“A Planet Shaker”: Educational Impacts of USAID’s Dismantling

Abstract

In early 2025, President Trump froze and then gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), slashing more than $50 billion of aid spending. The speed and scale of Trump’s cuts sent shockwaves around the world and destabilized a global order in which the United States wielded tremendous financial and symbolic power through its foreign aid. Although significant media attention has been paid to cuts’ devastating ramifications for global public health, little is known about the consequences of the funding cuts to international development education. In this article, we drew on 62 interviews with actors situated within both global and national organizations to consider how USAID closures have transformed education globally. Our findings indicate that development actors see in this moment both widespread damage to education sectors and the possibility for newly configured aid and educational relations.

Introduction

In early 2025, President Trump froze and then gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), slashing more than $50 billion of aid spending (Walker et al., 2025). By July 2025, he had shuttered USAID entirely. The speed and scale of Trump’s cuts sent shockwaves around the world and destabilized a global order in which the United States wielded tremendous financial and symbolic power through its foreign aid. Significant media attention has been paid to the devastating ramifications of USAID’s closure for global public health and food security (e.g., Malik, 2025; Mandavilli, 2025). Yet, millions of young people also risk losing access to schooling (UNESCO, 2025b).

Although unique in its scope, USAID’s closure is part of a broader global shift toward aid austerity, which includes reductions from the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. ¹ In fact, global aid spending decreased by a third in 2025 alone (Ferris, 2025), transforming the organizational landscapes of international development and radically reconfiguring the possibilities and practices of schooling worldwide (Madgi & Amiri, 2025; Save the Children, 2025).

In this article, we drew on 62 interviews with actors situated within both global and national organizations to explore how people working within the international development industry understand the consequences of funding cuts to education as they unfold. In doing so, we considered the implications of this moment for a broader transformation of the international development education (IDE) sector. This research builds on critical development scholarship that has demonstrated how, while foreign aid can meaningfully impact lives, the global aid system—the organizations, funding mechanisms, policies, and programs that scaffold development and humanitarian activities—is deeply flawed, reproducing power hierarchies rooted in colonial histories and relationships (e.g., Escobar, 1995; Kothari, 1990; Menashy & Zakharia, 2022; Schmitt, 2020). ² Aid projects often bypass local institutions and government structures, limiting their long-term efficacy (Chasukwa & Banik, 2019; Moyo & Imafidon, 2021). Education projects designed externally can misalign with local understandings, needs, and priorities (Silver & Morley, 2022; Tabulawa, 2003). They are also notoriously unstable, contingent on political will and funder agendas. Many therefore have called to transform, or reject altogether, aid structures and IDE practices (Faul, 2025; Kothari, 1990; Rahnema & Bawtree, 1997). Our findings indicate that development actors across the globe see in this moment both the damaging impacts of austerity measures and new possibilities for reconfigured aid and educational relations.

We attended to two spheres of influence and practice to understand the implications of USAID’s closure across scale: (a) international organizations that design aid policies and fund projects at the global level and (b) and the nongovernmental organization (NGO) staff members, policymakers, and civil society actors who enact education and development programming in one national context, Malawi, which has received U.S. funding flows to education for more than 30 years. Guided by a critical political economy theoretical framework, we asked the following research questions:

1. How do people working in international development education from diverse geopolitical and institutional locations understand the effects or consequences of recent aid cuts?

2. How do they imagine the future of international development education broadly and Malawi’s education sector specifically?

By addressing these questions, we aimed to inform public debate about the value of U.S. foreign aid spending, which has largely focused on domestic interests, with less understanding of USAID’s effects on education worldwide. Although initial attention has been paid to the unfolding consequences of USAID withdrawal globally (Cavalcanti et al., 2025; Mbah et al., 2025), we have yet to find studies that focus on education systems specifically. We build on a broader literature that critically analyzes USAID’s role in education globally to extend scholarship on the agency’s power and the aftermath of its dissolution.

Conceptualizing USAID Through a Critical Political Economy Lens

A critical political economy lens helps us understand USAID’s role in international educational development and why its dismantling has such sweeping and varied impacts globally. Traditional conceptions of political economy focus on the interrelationships between economic and political systems, often resting on neoclassical frameworks that pay most attention to market forces and their implications. Critical political economy extends such analyses to focus on power relations within and across societies, considering the intersections between economic, political, and social phenomena and impacts on equity and justice (Wigger, 2024, p. 1). As Novelli et al. (2014) explained, critical political economy allows for “unpacking the tensions, contradictions and inequalities in everyday life and in education systems—analyzing what policies work or not and for whom” (p. 2). Our use of the critical political economy approach allowed us to examine not merely the intersections between the political and economic implications of USAID cuts but also the structural impacts on equity and power hierarchies. We take a critical political economy perspective to capture the complex and varied ways in which USAID has impacted education globally, including within the development and humanitarian systems, its organizations, and at the country level.

A critical political economy approach, for instance, helps to situate USAID within the larger system of aid to education, which reflects colonial power hierarchies. International development has been widely critiqued for extending and deepening the political, economic, and cultural residues that persist beyond formal colonial rule (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; see also Kothari, 2006; Mkandawire, 2011; Pailey, 2020; Tamale, 2020). A growing body of work has analyzed how IDE programs, specifically, uphold global racial hierarchies (Menashy & Zakharia, 2022; Odora Hoppers, 2015; Sriprakash et al., 2019). The hyperfocus of the World Bank and other international organizations on human capital development through education has narrowed attention to school access and basic literacy acquisition, eliding locally salient possibilities for teaching and learning (Bartlett et al., 2014; Tabulawa, 2003) and hampering the higher education sector for decades. Researchers argue that such aid-subsidized neoliberal educational projects preserve inequitable and colonial systems (Chiwaula & Winiko, 2024; Odora Hoppers, 2025).

Grounded in the above-mentioned literature, our study sought to uncover the effects of the USAID cuts and to consider the reasons for these impacts and their potential long-term political, economic, and social implications from the perspectives of those who have long worked within aid systems. Because “critical political economy traditions challenge analysts and policy makers to consider the role of a wide range of economic and political factors in the policy process,” we anticipate that our analysis can contribute to both scholarly and policy conversations on global education in the wake of USAID (Novelli et al., 2014, p. 12). We map these themes in both the global sphere and the national setting of Malawi.

Situating USAID’s Role in IDE

Prior to USAID’s 2025 closure, the organization had long played an outsized role in IDE. Established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, USAID aimed to enable U.S. soft power while addressing humanitarian and development needs. Until recently, the United States was the single largest contributor to education among all bilateral funders—in 2024, it committed more than $1 billion in educational aid globally. This included projects covering the full spectrum of education, from early childhood through to adult learning, and within countries across the world, with a majority of spending in the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa (European Training Foundation [ETF], 2025). USAID mainly focused on development projects, primarily supporting longer-term initiatives to enable poverty reduction and economic growth. Yet, it also was a humanitarian organization, meaning that it served a crisis-response role and funded education during and after conflict (Alliance for Child Protection, 2025).

Although USAID often gave directly to governments in need, it also worked inextricably in concert with other organizations. For example, it served as a partner and key funder to both the Global Partnership for Education and the Education Cannot Wait Fund—large multistakeholder organizations comprised of various funding agencies and recipients. Many of the largest international NGOs and philanthropies, including Save the Children and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and U.S.-based research and consulting organizations, such as RTI International and Creative Associates, partnered with USAID to fund and implement their education programs. Moreover, a common means of aid programming, including USAID’s, has long involved international funders designing and financing projects and then contracting local NGOs within countries to implement them. This structure has created entire industries in aid-receiving countries that include people directly employed by USAID or its international NGO partners, staff members of local organizations that are subcontracted to implement programming, and an array of service-industry employees such as drivers, cooks, and cleaners (Menashy, 2025; Morley & Silver, 2024).

Thus, when the United States stopped its work and ceased funding education globally, it set off a ripple effect that can be difficult to quantify, yanking a vital thread from a complex tapestry (ETF, 2025; UNESCO, 2025a) and eroding the relational architecture on which aid programming relies in recipient countries (Morley & Silver, 2024). In addition, the dismantling of USAID amplified an already precarious situation, dovetailing with several other wealthy countries’ recent decisions to reduce aid commitments. When accounting for all cuts, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2025a), “aid to education fell sharply in 2024, with deeper cuts expected. . . . Overall, aid [to education] is expected to decline by over 25% by 2027.”

Although its official mandate embodied notions of altruism, analysts have overwhelmingly viewed USAID’s goals as self-interested. At its inception in 1961, USAID served as a platform for U.S. soft power and a noncoercive means of gaining global influence during the Cold War (Daniel, 2025). USAID’s education sector work has been particularly instrumental in forwarding its soft-power agenda. For example, its extensive support of education in Afghanistan was in large part to secure its geopolitical and security aims in the country as a form of counterterrorism and “winning hearts and minds” (Novelli, 2017).

Given its scale of influence as global education’s largest bilateral funder and its plainly self-interested aims for providing education, USAID has been analyzed for its impacts or efficacy across particular education subsectors, such as basic education (Chapman & Quijada, 2009), girls’ education (Stromquist, Klees, & Miske, 2019), pedagogy, and teacher education (Rizvi & Khamis, 2019). Research has also attended to the influence of USAID on education policy within certain regional or national contexts, most notably in Latin America (Bujazan et al., 1987; Edwards, 2012, 2013, 2018; McGinn et al., 1979; Rosekrans, 2006; Valverde, 1999). This body of scholarship provides important insights into the role and consequences of USAID, raising important and long-standing critiques, for instance, its outsized influence on policymaking (Bujazan et al., 1987), shortcomings of USAID’s logical frameworks, and the political and ideologic underpinnings of pedagogic interventions (Tabulawa, 2003). We built on this scholarship to present a nuanced analysis of the impacts of USAID cuts on education in real time. We paid particular attention to how the cuts shifted or reconstituted the dynamics of power.

At the time of this writing, published accounts of the implications of USAID cuts have focused largely on public health (e.g., Zumla et al., 2025). International NGOs have produced initial reports on education-sector impacts (Alliance for Child Protection, 2025; ETF, 2025; UNESCO, 2025b), whereas other organizations have written blogs and press releases (EiE Hub, 2025; Global Campaign for Education, 2025; Jesuit Refugee Services [JRS], 2025). Based on our review, only a very small number of scholarly studies have grappled with the educational impacts of USAID’s closure, and they do not solely attend to education (e.g., Cavalcanti et al., 2025; Mbah et al., 2025). To our knowledge, this empirical approach is the first to consider the implications of USAID closure on education systems globally and in one country context. We do so by attending to how actors in international organizations and in the specific setting of Malawi make sense of this paradigm-shifting moment.

Within aid relations, development workers play a fundamental yet often overlooked role in development policy construction and translation because they liaise between international funders, community-based organizations, and aid recipients (Fechter & Hindman, 2011; Mosse, 2011). In a single national context, they occupy diverse institutional positions, with some employed in elite managerial or administrative posts in major cities and others conducting fieldwork in rural communities. In Malawi, development workers at the midlevel significantly influence how development policies and programs roll out (Englund, 2006; Silver & Morley, 2022; Swidler & Watkins, 2017). Attention to the impacts of USAID cuts thus must be attuned to the relational and technical aspects of policy change (e.g., Peters, 2020).

Contextualizing International Development Education in Malawi

Malawi is a uniquely generative setting to examine the consequences of aid austerity. The country is often described as highly dependent on foreign funding. In 2022, for instance, Malawi received $1.34 billion in net aid, representing 53.65% of total government expenses (World Bank, 2025). Over half the healthcare spending in Malawi has historically come from foreign funders, including more than $2.1 billion dollars from USAID for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis treatment and prevention since 2003. In the education sector, funders provide 11% of the total budget and more than 80% of educational infrastructure development, including classrooms and school blocks (Savage, 2025).

In 2024, Malawi received the most U.S. funding to education of any country in sub-Saharan Africa as well as the fifth most globally after Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Afghanistan (ETF, 2025). USAID has been Malawi’s biggest international funder for more than a decade. Based on reporting in The Guardian (Savage, 2025), the United States has contributed more than $350 million to Malawi each year, more than 13% of the country’s 2024–25 budget.

This landscape, however, must be understood within the long history of patriarchal, colonial, and racial capitalist interventions (Mkandawire et al., 2022). Previously Nyasaland, Malawi was colonized by Great Britain from 1891 until it gained formal independence in 1964. During the missionary and colonial eras, formal schooling was an elite enterprise that functioned primarily to convert Malawians to Christianity, train civil servants to staff the colonial state, and codify Victorian gender roles (Sharra & Silver, 2023).

After the transition to independence, President Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi Congress Party ran an authoritarian regime that was largely able to provide government-run services until the mid-1970s, when economic growth declined due to exogenous factors. Schooling during these years remained exclusive, with an emphasis on creating prestigious secondary and higher-educational institutions that primarily served men. In 1981, Malawi became the first country in the region to implement International Monetary Fund (IMF)–led structural adjustment policies, which tied loans to neoliberal policy conditions, for example, removing agriculture subsidies, privatizing state-owned enterprises, and imposing user fees for healthcare and higher education.

The weakening of the Malawian state through externally mandated “adjustment” coincided with swelling international intervention, including in the education sector (Kendall, 2007). In the early 1990s, the newly democratized Malawian state implemented a policy of free primary education, instantly expanding access to primary schooling. Yet, in the absence of sufficient resources, Malawi’s educational infrastructure and teaching force strained to meet demand (Kadzamira & Rose, 2003). USAID and other funders began to play an outsized role in educational financing and policymaking (Kadzamira & Rose, 2001). Since the early 1990s, USAID has focused on several key educational priorities, including educational infrastructure development, girls’ education, inclusive education, and early-grade reading, for which the United States has purportedly spent more than $136 million in Malawi since 2015 alone (Relief Web, 2022).

After 45 years of funder intervention, Malawi’s economic growth remains stalled, with a per-capita gross domestic product of only $481 (Savage, 2025), dwindling earnings from agricultural exports, and a 24.2% inflation rate (IMF, 2025). Recent aid austerity has hit the country acutely, whereas the escalating consequences of climate change has exacerbated economic conditions and imperiled education access in a multitude of ways (Silver, Makhuva & Morley, 2024). The confluence of increasing need and decreasing resources has amplified long-standing calls to establish sustainable funding flows removed from colonial entanglements (Chasukwa & Banik, 2024; Zeleza, 2025).

Methodology

This article represents our combined efforts to understand how diverse stakeholders in IDE understood and experienced USAID cuts. We drew on 62 key informant interviews conducted as part of two larger, ongoing projects that investigate IDE through critical political economy. ³ Combining data from our two projects—one focused on global representatives (led by Menashy) and the other on midlevel Malawian development workers (led by Silver and Morley)—enabled a rapid and layered analysis of USAID cuts and implications.

Our methodologic approach is situated in multisited analyses of education policy that trace processes of change across local, national, and global scales (e.g., Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014; DeJaeghere, 2024; Marcus, 1995). With “simultaneous and overlapping attention” across levels of analysis (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 15), multisited research supports productive comparisons to make sense of how shifts in policy are experienced within diverse political economies. Our theoretical grounding in critical political economy frames consequences historically and complexly. Further, we paid continual attention to relations of power shaping aid and resourcing ecologies in exploring both the effects of the USAID cuts and the imaginings for new configurations.

We pursued these research questions by joining two separate strands of data collection, one focused on the global level and the other on Malawi. In the following sections, we describe data-collection and coding procedures for each individual project before discussing our collaborative thematic analysis. In the case of both interview-based projects, the researchers held established relationships built with many respondents long before 2025, enabling trust and rapport and thus contributing to reliability (Tobin & Hayashi, 2017).

Global Data Collection and Coding

In focusing on global policy-level processes and the experiences of staff at the global level, Menashy sought to “study up”—a methodologic approach that focuses on understanding the powerful. In studying up, Menashy worked to reverse traditional data-collection practices in such fields as comparative and international education, which commonly involved a researcher from the Global North studying marginalized populations in the Global South, risking exploitation (Menashy, 2025; Nader, 1974).

Menashy conducted data collection about USAID cuts as part of a 2-year project tracing humanitarian aid and policymaking within international organizations to explore global racial inequities. The prescheduled key informant interviews began in early 2025, coinciding with the sudden USAID freeze, so Menashy incorporated questions on the implications of U.S. policy into her interview instrument. The interviews were semistructured, with probing questions asked to elicit additional details and elaborations (see Appendix A).

Data at the global level included 36 key informant interviews with representatives of international organizations, including government funders, UN agencies, international NGOs, and private philanthropies in the development and humanitarian sectors. Global-level key informants were selected using purposive sampling and included those who held at least 10 years of professional experience in the international education field and employment within an organization headquartered in the Global North. An initial list of potential participants was developed from several sources, including Menashy’s prior knowledge of the development and humanitarian sectors and professional networks, participant lists from major IDE conferences and events, and staffing websites from major international organizations. Snowball sampling also was employed: At the end of interviews, she asked participants if they knew of others who might be appropriate to speak to similar issues. Interviews took place between February and June 2025 and were conducted virtually, lasting approximately 1 hour each.

Interviews were transcribed automatically through the virtual recording software and then cleaned by Menashy or a research assistant to ensure accuracy. Coding of the global interview transcripts was conducted using NVivo qualitative software and began with broad thematic parent codes and then subcodes (e.g., effects on organization >> effects on funding >> effects on staffing >> effects on policies). Both parent codes and subcodes were informed by critical political economy because they attended to interrelationships between economic, political, and social spheres. Codes were added iteratively to pursue new strands of analysis, for instance, how participants articulated interactions between the cuts and political environments. These codes included themes that were not predicted a priori (e.g., impacts on anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion [anti-DEI] measures).

Malawi Data Collection and Coding

Silver and Morley have conducted ethnographic research on international development programs and relations in Malawi for a combined 25 years, including on the effects of the United Kingdom’s aid cuts in 2020. In December 2024, they launched a new project exploring post-aid possibilities in Malawi. When Trump announced the USAID freezes, Silver and Morley set up a series of Zoom interviews with participants to understand the current changes and implications. Specifically, they focused on Malawians at the center of the international development education ecosystem: the NGO staff members, policymakers, and civil society actors who, in their daily work, broker between funders and communities and translate key policy directives into practice (Peters, 2020). In their diverse institutional and hierarchical positionings, these midlevel actors are uniquely situated to critique power relations (Silver, 2024). Silver and Morley employed the anthropologic approach of studying through to follow mechanisms of transformation across multiple interconnected sites (Wright & Reinhold, 2011). Studying through examines the “continuous process of contestation across a political space” (p. 108), tracing how local actors provoke systemic change through daily acts of negotiation, resistance, and refusal.

Data from Malawi included 26 key informant interviews collected immediately prior to Trump’s inauguration (December 10, 2024), again with the same informants after the USAID freezes and closures (March–May 10, 2025), and finally with new actors in the following months (June–July 6, 2025). Silver and Morley conducted in-person interviews in December 2024; second-round interviews were held virtually via Zoom, lasting approximately 1 hour each, with some exceptions for connectivity issues. Finally, Stella Makhuva, a Malawi-based research team member, conducted the final six interviews in person in the summer of 2025. Key informants were selected from our professional networks, purposefully sampled to reflect diverse institutional locations and employment positions. Some were employed by USAID, whereas others worked in Malawian NGOs, universities, or educational projects directly or indirectly affected by the aid cuts. All could speak intimately about the impacts of the USAID dismantling in Malawi based on professional knowledge and personal experiences. Although we adapted our interview protocol based on our knowledge of each participant, Appendix B includes questions posed consistently across interviews.

Interviews were recorded and transcribed virtually via Zoom, in addition to being manually annotated in real time by one or both researchers. Silver and Morley identified key codes to map the political, historical, economic, and relational dimensions emerging in interviews, such as “ripple effects,” “U.S. reputation,” “critical perspectives on development,” “‘it’s their money,’” and “reconfigurations and alternatives.” Using the qualitative analysis software ATLAS.ti, Silver and Morley systematically analyzed the data for these and other emerging codes. They wrote analytic memos in ATLAS.ti (Emerson et al., 2011) to explore disconfirming evidence and to begin identifying patterns within and across interviews.

Combined Thematic Analysis

After coding the global- and national-level transcripts separately to identify salient themes, we compared initial findings as a research team. This comparison occurred through writing memos, generating data outlines, and discussing as a research team similarities and differences. This process allowed us to arrive at thematic findings or substantial patterns in the data. Thematic findings were considered robust and important to include in the findings after saturation had been reached, where several respondents repeated similar perspectives (e.g., Saldaña, 2021). We all engaged secondary data sources, such as reports and newspapers, to refine, triangulate, and extend our thematic findings.

Although the global and national data emphasized different aspects of the cuts, there were many overlapping themes. In the findings, we largely focused on these commonalities to show how similar impacts manifested in each context (e.g., job losses). Still, we uncovered how some impacts may be unique, or distinctly felt, at each scale (e.g., the role of government in Malawi, challenges facing local NGOs or the implications of USAID cuts on DEI initiatives). A critical political economy lens helped illuminate the intersecting and disparate impacts on the political, economic, and social spheres of each context, with a particular focus on inequity and marginalization.

Findings

Immediate Aftermath

On January 20, 2025, Trump issued a 90-day freeze of USAID programming following a spree of executive orders targeting, among other things, government DEI programs. Development workers across our interviews—from the global policy arena to local NGOs in Malawi—described this event, and the weeks after, as marked by chaos and confusion. Recent reports have documented the comprehensiveness of the USAID cuts, highest in the sub-Saharan African region, where funding was reduced by 71% (Kenny & Sandefur, 2025). As the cascade of directives came from Washington—the freeze, the stop-work order, and project closures—diverse stakeholders sought to make sense of them in real time and interpret the impacts on their and others’ lives and livelihoods. Importantly, they distinguished this round of cuts from past austerity measures, framing them within broader national narratives from the calls for government ownership in Malawi to antiprogressive movements in the United States.

Global

Respondents characterized USAID as an “easy target” for the Trump administration due to its large budget and assumptions about the political leanings of its staff: “It’s very clear that this administration thought that they were taking down a huge left-leaning bastion” (5/13/25a). ⁴ False allegations and conspiracy theories about USAID had made the news cycle, drumming up public support for cutting USAID funding. The dismantling of USAID therefore was “just a pawn in this larger expansion of power and revenge and retribution” (5/13/25a).

Across USAID’s education sector, however, the impact was felt even prior to the shutdown directives. When President Trump signed an executive order to end “radical and wasteful government DEI programs” in January 2025 (White House, 2025), USAID personnel were forced to immediately respond. Yet, because much of education connects inextricably to issues of equality, few were clear on how to proceed. One staff member gave this example: “What does it mean for an inclusive education project to stop DEI related activities?” (5/20/25).

As the organization was in the midst of attempts to shift its programs to respond to the directives, a stop-work order was suddenly introduced. Programs around the world were put on a 90-day review, but according to one staff member, “Maybe halfway through February it started to feel like this 90-day review was something that was not actually going to result in any sort of serious review” (5/20/25).

In rapid succession, over only a few short days, USAID projects were completely terminated, and personnel—both at headquarters in Washington and across the world—were fired. The speed of the cuts left the global education community stunned: “Turning off that funding overnight and the horror of that—services being cut off and disappearing, no accountability to populations and communities—that’s horrendous” (2/20/25). Respondents were astonished by “how rapid it has been, and just completely without analysis” (5/1/25); “It is really shocking” (3/18/25).

Malawi

Although Malawian development workers had weathered unexpected program closures before the USAID cuts, “this time around . . . this was different” (3/18/25). Indeed, an NGO staff member noted that past aid cuts that had occurred, such as those from the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (formerly the Department for International Development), were simply “not at the pace this has rolled out” (3/18/25). Another shared that the Danish International Development Agency had given a 6-month offramp when it was required to terminate contracts to allow for future planning. USAID’s closure was so abrupt that one interviewee likened it to a plane crash:

Let me first give you this example. An airplane when it is taking off, it takes off at an angle, not 90 degrees. . . . And again, when it is descending, it descends at an angle . . . because if it descends 90 degrees, that is an accident. Now, what has happened here is 90 degrees because from nowhere, we are down. I think [that] we are in a very, very bad situation. (7/7/25)

Previous, smaller-scale USAID freezes or withdrawals reflected changes of political administration and pertained to the programmatic areas deemed ideological, such as support for LGBTQI communities, gender equity, or sexual and reproductive health programming. For this reason, project management anticipated some cuts as well as having to minimize references to DEI in their work on Trump’s 2024 election. For instance, one person described having expected to be asked to rewrite the job descriptions for staff members in gender equity– or inclusion-focused positions (7/12/25), but blanket closures across sectors were unprecedented. According to one Malawian employee of USAID itself, “It was a bit surreal. . . . I have grown up knowing USAID, because it has been there for such a long time . . . It just couldn’t really register in my mind” (3/6/25).

For another NGO executive director who administered a USAID program, the immediate stop-work order, received a week after the funding freeze announcement, was both shocking and tremendously difficult to implement:

Immediately, we were requested to stop work and to cease all operations, to cancel all contracts [ranging from university partners to internet providers]. . . . We were advised that we have to stay home for 90 days and that we should wait for any communication from the U.S. government. (3/5/25)

While her project colleagues refrained from work, this director’s work escalated as she sought to halt the project’s national momentum through phone calls. In late February, the team learned that their USAID grant would be permanently canceled as part of the termination of “99% of the USAID grants in Malawi” (3/5/25). A third educational specialist and NGO manager explained: “It was a planet shaker, because it’s unprecedented. And I think [that] many people never expected it, because we are far, far away from the U.S. . . . It was a shocker” (4/22/25; emphasis is ours). On April 20, 2025, the freeze was extended another 30 days, with more permanent closures to come.

For some interviewees, however, there was no warning time between the freezing of project assets and complete closure/termination. One manager who worked on a literacy program described how team members came “to the office only to find the office locked. . . . It was as if we were dreaming,” she explained (7/18/25).

Despite widespread layoffs in and beyond IDE, interviewees noted that the Malawian government had been, in their opinions, quiet in reference to the freezes and cuts. One NGO executive director explained, “I have not heard a pipsqueak, anything substantial to address any of this that’s happening” (3/6/25(7/18/25). According to another, “Our government will do business as usual. Our schools are still there. [It’s as if] there is nothing, nothing missing like nothing missing, nothing broken” (4/22/25, 7/18/25).

In a March 25, 2025, interview on Podcast Malawi, President Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera reflected on USAID’s closure and broader austerity trends, noting,

Today’s misfortunes could lead to good fortunes tomorrow. A child sometimes grows the same day his father dies. Because, let’s face it, this is truly a global village. You have bilateral relations, but you also have multilateral relations and we need to navigate these things. (Sabola, 2025)

Here Chakwera has suggested both an acceptance of the changes and a push to look for alternative strategies moving forward. On May 28, 2025, the Malawian government announced a handover ceremony on its official Facebook page that “mark[ed] the conclusion of USAID’s active financial support for now” (Government of Malawi, 2025). Yet, while in previous times NGOs could “go and hunt [financial support] from another donor” (3/3/25), in the face of a funding cut, this was now no longer the case.

Over the past decades, research has pointed to disempowerment of Malawian state actors by international development structures and by funders increasingly setting policymaking agendas (Chasukwa & Banik, 2024; Mkandawire, 2010). For these reasons, some participants indicated that they felt that government actors might feel some relief by the exit of USAID from the education sector. One program manager shared how she felt that her contacts in government were happy about the changes, explaining: “I think it’s because there was [an] imposition by USAID. . . . The government had no contribution to the design and the things that needed to be kept. . . . There’s no ownership, in other words, by government for this [or that] project” (4/22/25). She continued to describe many areas of conflict between Malawian government officials and USAID, including around teacher management and allowances during USAID- and NGO-sponsored trainings.

Together these findings point to a sense of shock not at the fact of aid cuts but at their scale and rushed nature. In international and Malawi-based organizations, participants had experience with shifts or cuts in aid spending that corresponded with the political administration in power or broader economic trends. But the speed and totality with which aid was first frozen and then removed entirely were described as something catastrophic, akin to a plane crash. There was consensus among our interviewees that this was unprecedented, and in Malawi especially, concern emerged over how NGOs that implemented USAID programs became responsible for immediately communicating the consequences of decisions about which they had no control and no lead time. Trump’s cuts provide the most extreme example of how U.S. decision making around foreign aid has lacked accountability, a fact that led some of our Malawi-based participants to suspect a degree of relief from the Malawian government about the exit of U.S. actors from the education sector.

Ripple Effects

The extent and severity of the USAID cuts continued to stun respondents as the wide-ranging impacts came into greater focus. Participants used vivid and at times violent language to describe the cuts and their ramifications (e.g., “carnage,” “so cruel,” “something nasty”). Respondents brought up job losses—their own, their colleagues’—and the attendant impacts these losses would have for the broader economy. Development workers across scale observed that the IDE sector was irrevocably changed by the cuts. Malawians worried that local expertise would be lost and homegrown NGOs would be even less able to compete for scarcer multi- and bilateral funding; global actors predicted that the IDE sector itself would be decimated. Although participants across levels weighed how programming priorities would realign to a newly configured aid landscape, global actors uniquely worried about how the realignment would intersect with broader turns away from DEI and equity-focused work (e.g., Loy, 2025; White House, 2025). In different ways, both groups signaled that the United States had caused deep damage to its credibility.

Global

Global education actors all agreed that the USAID cuts had already had large-scale, immediate impacts across the sector that could not be understated, described as “horrifying” (4/17/25b), “a nightmare” (5/13/25), “massive” (4/17/25a), “traumatic” (1/5/25), “absolute carnage” (4/28/25b), and with “life-and-death repercussions” (2/20/25).

Data from a New York Times analysis showed that these sentiments were not hyperbolic. As of June 2025, 94% of all USAID basic education programs and 99% of higher-education programs had been cut. Because much development and humanitarian funding largely operate in concert with other organizations, the ripple effect on other global education organizations has been sizable. UN agencies and large international NGOs in particular had been hard hit, with global actors explaining that some agencies rely on USAID for upwards of 40% of their education funding (4/28/25, 2/20/25, 2/19/25, 2/26/25). As one person said, “The knock-on effects are the most profound” (4/8/25).

Moreover, education has long been viewed as chronically underfunded globally, and the USAID cuts exacerbated the deeply underresourced sector: “There was already a massive shortfall in funding for lots of different countries, lots of different contexts—particularly in education, which is typically underfunded anyway. . . . I think the generic big picture is pretty brutal, particularly because the U.S. has traditionally been a very large donor. . . . Bringing additional precarity into what is typically already quite precarious” (2/26/25). As discussed earlier, in recent years, several other funders have cut their aid budgets substantially, “and there are more cuts coming down the pipeline from European governments, from the U.K., from Germany, from Switzerland, from France. That is going to exacerbate the crisis” (4/28/25b). The overarching effects on educational aid globally cannot be overstated. As a global policy actor summarized, “I think it will decimate and destroy the sector” (3/6/25; emphasis is ours).

Job Losses

Given the ripple effects, global education actors from not only USAID but also many other organizations have faced “massive terminations” (5/8/25a). Those who worked on collaborative programs and initiatives funded even only in part by USAID have been terminated. During an interview, one global actor not directly employed by USAID said, “I expect to be fired next week” (2/19/25). Another, who has retained employment, explained, “I don’t really know who’s left to be honest. Most of the people . . . were literally fired on the spot, I think” (4/28/25b).

Job losses have created a chilling effect within the sector: “It’s sowing panic and discontent in a way that exacerbates existing challenges within the sector” (2/26/25). Another respondent said, “Don’t underestimate the level of fear in Washington” (5/13/25).

Retrenchment from Equity and Justice-Focused Programs

The Trump administration’s ban on DEI initiatives and backtracking from climate change agreements had consequences on the education and development sector as well. In efforts to please the administration and in hopes that U.S. funding might, someday, return, organizations began either downplaying or erasing their environmental or equity-related mandates and work. Development organizations started to wipe equity and diversity–related information from their websites (Loy, 2025), as described by a respondent:

Interestingly enough, some organizations are trying to reposition themselves, to be in line with what far right governments might fund or may not fund. So you see certain organizations already starting to tone down what they’re saying about the climate or what they’re saying about gender or certain things. (5/8/25)

The moment, some fear, would embolden other organizations and governments to reduce DEI efforts: “Some people will obviously leap on it and as much as they can, because it will help them to preserve power and cut all sorts of progressive programs” (2/13/25). “I worry that other donors will sort of follow suit and use this as a moment to make aid more contingent on political objectives” (3/18/25). A global policy actor spoke of the antiracism initiatives that gained steam after the murder of George Floyd and “the speed with which some organizations are happy to step back from those statements when the political environment shifts I find also troubling” (5/20/25).

Even individuals who have shown passion for equity initiatives in the past appeared to be retreating due to fear or confusion:

I’m on a working group on antiracism and decolonization and education. . . . And I’m like literally just getting no response. I know they’re out there. . . . it’s just kind of gone radio silent a little bit. . . . I think people feel really hamstrung about whether they can have those discussions. (4/8/25)

Particular marginalized groups were at the forefront of many global actors’ minds, voicing concerns about Trump’s anti-DEI push and how it will exacerbate inequities and oppression when in concert with aid cuts. For example: “What we’re most concerned about right now is how this will impact gender-based mandates. . . . If USAID and other donors no longer encourage or fund these gender equality initiatives, will the aid community continue prioritizing them anyway?” (2/27/25). “I think about it in terms of girls’ education as well—adolescent girls—or if I think about children with disabilities. It’s already difficult to include them in a response. Now imagine with no funding—they’ll either be hidden even more, and you run the risk of further child protection risks” (3/18/25b). “I think it’s very worrying that anything that’s to do with LGBTQI, excluded groups, DEI—everything is just getting attacked” (3/18/25a).

As a global actor described, the anti-DEI orders have been particularly damaging to the education sector because “from an education point of view, that’s got to be one of the biggest [issues], because if you are not allowed to talk about diversity, inclusion, and equity, then you’re permitting and actively supporting lack of equity, inequity, exclusion” (2/13/25).

Damage to America’s Reputation

Even after a very short time, several respondents noted how the dismantling of USAID had permanently damaged the global reputation of the United States. Long self-described as a partner to governments in supporting development and humanitarian projects, the USAID actions fed perceptions of the United States as untrustworthy, unpredictable, and dishonest: “People have stopped trusting American funding” (4/22/25). A respondent described the situation with the following scenario: “If you’re working in an emergency situation or a crisis to try to explain to people why you’re sitting in your office with resources that they need, and that they want, and that they’ve specifically asked for. And the U.S. government has promised, and you’re refusing to deliver them. I feel like the U.S. has just absolutely shredded its credibility with partners across the globe” (5/20/25).

Rhetoric of “Back to Basics.”

Several global education actors voiced a concern that due to the extreme funding cuts, resources would be shifted to the sectors commonly seen as most pressing, diminishing education as a priority area. Within international organizations, a rhetoric of “back to basics” arose shortly after the announcements of USAID cuts. Respondents feared “a continued decline of prioritization of education [because] in a time of scarcity people make really tough choices” (4/15/25). Another explained the position of leaders in aid organizations on education: “You know, they’re like, yeah, yeah, okay. But you’re not water, food, blankets. Like you’re not—you’re not those” (5/13/25a).

Priority areas include health, nutrition, and disaster relief, but not education: “Health is lifesaving, but education is just nice to have” (5/20/25a). Because education provision now requires justification, among those in the sector, “It feels like a big, sort of existential threat” (4/15/25).

Malawi

In Malawi, as predicted by global-level actors, the educational impacts of USAID cuts were swift and cataclysmic. Since the early 1990s, USAID has focused on several key educational priorities, including early-grade reading/foundational learning (for which the United States spent more than $136 million in Malawi since 2015 alone; Relief Web, 2022), inclusive education, and educational infrastructure development. As of early 2025, major U.S.-funded educational projects in Malawi included USAID-Malawi Next Generation Early Grade Reading Activity (NextGen), with a total earmarked budget of $74 million over 5 years (2022–27) and the Transforming Higher Education Systems in Malawi Project, with $17 million (2022–27) dedicated to supporting student access to and retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) university programs (Relief Web, 2022). ⁵ The Transforming Higher Education Systems in Malawi project, for instance, supported thousands of students across Malawi’s public universities until their scholarships were immediately revoked and students told to return home (Masina, 2025). As one staff member on the project explained, “So ending this support doesn’t just stop a program. It has disturbed lives. It has disturbed dreams. In long-term systems” (3/7/25). Another NGO worker explained, “I know some students have committed suicide because they know their future is doomed” (3/3/25).

Job Losses

The devastating consequences of aid cuts, however, were of course not limited to beneficiaries. Instead, the effects of the cuts rippled out to those employed by the sector, their families and communities, and the landscape of Malawian organizations. Based on reporting in the Nyasa Times, 5,000 people in Malawi lost their jobs due to the USAID cuts, a stunning number in a national context with a nearly 90% formal unemployment rate (Chirwa, 2025). President Chakwera and other sources, however, used the number 27,000 to reflect the cascading job losses beyond those directly employed by USAID, including those contracted by projects or whose employment was tied to their continuation, such as food vendors, drivers, and housekeepers (Sabola, 2025). Their payments were frozen with no warning or lead time as USAID projects were ostensibly reassessed. We learned about people who had, for instance, taken out loans that suddenly they could no longer service or who had no savings. One staff member shared: “I think the way they did it was too cruel. . . . they should have, you know, given a lag warning so that people [could] prepare themselves. It was so cruel, cruel that people went out of jobs literally with nothing” (4/22/25). USAID and other NGO employees who had been promised multiyear contracts thus suddenly found themselves in a “pool of people scrambling for anything we can get” (3/6/25).

One executive director with whom we spoke shared that her organization received nearly 47% of its organizational budget from USAID. As a result of the freeze, she suddenly had to lay off 32 of her 79 staff members. She described the excruciating process of having these conversations:

The reaction is not good. As you know, people have families. They have children who are at school. Some of them are in boarding schools. It means, come next term, they don’t have money to pay for school fees. They don’t have money for their rentals; they don’t even have money for food. . . . So it’s, it’s, something nasty. The whole thing is something nasty. . . . I felt sick for 2 weeks. (3/18/25; emphasis is ours)

Other project-management team members described having to suddenly confiscate and return organizational assets purchased from USAID, from vehicles to cell phones, computers, and even desks. As an interviewee stated, “For us, it was like Trump speaks today, tomorrow we leave [our] laptop, the next day we get fired, and that was it” (7/25/25).

As we have shared elsewhere (Morley & Silver, 2024), the work of canceling contracts, firing staff, and redistributing assets can be emotionally draining on those who have to do the day-to-day work of project closure. They become the face of austerity by default. As one project manager explained of USAID closures, “It was really hard; we put our heads together and cried” (3/7/25). She continued:

In Africa. When you see me at work, it’s not only me. It’s like there is a whole village behind me looking up to me. . . . So, with this decision, it has not only affected us as employees that we’re working under these USAID projects, but it has also affected the people that we’re supporting back home. (3/7/25)

Another participant shared the tremendous stress of laying off staff and removing office infrastructure while facing her own impending unemployment.

Erosion of Local Organizational Capacity

Not only do cuts impact employees in the short term, but they will reshape what the development workforce looks like because highly skilled individuals must take the first available jobs, including those outside the education or development sector and outside of Malawi. One education expert talked about the loss of capacity at both individual and sectoral levels: “It’s not as simple as what people think. It’s not just money. But it’s also a loss of skills. Loss of experiences” (3/3/25). This loss of capacity is particularly disastrous for “local” or Malawian-run, Malawian-staffed NGOs, which have “lost so many good, good quality people because of this. And you know, developing . . . quality official officers is not an easy task” (4/22/25).

Malawian organizations faced difficulty competing with better-resourced international NGOs for donor funding (Silver, 2024). USAID cuts have exacerbated the problem, as one participant forecasted: “What might happen in the long run is that you’ve got these small organizations, national (Malawian) organizations. They’ll be crowded out” (3/3/25). International NGOs such as Plan International and Save the Children, he explained, have a stronger financial foundation and can lean on other funding streams, including private donors. Malawian organizations, in contrast, are highly reliant on bilateral agencies and less able to pivot to other sources.

Finally, Malawian NGO staff members predicted that Malawians would be even less able to shape what the remaining externally funded projects look like than they did before. With USAID staff in the country, one participant explained, there were some avenues for Malawian experts and local NGOs to pitch ideas, push for change, and challenge programmatic norms, but the shuttering of USAID closed those channels.

Damage to America’s reputation

Malawian informants were clear-eyed about the linkages between Trump’s America First agenda, the voters who supported it, and the reality unfolding before them. Staff members described feeling “a mix of disappointment and helplessness” (3/7/2025), “abandoned as though their efforts were not appreciated and undervalued” (3/7/25), and like “the collateral damage in political decisions far removed from our daily reality” (3/7/25). This was especially the case given how much former USAID employees valued the work they were doing and the impacts they felt they were having on student lives. One former project manager shared:

I know a lot of people in America may not understand the impact that something like this has had on people on the receiving end of the assistance that comes. But I assure you, people on this end really understand Americans a little bit more. . . . There is some irreparable damage that has happened, which I feel will negatively affect if at all the U.S. decides to continue aid. (3/6/25)

Even without a full understanding of the consequences of aid cuts, interviewees felt that the mode of Trump’s aid cuts showed a disregard for their humanity, with “no human face to the cutting” (7/25/25).

Finally, some informants spoke to how they saw in the moment an opportunity to deeply interrogate the global order and possibly forge a new one. One educational expert shared that the extent of damage wrought by these cuts caused him to question how it was that the United States held so much influence in the first place such that a person “at the touch of a button [can] make decisions like this that affect hundreds of millions of people’s lives” (4/25/25). He continued, “Some . . . are seeing an opening for a rethinking of how some countries can wield so much power that they become untouchable. They become uncontrollable. There is nobody that can stop them.”

USAID has always involved the articulation of uneven power relations because aid offered the United States an opportunity to exert geopolitical influence without upending the structural conditions that created need in the first place. But it also has subsidized vast economies in places like Malawi. Across scale, USAID’s closure was understood as a political decision related to U.S. domestic politics and Trump’s general disdain for DEI. In international organizations, participants witnessed a purging of language and programs that were equity focused. They questioned what removing DEI language and focus even meant in the context of education. In Malawi, participants lamented not only the loss of equity-focused programming but also, more significant, the loss of a safety net garnered through formal employment that would yield terrible consequences for equity across society. The sudden inability to pay for master’s programs, to service loans, and, crucially, to cover school fees and food for wide family networks would have gendered, regional, ethnic, and class-based implications within Malawian society. Both global- and Malawi-based actors saw USAID’s closure as causing long-term, perhaps irreparable damage to the U.S. reputation globally and potentially the end to IDE writ large.

Future Imaginings

As participants reflected on what they imagined will come next, their responses conveyed contradictions: Some felt only despair, whereas others identified optimism in the moment. Some sketched idealistic alternatives, whereas others demanded pragmatism. These contradictions characterized responses across the global and Malawian interview samples. Yet, the project of imagining new futures was propelled by an ability to place USAID in the past. Despite the tragic consequences wrought by USAID’s rapid cuts, many respondents spoke candidly about how the move addressed the long-standing need to curtail U.S. influence on the global stage. For many Malawians, the shift in the U.S. role opened conversations about how aid itself was “not right.” Although most respondents shared the view that IDE was flawed prior to the cuts, they relayed disparate—at times buoyant and elsewhere resigned—accounts of possible futures.

Global

Although all interviewees at the global level expressed abhorrence with the ways in which Trump cut aid—the speed, scale, lack of explanation, and absence of empathy for those affected—some felt that a reduced role for the United States might prove positive in the long run: “The good news is the U.S. will have a diminished voice in lots of spaces where that voice was actually quite problematic. . . . Aid was used and misused to advance American interests—trade or security interests. . . . [It] would be lovely if they were just to step out of that space, and others could actually then have a more sensible discussion” (2/13/25).

Others noted how decimating USAID provided a shock that could spur meaningful reform: “People are now starting to challenge and ask questions. . . . I think it’s definitely a catalyst for change” (4/22/25). Another respondent expressed optimism:

I am hopeful. This does give us an opportunity to restructure, rethink how we do things and change our ways of working. I am also hopeful that there are enough people out there who are fed up [with] this, of the way things are, and who feel this shouldn’t be like it doesn’t have to be this way. And so I am cautiously optimistic that this is the beginning of a moment. (5/8/25a)

Finally, in seeing the moment as a low point for the IDE sector, some stated that because the situation couldn’t get worse, the sector may as well attempt something new: “Because what we’re doing is not working. We’ve had 70 years of humanitarian aid, and one country has pulled funding and taken HIV and medicine away for 25 million people. So, whatever that system is, it’s not working” (4/28/25b); “We have tried this for so many years, and it’s been a disaster that can’t get worse. I think we [have] reached the worst. So maybe we should just try something different and see” (4/15/25a).

Among those who believed that the USAID dismantling could spur positive change, most agreed that moving forward, power must shift in order to enact a true reimagining: “Will the aid industry reorganize itself to become less bloated and top-heavy? If direct control is given to communities to determine how funds are allocated, then there could be positive things that come out of the fire” (2/17/25). Other global actors urged: “Let’s try to really listen from voices that usually were not at the table. . . . This is the moment to be brave and to put on the table ideas that are completely crazy. Because maybe one of them can work out” (4/15/25a). “I don’t want that system back. So let’s try and start from a reframing and see what we can do” (4/28/25).

In contrast, several respondents lacked optimism about the future of global education support. Some said that those viewing the moment through a positive lens are “too idealistic. I just don’t see how there can be that shift in the global ecosystem when you’ve taken out close to 50% of the funding [in a country]—nobody can make up that gap. And the donors that remain, I don’t think that there’s a strong enough self-interest or a strong enough push for them to really change their modes of operating. . . . I think it’s idealistic . . . where will the money come from?” (3/18/25a). In addition to questioning idealism, global policy actors said that the absence of concrete ideas moving forward contributed to their pessimism: “It’s too theoretical. We’re not talking about in reality. What would this look like?” (4/17/25). “I don’t see a very rosy future in the short term. . . . Something more positive would, you know, rise from the ashes, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I generally don’t think chaos is the right tool for bringing change” (4/17/25b). As one global actor summarized, “I’m an optimistic person. But I don’t feel super optimistic” (4/8/25).

Malawi

In Malawi, respondents debated whether USAID’s closure marked a permanent change for the sector. One participant said, “The development sector world . . . it’s going to, unfortunately, die” (7/25/25). She attributed this death to how easily she felt that major multilateral entities from the United Nations to the World Health Organization cowed to Trump and the U.S. and the large role the U.S. had in underwriting them. Still others felt that the rupture of aid relations catalyzed by Trump’s second term was only temporary. A project manager explained that the United States, after realizing China and other funding countries will continue to exert influence through aid, would seek to reestablish a USAID-like entity. He explained, “They will bring you the same thing and paint it green and say, we think this is better” (7/12/25). Beyond the debate about whether this change was permanent was a deeper discussion about if and how it could foster transformation in power relations among the United States and aid-receiving nations.

Similar to the global level, some interviewees in Malawi felt that the seismic change might open new possibilities to transform what was a problematic arrangement. According to one staff member who had worked on many major USAID projects:

The way development aid was being done was not right; so much money was said to be invested in development, but the truth is there was no development going; much of that money was left in the U.S. When it came to Malawi, it really never went to the ground. For me, it was probably more immoral than the cruel reality we have at the moment. It was appearing as if the right things were happening, when in actual sense, the wrong things were happening. It’s like coating a bitter thing with sweet on top of it when inside there, it’s so bitter and we would have lived with that for generations. (4/22/25; emphasis is ours)

In her response, this participant explained that despite rhetorical commitments to supporting education in Malawi, significant portions of USAID spending ended up cycling back to U.S. contractors and employees to implement programming that was often mismatched with what Malawians needed. She lamented wasted money on overhead for these same contractors and the tendency for aid projects to be awarded to international, versus local, organizations (Silver, 2024). For her, the status quo of USAID had been profoundly troubling despite the moral patina surrounding it. She hoped, then, that whatever came after the cruelty of the USAID cuts would be preferable to that which came before. Language around decolonization and new forms of sovereignty animated this and other conversations, as did a call to recharacterize aid as reciprocal. One former USAID employee explained:

If . . . you really look at how international aid has been framed, for instance, it’s always understood as the U.S. government or maybe the British government or China is providing aid to Malawi or less developed countries. But we know in the realist sense of things that that’s not the case. . . . There’s always a give and take, even though maybe one partner in the process doesn’t want to acknowledge the fact that they are also benefiting in the process. (3/31/25)

Other participants saw a chance for Malawians to reclaim their influence over managing local issues, thus reestablishing ownership and autonomy lost amid USAID’s incursions in the education agenda. “That’s a positive thing that can come out of all this mess,” explained one staff member, “that now we take leadership as a nation to solve our problems and solve it in the right way, and possibly even government would have greater ownership” (4/22/25). Or put another way: “Malawi needs to rise up and see what can we do” (7/25/25).

Regional political economists call for Malawi to further reconstitute its resourcing future away from aid dependency toward investment-driven growth (e.g., Zeleza, 2025). This might mean relying instead on expanded private capital flows, intra-Africa and South-South partnerships, broadened tax bases, diaspora remittances, and other donor sources such as China (Chasukwa & Banik, 2024; Zeleza, 2025). Our participants did outline some of these possibilities, from leveraging diasporic resources by forming new virtual collectives on WhatsApp and LinkedIn to creating new groups saving schemes, promoting corporate social responsibility, and lobbying alternative funders. One participant suggested the creation of for-profit branches of Malawian NGOs that could be “channeled toward management [for operational costs] in the absence of donor funds” (3/18/25). Another participant explained that private funders might show interest in supporting activities but worried about the difficulty fundraising for NGO operational expenses. None of these solutions, however, were described as quick or easy. “There will be suffering . . . tough suffering for the students currently” (3/3/25), he explained.

Despite the optimism of some around long-term solutions and even paradigm shifts in education-sector management, others offered what they called a “reality check”: Self resourcing, in the context of an $8.75 billion debt, is simply not possible. Malawi’s economy as of 2025 is shrinking, not growing, and remains seriously hampered by climate change’s impact on rain-fed agriculture. Eschewing what she called “academic” aspirations of a systemic recalibration, one educational consultant explained:

For five years our economy hasn’t been growing. Mostly because of climatic change. Every year we have had natural disasters which have impacted so much on the growth of the economy, which is dependent on agriculture. So we have had droughts. From droughts we go to the cyclones, tropical cyclones, which either there’s flooding destroying all crops and things like that year in, year out since 2020. So the capacity of government has really been greatly reduced by climatic change in the last five years. (4/2/25)

It must be noted that the consequences of climate change felt most acutely by countries such as Malawi result from emissions that disproportionately come from the United States and other aid-sending countries.

Thus, in imagining future possibilities for IDE, both global- and Malawi-level actors acknowledged the problematic nature of the previous state of aid. Although our participants all condemned how the aid cuts happened, many felt that the rupture of aid relations might foment something new and more equitable moving forward. From their vantage points in international organizations and in Malawian NGOs, they hoped that U.S. actors might more meaningfully transfer decision-making authority and funding itself to local entities. Malawian participants aspired to conversations about aid that were more frank, acknowledging reciprocal exchange and clearing space for more autonomy. Still others remained skeptical. Reconfigured aid relations in a post-Trump era might end up being more of the same but “painted green.” Or meaningful transformation might not be feasible at all given the devastating realities of economic decline, mounting debt, and climate-driven disaster in places like Malawi.

Discussion and Conclusion

This research contributes to recent literature on USAID’s role in education, extending knowledge on the notable degree to which the agency has shaped education funding, policy, and programming both globally and within a national context. Given the lack of research specifically targeting the education impacts of the current cuts, this study makes a significant contribution to the field of education and development, providing an in-depth, empirical understanding of the current, disruptive moment in foreign aid. Although initial reviews of USAID’s dismantling have emphasized the effects on beneficiaries (e.g., Alliance for Child Protection, 2025) or considered impacts for the global health sector (e.g., Zumla et al., 2025), the analysis presented in this paper aimed to illuminate the intersecting economic, political, and social consequences for education. Through a critical political economy lens (e.g., Wigger, 2024), this paper surfaced complex implications as well as future imaginings for education, contextualized by relations of power across both sector and scale.

Participants in this study saw Trump’s sudden USAID dismantling as a “planet shaker” that would at once “decimate and destroy the [IDE] sector,” rewrite U.S.-global relations, and provoke new possibilities for educational futures. While austerity in aid has been a global feature for some time, the speed and scale of USAID’s dismantling signaled a turning point in an educational global order marked by U.S. leadership for at least four decades. In Malawi alone, the United States was the top bilateral funder, flowing more than $350 million to the country each year for activities across sectors (Savage, 2025).

The impacts of the cuts to education specifically revealed how fragile education sectors were within this status quo. According to global-level respondents, given the interconnected nature of the aid system, few if any international education organizations were left untouched by the USAID cuts. And even while governments such as Malawi earmarked significant percentages of national budgets to education (in Malawi, 14.8% according to UNICEF, 2025), USAID was intricately woven into the country’s education operations for complex reasons, including the U.S. exercise of soft power. Education sectors were thus inherently vulnerable to U.S. political whims while unaccountable to the Malawians—and others around the world—who were made to rely on USAID for fundamental services.

This vulnerability was exacerbated by declining funder allocations despite espoused commitments to global education mandates such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Education for All Initiative. Education sector fragility must also be situated in a longer history of extraction, disinvestment, and global economic policies such as structural adjustment that deepened poverty and eroded social safety networks. In Malawi, the government allocates a greater share of its budget to debt servicing costs than to any other sector, reaching 24.4% of spending in 2024–25 (UNICEF, 2025). A critical political economy approach brings these realities together, highlighting the interconnections among debt and aid dependency, macroeconomics, and the causes and consequences of climate change. Our findings demonstrate that any single moment of crisis in Malawi, as elsewhere—including the shuttering of USAID—can only be understood amid and in relation to other more enduring crises, from neocolonialism to racism and climate change (e.g., Mkandawire et al., 2022). Efforts to rebuild education-sector capacity in aid-receiving countries will face these very same challenges as formal U.S. commitments are rescinded.

At the same time, by attending to the consequences of USAID cuts in multiple spheres, we have shown how decisions around aid ripple out across institutions and scales, from job losses in the United States to the erosion of family support networks in Malawian towns and villages, the further marginalization of DEI groups at home and abroad, and the loss of individual and organizational capacity in aid-receiving countries. The outsized role of the United States in global education has been laid bare by its withdrawal.

With regard to what comes next, informants in our study at both the global and Malawian levels pointed to the potential role of China in filling the gap left by U.S. funding. Even before 2025, scholars considered the geopolitical, ideological, and financial implications of China’s expansion into development (e.g., Chin & Gallagher, 2019; Tan-Mullins, Mohan, & Power, 2010). China has played a significant role in Africa broadly and Malawi specifically, including through infrastructure investment, food aid, and, most recently, by canceling $20 million in debt (Viano, 2025). For these reasons, Malawian critical political economists have pointed to multipolar trade and aid relations, including with China, as one component of a sustainable pathway forward (e.g., Zeleza, 2025).

Across global and national scales, our participants further considered what would emerge in USAID’s wake. With only a few exceptions, however, respondents from international organizations largely lamented USAID’s dismantling as a harbinger of the international education sector’s demise, with little hope for a future that could cope without funding from the United States.

In Malawi, our data demonstrate how development actors, who have long identified power hierarchies rooted in colonial legacies in aid (Mkandawire, 2011; Sharra, 2025), see in this moment an opportunity to reclaim autonomy and imagine alternative educational futures outside of traditional aid structures. Perhaps such a radical move will clear the way for new possibilities for educational programming and partnership that reground ways of respectful collaboration. Perhaps the increasingly harsh and untenable realities of life in contemporary Malawi will demand a more profound recalibration. In the short term, however, as a Malawian participant expressed to Morley:

When you’re down, there’s nowhere else to go but up. That’s my philosophy right now. This is not a smile-smile; it’s a smile for me to . . . feel better. And hoping that also transfers to you. I hope that as I’m smiling, you can see my strength. And push on and make sure that this [message] gets to the right people. (3/6/25)