One year after the Trump administration officially shuttered USAID on September 2, 2025, it is now trying to rebuild those same capabilities within the State Department. Secretary Powell’s warning to President Bush before the Iraq invasion—“Once you break it, you own it,” often called the Pottery Barn rule—aptly captures the current moment. The State Department now bears full responsibility for managing billions of Congressionally appropriated U.S. taxpayer funds, yet it lacks the expertise and experience, especially on the ground, to do so effectively and responsibly. Dismantling the largest development agency in the world has resulted in an estimated 750,000 deaths just in the past year. While the State Department, at least for now, has the responsibility for running development, it is imperative that it quickly strengthens its capacities with development and humanitarian experts. To do so, it will need to leverage and invest in the local expertise that still exists.
Development does not happen in Washington, it happens overseas. Secretary Rubio proclaimed in his May 2025 testimony that embassies and ambassadors would have more authority over foreign assistance “to drive power and action in our agency to the regional bureaus and to our embassies,” but more than a year later, this is not the direction the State Department is going. The 12 foreign assistance units (FAUs) created within select embassies after USAID missions closed in more than 80 countries are understaffed and have little authority. For example, USAID/Colombia, where I was once the Mission Director, closed its doors with 123 experienced staff who had been responsible for $236 million. Today, there are 12 people in Embassy Bogota overseeing several hundred million in foreign assistance for Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru. Foreign assistance authority and management is now at the headquarters of the State Department, primarily in the central bureaus such as the Bureau for Global Health Security and the Bureau for Disaster and Humanitarian Response, rather than with the regional bureaus, which Secretary Rubio promised to bolster.
Almost a year after the Trump administration shuttered all USAID missions, the Department of State is issuing an unprecedented number of large no-bid awards, including a historic “$2 Billion in Health and Humanitarian Assistance to Faith-Based Organizations” as well as large financial transfers to UN agencies which they once derided. They are now hiring contractors to build up their capacity in State headquarters and issue large contracts before the fiscal year ends in September.
In this process of building back staff, the Department of State has a responsibility to rebuild lost expertise. To do so it is imperative that the Department of State tap into the unique local talent pool that not only exists, but it is actively working, often as volunteers, at the community level to continue programs that dried up due to DOGE’s cuts. There are still thousands of development practitioners at the local level thanks to decades of U.S. government investment in everything from techniques to scale innovative maternal health initiatives to advancing counternarcotics strategies that emphasize both security and rural development. The skills and expertise that reside in former USAID foreign service nationals (FSNs) and local partners are needed now more than ever. These FSNs and local partners have decades of experience working on U.S. foreign assistance programs, and they also have the relationships with host country government officials, civil society, the private sector and others that are essential to development. They have sustained productive bilateral relationships through political transitions, crises, and humanitarian disasters.
The August 10 earthquake that struck Colombia is just one example of the loss of U.S. emergency response capability. The earthquake devastated one of Colombia’s most isolated and vulnerable departments, Choco, where the United States previously had eight USAID programs operating before they were all terminated last year. Previously, there were USAID FSNs working in Choco who had spent years earning the trust of local authorities and community organizations. If they were still there, the U.S. humanitarian team could have delivered a robust response - working closely with community networks to identify those local organizations that were best positioned to deliver assistance, especially to those vulnerable communities (some only accessible by river). This would have made our immediate response faster, better targeted and more comprehensive, as well as assist with the rebuilding effort that always outlasts the initial humanitarian response.
Despite the setbacks the development community has endured, we still continue to mobilize as I described in my recent article “Running Toward a Disaster” in the American Foreign Service Association journal. USAID’s FSNs have continued the work, mainly as volunteers, with support from their former American colleagues who lost their jobs. For example, two new locally led groups, Lead Right Malawi and M-BRIDGES – CONNECT, TRANSFORM & IMPACT in Mozambique are using their incredible skills and decades of USAID experience to inform the new government to government agreements and memorandums of understanding. Crisis In Care was stood up by two former USAID Global Health officers who were determined to get funding to the former direct USAID recipients who were providing critical HIV prevention programs for orphans and vulnerable children, young women and adolescents, and at-risk populations and the organizations continuing to provide treatment to children living with HIV and others through community support work. The Aid in Transition Alliance is working pro bono to rebuild the development ecosystem and former USAID officers created Local Works Global to support former USAID FSN-led initiatives such as the LocalWorks Foundation in Nepal, Mariang for Community and Ecosystem Services in Bangladesh, and GIDS Hub in Zambia. They are all connecting funders with local partners to provide capacity strengthening, technical assistance, and accountability support needed to build effective, locally led development partnerships. Most of the Americans working on these initiatives are doing it as volunteers because, for them, it was never just a job. As heroic as these efforts have been over the past twenty months, it is not sustainable or scalable as a volunteer effort.
A wealth of knowledge and experience exists across the globe, where current and former development and humanitarian experts continue to do this important work, with many standing ready to do more. The State Department should tap into this uniquely skilled talent pool rather than attempt to rebuild it on the fly from scratch. The State Department should look to local expertise already in place, before staffing up with more contractors in Washington. On the one-year anniversary of USAID’s closure, we mourn the lives that were lost and the long-term damage that was done, but it’s not too late. The Trump Administration and Congress must work together to build a development ecosystem with the necessary expertise to have lasting, sustainable impact.
