’s media briefing on covering the United States Agency for International Development or USAID. We’ll discuss the roles and effects of the agency, both in terms of foreign relations and impacts on U.S. residents. My name’s Elena Renken, and I’m SciLine’s manager of journalism projects and multimedia. Now, if SciLine is new to you, we’re an editorially independent nonprofit based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And everything we do is free since our funding is entirely from philanthropies. We work to make scientific expertise more readily available to reporters so you can report the news with evidence and deeper context. Even if you’re covering a topic that seems distant from science, like business or policy news, we think scientific expertise can enrich your reporting and we’re here to help. All our resources are outlined on sciline.org, including our toolkit for reporting on the major issues of 2025. And you can also request an expert source to answer your specific questions by clicking the blue I Need an Expert button, and we’ll look for a source with the right background who’s available to speak with you on deadline. Now, a couple of logistics. I’m joined here by 2 panelists who have researched aspects of USAID and collaborated with the agency. I’ll let each of them introduce themselves, their topics of research, and their connections to USAID. Dr. Beck, would you go ahead?

[00:02:01]

DEANDRA BECK: Yes. Thank you, Elena. My name is Deandra Beck, and I am retired recently from Michigan State University as associate dean for international studies and programs. I was an AAAS, an American Association Advancement for Science Fellow at USAID in 1990 and through 1992, working on democracy programs and environmental programs. Following that time at USAID I worked at a number of U.S. federal agencies on international affairs, including the Foreign Agricultural Service, part of USDA, the U.S. Forest Service, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the National Science Foundation in the Office of International Science and Engineering. Again, most recently I was the associate dean for international studies and programs at Michigan State University.

[00:03:02]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent, thank you. And Dr. Winters, would you introduce yourself as well?

[00:03:06]

MATTHEW WINTERS: Hi, good afternoon, everyone. I’m Matt Winters. I’m a professor of political science and the director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois. My research has looked at foreign aid in a variety of different contexts and looking at a variety of different foreign aid donors. I also study corruption and governance, and I do a lot of public opinion research. With USAID I’ve acted as a consultant on several occasions, doing some research in Indonesia about foreign aid harmonization, the way that different donors cooperate with each other or not. And then I’ve been involved with a number of evaluations of USAID’s democracy, rights, and governance programming.

[00:03:55]

ELENA RENKEN: Great. Thank you. I’ll ask each of our panelists a couple of questions first, and then they’ll be taking your questions. You can submit your questions at any time. Just click the Q&A icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen to add your question and make sure to note if you’d like it directed to either specific speaker. A recording of this briefing is also going to be available on our website later today, and a transcript will be added in the next day or 2. I’ll go ahead and get started. Deandra, what is the role and function of USAID and how much funding of the total GDP goes into foreign aid?

[00:04:31]

DEANDRA BECK: Yes, Elena. The U.S. Agency for International Development, as we’re saying USAID is actually one of the largest development aid agencies in the world. And it accounts for about half of all U.S. foreign assistance. So what it provides is the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms. USAID has missions, offices, or they’re called missions in over 100 countries primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

USAID administers programs in a number of sectors including global health, disaster relief, socio-economic development, environmental protection, democratic governance, and education. There’s a very nice resource for the media. The Pew Research Center issued a briefing report entitled “What the Data Says about U.S. Foreign Aid.” The following figures are from fiscal year 2023, and those are the most recent data that’s available. So in fiscal year 2023, USAID distributed nearly $43.8 billion in aid, which constitutes approximately 3 out of every 5 foreign assistance dollars. The State Department dispersed about $21.3 million in aid, which is about 30% of the total, and smaller amounts were dispersed by the Treasury and by the Health and Human Services departments, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and 16 other federal agencies. And that totaled about, for all of these agencies and U.S. government investment was about $71.9 billion. In fiscal year 2023, the entire foreign assistance budget implemented by all of these federal agencies was 1.17% of the U.S. federal budget, $1 out of every $100 was involved in foreign assistance. If you compare this to 1963, when USAID was founded at that time, the international technical assistance budget was 4.7% of our federal budget, and that was at the height of the Cold War. And just to give you a sense of a little bit more of the data, in 2023, the largest USAID recipients were Ukraine at $16.6 billion, Israel at $3.3 billion, Ethiopia, $1.8 billion, Jordan, $1.7 billion, Egypt, $1.4 billion, Afghanistan, $1.3 billion, and Somalia, $1.2 billion. Nigeria and Congo both received $1 billion.

[00:07:27]

ELENA RENKEN: That’s really useful data to have and to see how that landscape has changed. It’s very interesting. What impact does USAID have on U.S. foreign relations, and how does it achieve those goals?

[00:07:40]

DEANDRA BECK: That’s an important question. And I have to say that I think that George Ingram, who’s a senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development, wrote a really nice pithy description of this. And he said that diplomacy, development, and defense, the 3 Ds, they’re the 3-legged stool upon which the U.S. national security strategy resides diplomacy, development, and defense. And this really captures what USAID’s role is in so much as it is its mandate is an international development mandate. Mr. Ingram further added that while the agencies whose mandates are diplomacy, development, and defense may be united in advancing the national interests of the United States, these agencies while they might pursue interlocking objectives, each one has different missions, they have different expertise, they have different agency cultures, and they have different timelines.

So USAID as a development agency achieves its humanitarian goals using a variety of approaches. One approach and a lot of these large figures that I shared with you a few minutes ago are transferred as direct budgetary support through the Economic Support Fund or ESF funding. And this fund is specifically helping countries with economic political insecurity needs. So if you think back, Somalia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, very, very significant economic political insecurity needs. Nigeria as well. So that’s a very accurate description of why so much funding is going to those countries to help stabilize these important parts of the world. Additionally, USAID funds technical assistance activities globally in cooperation and in partnership with a number of implementing entities including the private sector, nonprofit firms and organizations, non-governmental organizations, U.S. government agencies, multilateral organizations, and universities. They have a huge number of implementing partners. A lot of these entities are based in the U.S. but in recent years, USAID has given priority to funding local institutions in-country.

[00:10:16]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent, thank you. And what effect does this agency have on American citizens?

[00:10:23]

DEANDRA BECK: So I just want to clarify this point. This is a difficult and nuanced kind of question. And if you think about the domestic federal agencies, like the Department of Agriculture, Department of Agriculture supports U.S. farmers to ensure stable and sustainable food supplies in the U.S. Other domestic agencies include the Department of Energy, which works with to advance energy independence in the U.S. And of course, Health and Human Services focuses on the nation’s health. This is just an example of 3 large federal agencies. USAID is a foreign affairs agency, and their constituency differs slightly from the domestic agency in terms of where they put their energy and their focus. So from a foreign affairs perspective, USAID advances U.S. foreign policy goals by promoting global peace and security, democracy, economic growth, food security, environmental protection, and greater societal benefit. Providing this kind of technical and humanitarian assistance is really considered to be a—it’s called a soft power tool that builds goodwill, it improves lives, and enhances the ability of countries to have more stability. And is particularly focused on developing countries that are struggling to meet their development objectives. There’s an organization called the Center for American Progress, it’s a slightly more progressive organization. But you and all argue that with the dissolution of USAID, the foundations of trust and durability, and respect are being diminished, which has the potential to impede the U.S. government’s ability to compete with China’s growing global influence and makes it more difficult for us to combat transnational threats like climate change, narcotics trade, and pandemic diseases.

And it also hampers our ability to address the next global macroeconomic crises. And you could argue including influxes of immigration, particularly from Latin America. But I will give you a couple of specific examples of the kind of program that USAID does that would have maybe a more direct impact on U.S. And one example is that USAID programs have trained South American farmers how to grow crops other than coca which is intended to reduce the supply of illegal narcotics being produced in countries like Colombia and Peru. That has a direct U.S. benefit. If those programs are successful and the farmers are able to convert their crops that has a direct benefit on the U.S. in terms of narcotics trade. There USAID’s had programming to build economic and financial capacity in Africa. And that allows a more stable economic and investment climate so that U.S. businesses can invest and profit from international business and enhance global trade. USAID programs might be focused on bird habitat along critical flyways in Central America and the Caribbean. These can ensure that the species that return to the U.S. and either summer here or over winter here, are not threatened with extinction. So those are—that’s an example of an environmental program. So another—a final example of a direct program of U.S. benefit is that the USAID programs draw upon and source a lot of U.S. goods and services for implementation and U.S. market exposure as well.

[00:14:31]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you for getting into some of those complexities of soft power. That’s very helpful. We’re now seeing data takeover and movement of USAID to the Department of State. Based on your expertise, what effects do you think this will have on agency goals?

[00:14:47]

DEANDRA BECK: Well, this is the big topic of the day. I know everybody is particularly interested in this, and I have to put this a little bit in context, Elena. In March of 1961, President Kennedy established what was then known as AID, now known as USAID by executive order. And the purpose was to consolidate several different agencies and programs into an agency with the explicit purpose of providing foreign assistance, again at the height of the Cold War. Fast forward a little bit, during the Clinton administration, Senator Jesse Helms led an effort to merge the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the U.S. Information Agency, and USAID into the Department of State. This effort occurred in the context of extensive and informed discussions within and between the two branches of government, that being the legislative branch and the executive branch. The outcome was that in the 1998, there was a law passed that actually folded the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the U.S. Information Agency into the State Department, but it also statutorily established USAID as an independent agency that has a dotted reporting line to the Secretary of State, which is the State Department is the pinnacle, if you will, of our foreign affairs. And so there was a dotted reporting line there.

So I will say that in 2017, there was a bipartisan effort under auspices of an organization called Modernizing Foreign Assistance, or MFAN. It resulted in a consensus report that addressed the merits of merging USAID into State and found that while reforms should be pursued, the diplomatic and development function should be distinct and institutionally separated. Again, a bipartisan consensus report in 2017. The committee that produced the report was comprised, they had 2 former USAID administrators participate in this, one Democratic and the other Republican. So the MFAN or the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Report also further referenced the merger of foreign affairs and development assistance agencies in the U.K., Canada, and Australia. So the U.K., Canada, and Australia did what this administration is trying to do—it’s a little clear what this administration, but the Republican administrations of years past have wanted to merge the development assistance activities of USAID into the State Department. So these countries have done this, U.K., Canada, and Australia. This report concluded that the development branches of the combined agencies in these 3 countries, or they call them ministries, have actually lost technical expertise and capacity to provide development assistance and have undercut the foreign assistance goals of those countries.

[00:18:08]

ELENA RENKEN: Good to know. Thank you for all that context. And over to you now, Matt. To start off, what role does foreign aid play in international diplomacy?

[00:18:19]

MATTHEW WINTERS: So there are two ways of thinking about this, maybe more. So one way is maybe more a sinister way, and that’s where foreign aid is used as a quid pro quo. And the most famous example of this is, although there are many, but the most famous example in my mind is just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States offered tremendous amounts of money to Turkey to allow for a northern front in the war. And so this was a very blatant quid pro quo, we’re going to give you all this money. We expect a policy concession in exchange where you’ll allow our military forces to launch this invasion out of your territory. Turkey said no in that instance. Another example of using aid as a quid pro quo, not from the United States, but China and Taiwan do this very regularly in their battle for diplomatic recognition around the world. So recognize Beijing as the legitimate Chinese government. Here’s a bunch of money to do that. And on the other hand, recognize Taipei as the legitimate Chinese government, here’s some money to do that. So that aid is a quid pro quo in diplomatic engagements. As Dr. Beck alluded to or described aid also is useful as a soft power tool. And so USAID would refer to itself, does refer to itself if the website comes back up, is America’s good news story. And that’s the idea that the good things that are happening because of USAID-funded projects generate positive emotions, positive attitudes towards the United States, and therefore the existence of U.S. foreign assistance programs wins hearts and minds around the world.

It’s worth noting, and Dr. Beck’s comments on being inside or outside of the State Department get at this as well, that this creates a really interesting tension with foreign aid. That there is a diplomatic function, that that’s in part the justification for this funding historically. And yet the people who work at USAID I would say are primarily thinking about the development function. They’re primarily thinking about the good that they can do in the world by feeding people, by funding health clinics, by funding schools, by building water irrigation systems. And so as a social scientist studying foreign aid, I like to wrestle with the tensions that come up because of these joint missions.

[00:21:05]

ELENA RENKEN: Great. Thank you. And how is foreign aid effectiveness quantified and what checks are in place to avoid corruption and fraud?

[00:21:15]

MATTHEW WINTERS: Great. Those are two questions. And remind me if I don’t get back to the second one. So we can think of foreign aid effectiveness again, in multiple ways. And primarily if somebody says foreign aid effectiveness, I think that they’re talking about the development or economic benefits of foreign aid. And then the second way that we can think about it is in terms of the diplomatic benefits. So there are—there’s a vast literature on aid effectiveness in economic terms and development effectiveness. And there’s a really interesting pattern in that literature that’s known as the micro-macro paradox, which is that at the micro level, at the level of individual aid projects, if we go and visit a foreign-funded health clinic or a foreign-funded school or a foreign-funded agricultural program, it’s probably meeting its objectives and doing things that we would say are good. That kids are in the school, they’re getting vaccinated, the farmers are learning new techniques and crop yields are going up. And so it’s very easy at that micro level to find a lot of success of foreign aid projects of development interventions.

We’ve had a much harder time finding success at the macro level when we try to use statistical methods to see how foreign aid is “causing” economic growth. The evidence is very mixed. And so there are people who just think it’s not happening, there are people who think it happens only under certain conditions. And there’s a lot of very technical arguments about the right way to run the statistical models. And I think very few people who have a high degree of certainty in what that macro-level relationship looks like. So that’s on the development side. On the public diplomacy side, and again, if we think of these 2 bins of how aid might be used, quid pro quos, and then winning hearts and minds in a soft power sense, we’ve worked to get evidence on each of these things. You might correctly assume that getting evidence about quid pro quos is a little harder because countries don’t necessarily want to publicize, “Oh, yes, we changed our policy because the United States gave us lots of money.” But there’s certainly enough patterns in the data where we do think that some things are happening.

So when countries are serving as temporary members of the UN Security Council, they tend to get more aid. And so that would be a sign that somebody is trying to lobby those countries, trying to get them to vote in certain ways. We can find patterns where countries that vote like donors vote in the UN General Assembly, they get more aid. So those are indirect evidence about quid pro quos, diplomatic kind of quid pro quos. In terms of the soft power side of things and does aid have an impact on public opinion? There’s been a real growth in the research on this front of the last 10 to 15 years. USAID on their website they have a page about USAID branding, and they had one particular story that they like to tell, which was that after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a lot of relief supplies were sent to Aceh, the northwestern most province of Indonesia and that you could detect a change over time in attitudes towards the United States, which USAID wanted to attribute to that aid. And that’s plausible. But social scientists have worked to increase the rigor of those studies and those claims.

And so there’s a very good paper out there that looks at PEPFAR spending with PEPFAR spending. PEPFAR is a program that targets HIV/AIDS in particular and shows a very strong correlation between the levels of PEPFAR spending and attitudes towards the United States. There’s a paper that studied an earthquake in Pakistan and could show that those areas that got more humanitarian relief after the earthquake had much more positive opinions about foreigners. That was not specifically looking at the United States. And then I’ve been a part of a number of experimental studies where in the survey context we give people some information about U.S. foreign aid or Japanese foreign aid, and there’s some other people taking the exact same survey that we don’t give that information to, and then we look to see, do they express different opinions later on in the survey. And those people that we’ve told about foreign aid flows express more positive opinions about the donors. And so that body of evidence really seems to be building up that foreign aid can help win hearts and minds. Your question about corruption and fraud maybe comes back to the aid effectiveness conceived as development effectiveness. Is there corruption in fraud and aid? Yes. In large amounts of spending, there’s probably always some corruption and fraud but USAID does a lot to try and prevent it. So there are very strict rules about bidding procedures and about who can bid. These things are happening in public, so there are public requests for proposals. The information is available afterwards.

Anybody who is bidding on a USAID project needs to specify their monitoring and control mechanisms, so how the money is going to be traced. And so corruption is certainly happening but it doesn’t seem to be happening, or I would say it’s not happening to such an extent that it is broadly undermining development effectiveness. And there are interesting arguments out there, Charles Kenny from the Center for Global Development, he has a great book called “Results Not Receipts,” in which he says there’s too much attention to corruption that all of those monitoring mechanisms and checking every single expense is slowing down aid dispersals and making them inefficient. And that if we were a little bit less concerned with corruption, we maybe would have greater development effectiveness from aid.

[00:27:58]

ELENA RENKEN: Great. Thank you. And I have a couple more questions for you, Matt, but I do want to remind reporters on the line that you can submit your questions at any point using the Q&A box at the bottom of your Zoom screen. And my next question for you, Matt, is how are projects and locations for foreign aid selected?

[00:28:16]

MATTHEW WINTERS: This varies a lot depending on the project and the agency involved. And so it’s really a negotiated process that particular actors within a country that’s going to be receiving aid might bring priorities to the attention of USAID or another funder, and that might be the government, or that might be partners. So for-profit contractors that had worked with USAID in the past or not-for-profit, non-governmental organizations. And so they might suggest that USAID target money at a particular area of the country because of needs there. Or it might be the case that the United States, perhaps individual members of Congress, see priority areas that would make sense in the broader U.S. foreign policy, and therefore give directions to USAID to target funding at those areas. And then that would come through in a request for proposals that there’s a particular region of Indonesia where a project should occur. And so it’s going to depend on the individual project and funding stream and what exactly the, yeah, the genesis of the locations are.

[00:29:41]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent. And before we move to questions for both of you briefly, could you give any examples of health-related projects that are funded by USAID?

[00:29:51]

MATTHEW WINTERS: Health has been I think very much in the news as the current debates about USAID have been unfolding. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about Uganda, a country where I’ve spent some time and done some research and two recent waves of USAID funding there. And so how does foreign aid benefit U.S. citizens? In 2014, there was an Ebola outbreak in several African countries that led to cases in the United States, led to fatalities in the United States. Luckily, the numbers were not very great in the United States, but Ebola is a terrifying disease that can move very quickly, extremely contagious, requires very high levels of hazardous materials protection, therefore, for anybody who’s caring for an Ebola patient or anybody who’s in the proximity of an Ebola patient. And so that takes money. And so USAID provided funding to Uganda to help prepare the country’s medical workers to be ready for Ebola. That was 2014, 10 years later, we’re seeing a very similar process with mpox or monkeypox, that there are a number of cases in Central Africa. Again, it’s been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization. And so in Uganda, USAID had committed, I don’t know how much of this money will actually see the light of day, but they committed $1.4 million to support World Health Organization programs in Uganda, $600,000 to support UNICEF programs, $400,000 for a specific health activity to be indicate—implemented by an organization called the University Research Collaborative, and then $1.7 million to the UN High Commissioner for refugees to support mpox screenings of refugees moving in or around Uganda. And so all of that activity has benefits for the people of Uganda but also has benefits for people of the United States insofar as an outbreak of this really deadly disease can be contained.

[00:32:21]

ELENA RENKEN: Excellent. Thank you. As we turn towards questions for both the scientists here, again, you can submit your questions anytime. And for our first question, I want to ask both of you about the news coverage you’re seeing on USAID. What are reporters doing well, and what could they be doing better?

[00:32:42]

DEANDRA BECK: Which order would you prefer, Elena?

[00:32:44]

ELENA RENKEN: Feel free to jump in as you like—

[00:32:46]

DEANDRA BECK: Oh, okay. [brief laughter] Okay, sure. Well, first of all, I certainly appreciate the attention that the news media has given to the early actions of the administration and the commitment to the different—the level of coverage of what’s transpiring recognizing that things have moved so swiftly and things have been closing down to the point that access to information is difficult. So I certainly think that the efforts to fare it out, if you will, the information about what’s transpiring is critically helpful. I think going forward, it’s going to be quite, quite important to continue to make sure that what’s being reported are the facts, not the opinions or the speculation or supposition of what’s going to happen. Because I think that muddies the waters, and I think it—the credibility issue of the media is best when facts are being reported. So that’s my—that’s a bit of my scientific bias.

So I’ve been really impressed with the stories of specific development interventions that we’ve been seeing in the news and some of the television news reporting of visiting projects and showing the harms that are being caused by the stop work orders that have come out as USAID funding has been suspended. So I think that has been very useful. Two things I’d like to be seeing more of is one a little bit more from USAID employees. And I know that people are, I think, under orders not to talk to the media. And so it’s a challenging situation to find those sources. But these are people who have been on the ground typically in many different contexts because USAID employees are required to rotate across country contexts if they’re in the field.

And so they have a lot of stories to tell about the work that they have done and could be doing. And so I would encourage people to seek out those sources. And the other component of that is people in aid-receiving countries who work for USAID, that a substantial portion of USAID’s workforce are nationals of the countries where the aid projects are taking place because the missions hire local staff. And I’d like to see some of those stories in the news as well that those people have taken on this public service mission for their country and are doing so in conjunction with the United States. And again, there are interesting stories to tell about the good work that they’ve been able to do.

[00:35:59]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And a question from the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. “What impact could the shutdown of USAID have on U.S. farmers and other agriculture-centric professions?”

[00:36:12]

DEANDRA BECK: Well, I’ll take a first stab at that, and certainly Matt can join in. There are a couple of answers to that. And I’ll start with the least direct, but also important. Quite a number of U.S. universities, including Michigan State University have been very, very heavily involved in field trials and studies and activities in international locations for improved potato production, improved grain production, drought-resistant wheat production, improved genetics of rice. There’s really tremendous research being going on that is going on by U.S. universities who are working in partnership with countries overseas. And so the ability of these projects, if they are shut down the pipeline to go to the U.S. agricultural community is cut. And that’s an—it’s a very critical opportunity here for the U.S. agriculture writ large to benefit for some of the R&D and some of the technology that’s being developed in these programs. There’s also a dimension here for the purchase of U.S. commodities and for food delivery overseas for—and for U.S. export.

And this goes back to the soft power. And so, and Matt alluded to this as well, is when the U.S. unilaterally takes action, yanks back its commitment, its funding, its programs to benefit countries, if there’s a chance for a country to say, “Well, I have a choice. Am I going to import corn from the U.S. or I’m going to import corn from China or Russia or another country,” what’s the choice there? There’s a real psychological impact here when these partnerships are severed so abruptly.

[00:38:22]

MATTHEW WINTERS: So I think this is a really good question, a really important question. And the USAID inspector general issued a report, I think last week in which there was a warning that almost half a billion dollars worth of U.S. food assistance was now sitting in warehouses and at risk of being spoiled or talking about corruption was at risk of being stolen and diverted and going to militias, who knows where it might end up. And so the inspector general got this report out and then was promptly fired by the administration. But the $500 billion—$500 million, half a billion dollar figure, that struck me. That’s just a huge amount of resources, of food resources. And those are typically purchases from U.S. farmers. And so there’s an argument against that, that this is actually a bad use of money, that the money should be spent in the lower income countries where the aid is eventually going and try to stimulate agricultural markets there. But at the moment, the way that U.S. food assistance has worked is that it has been a lot of purchases from U.S. farmers, and therefore to benefit—the benefit of farmers in the Midwest and elsewhere in the country. And then like Dr. Beck said universities have done a lot of great research with USAID funding.

So my colleague, Peter Goldsmith here at the University of Illinois has run an entity called the Soybean Innovation Lab. And it has been receiving a lot of news coverage because the funding has disappeared. He’s laid off 30 staff members. So that is a hit to the Urbana-Champaign community that that group of people has been laid off. And it was a win-win operation that it was employing people here in Central Illinois, it was helping students and postdoctoral scholars and professors pursue research, and then that research was being shared with people in developing countries that could make use of it. And there’s just a number of university-centered projects like that.

[00:40:58]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And now that you mentioned that Soybean Innovation Lab, we actually have a question from the Chicago Tribune for you, Matt. If you’re familiar with that lab, where would you say it falls on the spectrum of aid types you described?

[00:41:13]

MATTHEW WINTERS: Oh, is—as far as in terms of is it a quid pro quo or anything? I don’t—no, it’s I think that’s just a very typical that USAID has had these calls for proposals to fund research at universities that would be of benefit to the countries where USAID works. And so this Peter Goldsmith put forward a very competitive proposal and got the funding. And yeah, in terms of aid effectiveness, I think it is—that it’s been effective. The projects that I have seen here at Illinois that have been USAID funded have all been very impressive, the types of activities they’re doing on the ground. And again, in a win-win kind of way where I can see benefits for our students, our faculty, and then I can see that they are doing good things in other places that can use the assistance.

[00:42:14]

DEANDRA BECK: And Elena, could I just also add to what Matt has just said? For many years, Michigan State University hosted the Legume Innovation Lab, and similar to what Matt said, just tremendous involvement of students, of faculty, of researchers who came to Michigan State stayed here in Michigan, then went back to their countries to work. And I’ll say there’s been some really significant success stories that came out of the lab including new varieties of beans that are now currently being grown in Michigan, and there’s a really big export for those black beans to Mexico. So this is the type of win-win situation where the investment in a program to have an international benefit also has a domestic benefit.

[00:43:10]

ELENA RENKEN: Some really good examples of local connections and local stories for reporters. And we’d mentioned food purchase agreements, I believe, and we have a question from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “For USAID food purchase agreements, are farmers paid upfront or paid upon delivery?” Does either of you know?

[00:43:29]

MATTHEW WINTERS: No.

[00:43:31]

ELENA RENKEN: We’ll move right along then. We’re actually getting a couple of questions about the domestic economic impact of USAID programs, including farming, but also beyond farming. What proportion of the $44 billion in USAID spending goes to U.S. producers and companies?

[00:43:52]

DEANDRA BECK: Is the question for implementation? Is that—in other words, the funding flowing to U.S. and organizations that implement internationally, is that part of the question?

[00:44:03]

ELENA RENKEN: That would be excellent to speak to. If there’s any breakdown of the budget or any sense of proportion you can give that would be useful.

[00:44:10]

DEANDRA BECK: I’ll take a first stab at it and I—and just with a couple of comments here. The first thing is I wanted to point out is I gave you guys those numbers for the big ESF fund transfers to countries. If you add those numbers up, you’re looking at about $30 billion just in funds transfers to the countries. So these are not programming activities. This money goes straight into the countries. So that’s $30 billion out of a total of like $72 billion. So that’s a little over or a little under half of the budget. So you’re winnowing down here even further the amount of discretionary funds that go to project implementation. I will say that USAID has been criticized in the past for the amount of funds that flow to U.S. implementers, whether it’s the nonprofits or the for-profit firms, or the U.S. universities, there’s been a lot of criticism.

And I would say in the last 10 years or so, AID has made a very strong commitment to reverse the—or not to reverse, but to taper down in the amount of money that’s going into the U.S. community and trying to get more funds flowing into—directly to international institutions of different kinds. And they had goals set for that. I will say that with the website down, I would refer you to that because I know it’s one of the issues that AID has struggled with. And I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the current data at the tip of my fingers, and I think it would be difficult to pull that out right now with the website down.

[00:45:49]

MATTHEW WINTERS: I don’t know the specific proportions either. But I think Deandra characterizes things quite well here, that this has been a sore point for USAID where in the sphere of aid donors, the United States is frequently critiqued for too much of the money going to U.S. companies and not enough of it going locally. And so it is very important to keep in mind that the relatively little USAID funding goes to foreign governments. That generally USAID is putting out a request for proposals and very often the bidders on those requests for proposals are US-based companies, and so companies in the Washington, D.C., area or elsewhere. And so in effect, some proportion of the money stays in the United States to pay salaries of the people involved in that or those companies are taking some degree of overhead funding that supports their general operations. And so there is an ecosystem of companies in the United States, people in the United States that are supported by the “foreign” aid.

[00:47:07]

ELENA RENKEN: We’ve mentioned here that the website is down, some of the data is less available, and we’re getting multiple questions from reporters about that data access. So how would you recommend looking up USAID projects and data now that a lot of those sites are under maintenance? Or any advice on the best way to find out what programs or organizations are being affected by funding cuts?

[00:47:28]

DEANDRA BECK: Oh. [brief laughter] That’s a challenging question. And I will say that there are reports that have been issued by some of the project implementers, and so there’s a number of organizations, a number of U.S. universities have reports still on their websites of the programs and the projects that they have received funding to implement in the past. So if there’s a question about what kind of projects does USAID support? I think you can go to some of the implementers. There’s some very large implementers, Chemonics, Booz Allen, help me, I’m—it used to be the Academy for Educational Development, they have a new name, RTI, Research Triangle Initiative. There’s several groups like that, that you can often go. And even going to sites like the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which is U.S. government agency that is still active. And to my knowledge, I think the website is still up for that agency. Matt alluded to the inspector general reports, and it’s really interesting because if those are still available they may not be because they’re affiliated with USAID. I don’t know if there’s any inspector general reports out floating around in the atmosphere here. But this has been a problem. And I will say that I had the great pleasure of working with USAID during the Obama administration when Dr. Rajiv Shah was the administrator of USAID. And there was an incredible, incredible commitment to transparency, to posting development data, to assimilating, aggregating, synthesizing this data, and making it available to the general public. And it was, I think, one of the most effective and important developments at AID in recent memory for me. So I’m lamenting the lack of access to the data.

[00:49:44]

MATTHEW WINTERS: That was—there was a website called the Development Experience Clearinghouse, the DEC, which is separate from the main USAID website, but I just Googled it and affected by the current shutdown problem. I suspect that there are researchers out there who at some point have downloaded all of the USAID data, and so hopefully somebody out there will make a public good of the information that used to be available at some point. But so far, I don’t know anybody who’s done that.

[00:50:19]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. Helpful advice there. And a question from CNN, “Is there research to help us understand why so many Americans feel negatively about or don’t support foreign aid?”

[00:50:35]

MATTHEW WINTERS: This is very fun research even, and at the moment it might be depressing, but Americans dramatically overestimate the share of the federal budget that is spent on foreign aid. So the true number is less than 1%. But in public opinion polls, people will often say 25%, 15%, they think incredible amounts of the federal government budget are being spent overseas. And so you can ask people, “What—how much do you think is being spent?” And they’ll say, “25%,” “How much do you think should be spent?” And they’ll say, “10%,” which is, of course, more than 10 times the actual amount. And this is indicative of people having problems with very large numbers and with understanding what the federal budget is like and exactly how much of it is in entitlement programs, and how much of it is defense spending, and that foreign aid is just this tiny, tiny sliver. And so I think people lack that information, and we can try to do better public education about that. But it’s hard to reach people. It’s hard to get them excited about pie graphs as much as I might get excited about pie graphs and the sort of anti-foreign discourse drives people to have those misimpressions.

[00:52:12]

ELENA RENKEN: Very good to know. And then we have more of a geopolitical question. I’ll see if either of you has anything to add here. Are there signs China is stepping up to fill any gap left by cuts in USAID funding? Are there any geopolitical risks for the U.S. if they do?

[00:52:32]

DEANDRA BECK: I could say a few things, and I’m sure Matt, you have some perspective on this as well, but even I would say it’s not recent, but even in the last 5 to 7 years there’ve been research reports on the amount of funds flowing from China into the African continent. China has been extremely strategic about investment, particularly infrastructure investment globally. They have a large initiative in South Asia and Central Asia called the Belt and Road Initiative. And their effort is to link just to have huge trade connections between South Asia and Central Asia and going all the way into Europe. So the Belt and Road Initiative has really, really resulted in huge amounts of funding flows going into a number of countries. There’s a very interesting case study around Sri Lanka, if you’re interested about some ports in Sri Lanka that the Chinese invested in. But the Sri Lankan government, if I recall correctly, defaulted on the payments back. And so the Chinese government is in the process of assuming control of those ports. So it’s a very kind of an aggressive posture. And I would fact-check that, by the way, because I want to make sure that that’s actually current and accurate. But the Chinese have been working on gold mines in Ghana and ports and just huge amounts of investment. And this is not, again, recent as a result of this—of the actions by the current administration. It’s something that people have been looking at for quite some time.

[00:54:22]

MATTHEW WINTERS: I’ve seen media reports that yes, China’s right there on the ground. I don’t—it’s too early to say what the scientific evidence says about how Chinese outflows of aid or investment have reacted to the stop work order at USAID. Certainly, there are diplomatic risks here that there—exactly as Deandra’s saying, there have already been competition between the United States and China for favor in various countries. And in some ways, the U.S. is stepping back from that competition right now.

The scientific evidence is interesting. Whereas studies of U.S. foreign aid do tend to find these winning hearts and minds results that I described earlier, the evidence with China, there’s 2 big studies and one of them says that Chinese aid does not have the same effect, meaning that people don’t express more positive opinions towards China when they’ve been exposed to a Chinese aid project. And then the other study has contradictory results that says, yes, yes, they do. They’re more in line. So where—so it’s not clear that China is as good at the public diplomacy aspect, or there are characteristics of Chinese aid, the main one being that China tends to use Chinese workers when it does an aid project, and so the local population doesn’t benefit from employment and the way that it might with other donors. And so that might be a reason why Chinese aid projects are not as good at, at winning hearts and minds.

[00:56:10]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. A question from KQED in San Francisco. “Do you have other examples like Ebola in Uganda of how USAID loops back to help Americans? And what kind of health stories can reporters work on to help educate skeptics of foreign aid on how USAID helps them?”

[00:56:31]

DEANDRA BECK: That’s a good question. And I was thinking about some of the specific activities that had some direct U.S. benefit, and it’s really easy to turn to the health sector because I think global health issues with the rapid ability for people to move between continents and across the world and in a short period of time makes the possibility of spread of contagious diseases, for example, to be quite significant. And so the USAID has been very, very involved in vaccine work, especially with polio, and has been trying to commit, if you will, to eradicating polio working with the CDC and others, World Health Organization to do that. And I think it’s been a real success story up to a point.

Again, it’s without the availability of these vaccines it’s going to be hugely problematic. The second thing is the disease monitoring. And AID is invested in looking at—when Ebola was breaking out in Congo and in East Africa, and then it spreading over into West Africa, that USAID is helping to fund some of the monitoring programs that let people know where the hotspots are, et cetera. That’s also true for crop forecasting. We help countries look at their crop forecast, so we understand where is there going to be food security, where will American farmers be able to have (video interruption)

[00:58:17]

ELENA RENKEN: I’m so sorry. It looks like we may have lost Deandra there, but Matt, is there anything you’d like to add on the question?

[00:58:21]

MATTHEW WINTERS: Only carry on mid-sentence. I think the health examples, right, are very easy and tangible. That I don’t know the extent to which people have tried to study this. But have USAID education programs and job training programs, have those programs given people opportunities that prevented them from becoming radicalized and joining a terrorist group, joining an insurgency, right? And so far as that is happening, that is very much in the interest of the United States. There has been hope sometimes that aid will slow migration flows. So during the last administration, Vice President Harris went to Central America, and part of the conversation there was about how U.S. foreign assistance might reduce out migration from those countries. I think the evidence on that, again, is a little bit challenging. And so it’s not easy to know how much that is working. I do think that democracy, rights, and governance aid has had some successes that make for friendlier regimes around the world, more democratic regimes because of U.S. help in promoting democracy and promoting good governance in various countries.

[00:59:53]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. Now, we have one more question, which will give you, Matt, a chance to offer some concise takeaways for reporters. But first I want to mention a couple of things. One is that some attendees have very helpfully suggested some online resources for USAID data, so we have posted those in the chat in case they’re useful to any reporters on the line. I also wanted to note that you’ll all be getting a quick survey after this briefing ends. If you have even 30 seconds to give feedback on whether this is useful to you, it really helps us plan our programming to deliver what you need. And, hi, Deandra, I see that we’ve got you back here in time for a final question, which for both of you is in about 30 seconds, what is one key take-home message for reporters covering USAID?

[01:00:42]

DEANDRA BECK: We’ll go in the same order. I’ll offer a few insights.

[01:00:46]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And if you could speak up, I want to make sure everyone could hear you. Thank you.

[01:00:49]

DEANDRA BECK: Okay. Sure. Is this better? Can you hear now?

[01:00:53]

ELENA RENKEN: I can hear you all right.

[01:00:54]

DEANDRA BECK: Okay. I’ll speak a little bit louder. So I just, again, I want to thank everyone for their strong dedication to reporting on these issues and to try to seek out best information you can. From my time in Washington and my experience in kinds of organizations and institutions, I really believe that all institutions should be subject periodic assessment and reform. USAID is no exception. And under normal—

[01:01:25]

ELENA RENKEN: Afraid we’re losing your volume there.

[01:01:28]

DEANDRA BECK: Okay. Is that any better?

[01:01:31]

ELENA RENKEN: No, I’m afraid not. Matt, would you want to give yours and we’ll come back in a second to see if we can hear Deandra?

[01:01:38]

MATTHEW WINTERS: So I think I’d like people to know that the evidence about the soft power benefits of U.S. foreign aid is pretty good. That we’ve done some rigorous studies using the best social scientific methods that we have and have found that people do react positively to aid such that foreign assistance is serving this diplomatic winning hearts and minds soft power mission. I’m being self-serving in saying that, because some of that research is my own, but that is what I would like people to walk away with.

[01:02:15]

ELENA RENKEN: Thank you. And Deandra, do you want to try your mic again?

[01:02:19]

DEANDRA BECK: Is it—can you hear better now?

[01:02:21]

ELENA RENKEN: I can hear you now. Do you have a final takeaway for reporters?

[01:02:29]

DEANDRA BECK: Okay, sure, sure. I’ll just, my quick takeaway is, and I’ll just reiterate what I said a minute ago, that I think all institutions should be subject to periodic assessment and reform. And I think USAID is no exception, it has been reformed, it has been reviewed quite a bit. But under normal circumstances and from a historical perspective, USAID reforms have been undertaken in a measured way with significant bipartisan input and with an effort to incorporate feedback from constituencies in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, the legislative branch has a very strong role to play in this. And I would certainly encourage more activity from the House and Senate foreign relations committees. So the scope and the scale of the current intervention is unprecedented. And I am quite concerned about the serious adverse ramifications in our ability to have an effective foreign policy with this activity.

[01:03:25]

ELENA RENKEN: I want to thank our panelists for sharing their expertise and insight today when understanding USAID is so crucial to reporting, and we’re so grateful to all you journalists who took the time to hear these researcher perspectives and deepen your coverage as this story is evolving. So good luck with your reporting, and I hope we’ll see you at our next media briefing. Thanks.