Devex Pro Insider: The race to salvage USAID's institutional memory

This is a special Saturday edition of Devex Pro Insider from Senior Reporter Michael Igoe. For the next few months, this newsletter will tackle some of the biggest questions about the future of U.S. foreign aid, with insider reporting and analysis delivered straight to your inbox. When billionaire Elon Musk set about dismantling USAID, he painted a picture of a rogue agency that had been allowed to operate outside of public view — until his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, finally pulled back the curtain. “What we saw there is just a tremendous amount of money being sent to nongovernmental organizations,” Musk told Fox News’ Larry Kudlow in March. “This is a gigantic fraud loophole, where a government can give money to an NGO, and then there are no controls over that NGO. They’ve given billions of dollars — we estimate tens of billions of dollars — to NGOs that are essentially scams. We’re trying to put a stop to that.” It is hard to believe that Musk, whose own companies receive billions of dollars in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits, just discovered federal grantmaking. His claim that a large number of USAID partner NGOs were “essentially scams” was not backed by any specific examples or evidence, and DOGE’s dismembering of U.S. foreign aid programs has been doused in misinformation. A tragic irony of Musk’s transparency crusade is that a chorus of experts agree that one of the biggest problems with U.S. foreign aid programming was not that it lacked scrutiny and oversight — but that it focused on compliance at the expense of effectiveness. “USAID is forced to prioritize compliance with intrusive federal regulations that stifle creativity and responsiveness,” Andrew Natsios, who led USAID during the George W. Bush administration, told a congressional committee in February. “The system has created an incentive structure that leads to an over-emphasis on process above program substance and, in so doing, it has produced a perverse bureaucratic nightmare,” he said. There was some hope that congressional advocates — paired with a Trump administration that has shown little regard for the status quo — might be able to rewrite some of these rules in favor of a more effectiveness-oriented foreign aid approach. Instead, Musk and his team seemed to encounter a hamstrung bureaucracy, misinterpret why USAID channels so much money through NGOs, and prescribe euthanasia instead of any real solution. It remains unclear how a foreign assistance program run by the U.S. State Department will avoid these same — and many other — pitfalls. ICYMI: Can the US State Department do development? Further reading: Dismantling without a merger — how Trump and Musk undermined USAID Background: USAID's merger with the State Department — the pros, cons, and questions Deleting the tools for oversight A second irony is that by shuttering USAID, unplugging its website, hastily firing the vast majority of its staff, and triggering the collapse of numerous partner organizations, the Trump administration is destroying an entire body of knowledge that could have been mined to reveal exactly what did not work and needed to be changed in the U.S. aid system. In other words, if Musk wanted to find out what was wrong with U.S. foreign assistance, a better approach might have been to ask. Instead, the very components of U.S. foreign aid that were specifically built to enhance public transparency — USAID’s inputs to the International Aid Transparency Initiative, or its publicly available database of program evaluations, for example — have been wiped from the internet. Even the agency’s independent watchdog office is reportedly on the chopping block — after already reportedly withholding the publication of critical oversight findings due to fear of the Trump administration retaliation. It is not, to put it lightly, the best environment in which to conduct a good faith review of U.S. foreign aid programs to determine which ones are succeeding, which are not, and why. And yet, that is what the Trump administration claims to have done with a 90-day review that has been widely derided as a sloppy pretext for haphazard and draconian cuts. “You’ve taken down all of the data that would enable people to make a review,” says Sally Paxton of Publish What You Fund. “On what basis are you making decisions?” Instead it's an environment where misinformation about U.S. foreign aid has been allowed — or encouraged — to flourish, while the factual data that might counter it is being steadily sucked into a vacuum. The longer-term implications of USAID’s rapid decommissioning have also raised alarms. “America’s diplomatic and development corps have suffered the greatest brain drain in history,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York, charged in a hearing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month. There are ongoing efforts to fight the elimination of USAID and restore its programs. But for those beginning to think about what the future of U.S. foreign aid or “smart power” might look like when and if it is eventually reconstituted, this rapid diminishment of institutional memory is a big reason to worry. Simply put: Will the next version of U.S. foreign aid learn from its own failures and successes, or will it be forced to start from scratch? More reading: • After decades of progress, USAID cuts could blind the world to famine. • How Trump's first 100 days have meant chaos for US foreign aid. An accidentally salvaged USAID database Azra Nurkic and her team at the Institute for Development Impact, or I4DI, did not mean to save USAID’s Development Experience Clearinghouse from oblivion before Musk came along. They were just in the right place at a previously unimaginable time. In late 2024, before Trump took office, I4DI released a new artificial intelligence-enabled product that they hoped would help global development professionals make better use of USAID’s publicly available project evaluations. These were housed on the Development Experience Clearinghouse — or the DEC — a noble but cumbersome government database containing hundreds of thousands of USAID documents. I4DI, a Washington, D.C.-based social enterprise focused on evidence and technology, saw an opportunity to train specialized AI “agents” on different aspects of development using the roughly 13,000 evaluations on the DEC. The result was DECipher, an AI-enabled information tool that provides free guidance in areas like project management, communications, monitoring and evaluation, and foreign assistance regulations, based on what it has learned from decades of development documentation. Nurkic’s team wanted to go farther, so they pointed their scrapers at the entirety of the DEC, and ended up with their own database of roughly 110,000 documents they determined were worth including. They finished scraping the documents about a week before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Three weeks later, USAID’s website went dark, replaced by a “notice of administrative leave,” taking the DEC and its public database of documents with it. “That’s how we ended up saving the DEC,” says Nurkic. As a result, I4DI now manages DECFinder, a searchable database with the tagline “Preserving Development Knowledge for the Future.” It was not a responsibility I4DI intended to shoulder, but it has turned out to be in high demand. “We’ve gotten so many requests from different groups to safeguard information, to scrape websites that were going to go dark, to basically maintain these databases,” Nurkic says. I4DI has expanded DECfinder to include over 1,000 documents related to water and sanitation, another database related to global health education, close to 9,000 additional documents from other contributors, and it is making contingency plans in the event other U.S. foreign aid agencies are shuttered. I4DI, which has seen its employee numbers drop from nearly 50 to 13 full-time staff in the wake of Trump’s cuts, is looking for funders to help support these efforts. “I think that we're inevitably going to realize that we threw the baby out with the bath water,” Nurkic says. “In order to know what works and why some things didn’t work — it wasn’t for lack of interest or goodwill — we just never really managed to capitalize on learning from development.” “The castle has fallen. These agencies don’t exist at this time. That happened, but what is yet to happen is not clear. And in order to inform that, we have to do that due diligence,” she says. “We have to learn from the past.” Crisis response team “There are no silver linings to this, at all,” says Susan Reichle, who served in multiple leadership roles at USAID, including as the agency’s counselor. Despite her pessimistic outlook on the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle USAID and fold its remains into the State Department, Reichle says the U.S. development community’s response has been reaffirming. “That’s what we do in the development community. We see a crisis, and we spring into action,” she says. The crisis, in this case, was the imminent loss of USAID’s knowledge and the global public good it represented. The initial response was a grassroots, LinkedIn-based organizing effort called USAID Knowledge Rescue, led by the agency’s former chief knowledge officer, Stacey Young. Young likened the effort to a “seed bank-like repository” of USAID knowledge products that could be preserved for “future, better times.” That effort has now found a partner in Coherent Digital, an organization that specializes in preserving “endangered materials,” and is operating under the umbrella of the Aid Transition Alliance, which was established by senior women leaders in February after the White House began shutting USAID down. Their mission is to help alleviate the resulting development workforce crisis and the “potential loss of over six decades of irreplaceable institutional knowledge.” Much of that institutional knowledge, of course, is not captured in official documents, but instead in the memories and experiences of the thousands of USAID officials and partners who have either already lost, or are in the process of losing their jobs. To stem the loss of that “tacit” knowledge, the Aid Transition Alliance is in the early stages of interviewing officials at USAID’s country missions to produce searchable collections of knowledge about the development experience in different countries, Reichle says. “We want to make sure that the next generation of development professionals have access to this,” she says. But it is also to inform a future that Reichle also believes will arrive someday, even if the form it might take is still hard to see. “We're not just capturing what went well,” Reichle says. “We’re asking, in every interview, ‘what would you have done differently? What do you think could be next?’” Related: The emotional fallout of mass USAID and NGO layoffs + The Trump Effect: Explore our dedicated page to catch up on all the latest news, in-depth analysis, and exclusive insights on how the Trump administration’s policies are reshaping U.S. aid and global development.