“In the wake of this destruction”: The future of international development beyond USAID

Professor Samantha Power led the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from May of 2021 to January of 2025. Last week at the Harvard Center for International Development’s flagship annual convening, the Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM26: Reimagining International Development ), she was frank about the agency’s dismantling. 

“People don’t talk about USAID very much anymore,” she said. “That’s a gift, actually, to the people with the wrecking balls. And it’s unfair not only to the 15,000 people who worked at USAID when a year and a couple months ago a bunch of tech bros, on a whim, decided to destroy six and a half decades of work and impact.”

“Not just to them,” she continued, but to “the partners, to the beneficiaries, and to those in pain still today because of what has been upended.”

She said that the cuts to USAID were “a fever dream by no more than a dozen individuals who made something catastrophic unfold in the world.” Now, she said, it was time to “build something really important and productive in the wake of this destruction.”

Power, who is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership at HKS, led a lively discussion about what had been destroyed, what could be built, and the role of economists in that process. 

She was joined by four leading scholars of economics and development: Professor Esther Duflo from MIT and Professor Michael Kremer from the University of Chicago—who were two of three recipients of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work developing a new approach to alleviating global poverty—along with Rachel Glennerster, president of the Center for Global Development and Professor James Robinson (who joined virtually) from the University of Chicago, who won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with MIT Professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.

The conversation, “International Development in Time and Space,” reexamined international development with a global and historical lens. We share excerpts from panelists’ reflections below. You can also watch the full conversation.

On development work after USAID 

Glennerster:

Our estimates as of December were about 500,000 to a million deaths just from the cuts [to USAID] in 2025. And 700,000 to 1.5 million [deaths] from the cuts that have already been made [to] future allocations. 

There has been some pushback from Congress. This is just looking at health and humanitarian cuts, and it comes from where we can say, “This amount of dollars spent on malarial bed nets saves this many lives...” Which is only a fraction of what USAID did.

Power: 

The form that foreign assistance takes in the United States, the approach to development humanitarian assistance, is going to evolve—and should evolve, should always have been evolving. That evolution was massively constrained by the handcuffs put on the agency over many, many years.

Maybe this will be an opportunity to move forward without handcuffs and be able to really build on the incredible ideas of the panelists up here, and all of you. I hope so. But we should avoid assuming that just because something happened, that it was destined to happen…

[There’s an idea that] there’s not a constituency in the United States for international assistance. One rebuttal to that is that, last I checked, Mike Johnson controls the House, John Thune and others, the Senate, and they just passed in February, two months ago, a $50 billion foreign assistance package.

It’s not the way to run a rodeo, the way these things come together, but it speaks to the fact that there is an appetite to do something productive out in the world.

Duflo:

Maybe you could say the great success of development is the fact that infant mortality was divided in two in the last thirty years, that maternal mortality was divided in two, that we have much fewer deaths from HIV and AIDS, that almost all kids go to school, and so on and so forth…with all due respect to USAID, which I adore, and PEPFAR [the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief], it’s not due to aid, fundamentally. It’s due to the fact that the policies have changed. And they have changed because they have been allowed to change, because we had a Washington consensus that basically pressured countries into a very specific type of economic policy…

But eventually, at the end of the day, what matters is countries taking ownership of a problem and going at it with a vengeance. And we’ve seen it again and again, the difference it can make. It’s very regrettable that the U.S.—but not just the U.S., many other countries—have decided that  they are too busy.

Investing in innovation

Kremer:

We don’t know what the impact of AI is going to be. We could have incredibly wonderful outcomes for the whole world, including low- and middle-income countries. We could have disastrous outcomes. We have to make some very important choices about that. Most economists think that we’re going to have a very long transition...

[For example], there are not that many trained specialists—doctors to provide every type of care. But there are lots of community health workers out there. There are lots of nurses. With the right technology, community health workers and nurses are going to be able to do a lot more—or could potentially do—than they’re currently doing.

AI is radically improving weather prediction. India last monsoon season sent out 38 million AI-enabled weather forecasts. And it was an unusual monsoon year. The monsoon started early, then paused halfway up as it progressed northward through the country. The AI systems picked that up. Farmers got that information. They were able to adjust their behavior.

Debating the role of economists in economic development

Robinson: 

There’s lots of progress in terms of falling infant mortality, and world literacy has gone up monotonically, even in African countries. There’s lots of countries committing themselves to universal primary education, like Sierra Leone.

But I don’t quite understand what the role of economists is in this…if you’ve ever worked in Nigeria or Congo, you know there’s an enormous dearth of electricity. That’s not a problem of evidence. That’s a problem of the politics, of providing it, of organizing. I think most of the transitions you see are actually not about evidence. They’re about people reorganizing the society or the political incentives changing. So I’m a little confused about what the role of economists is in all of this, and what we’re claiming credit for and what we’re not claiming credit for.

Duflo: 

To my knowledge, no one claimed that economists are responsible for everything. It’s a little bit saying that “most people when they are sick get better on their own, therefore doctors are useless and medical research even more.” Well, some problems don't require medical research, and some do. 

The world is a complicated place, there are many problems—people come in with different fields within economics, and of course, from other fields, and with different competences and different skills to attack this problem. And none of them is superior ontologically or practically to the other.

Some economists have developed this ability to run the train on time, to run experiments to generate evidence…I think people really need to pick the issues that they think they can make a difference, the way that they can make a difference, and they need to push hard with that.

Glennerster: 

Economists didn’t invent the pneumococcal vaccine, but economists did invent the mechanism which led to it being scaled up five years earlier [and saving] hundreds of thousands of lives. Bed nets—economists said that they should be free, and that’s led to, I can’t remember the numbers, but tens of millions of kids not dying from malaria.

Which again, is not just a small thing. I’ve had a kid die. It’s hugely impactful even if it doesn’t change structural transformation—so any one of those deaths averted is a huge deal. If that is all economists have done, we've done a great thing.

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Photographs by Matthew C. Teuten