A year has passed since I and thousands of colleagues lost our jobs at USAID. Asking myself “Why us?” I have come to the conclusion that the American public had very little idea of what we were doing and why. Doge, the “department of government efficiency”, began its work in January 2025, with USAID as its first target, in a reckless campaign that even Elon Musk has said he would not repeat.
At that moment of chaos, Americans lacked the knowledge that could contradict the false narrative presented by Musk, who called the agency a “criminal organisation” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America”. But what if Doge had eliminated Nasa, not USAID? Such a scenario seems highly implausible.
Despite the rise of private space companies, Nasa remains an icon of national prestige, with broad bipartisan congressional support. How many kids want to be astronauts when they grow up? And that’s because Nasa has spent decades carefully communicating its results and cultivating its image with the public.
In contrast, USAID is not well known or understood. One expert on USAID’s brand noted that the agency’s handclasp emblem and the tagline “from the American people” were “well known in the developing world, even if not well known in Washington”. How much worse is that brand recognition in middle America?
Misunderstandings around foreign aid abound. In March 2025, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey reported: “Nearly nine in 10 (86%) adults overestimate the share of the federal budget spent on foreign aid, saying on average that the US spends about a quarter (26%) of its budget on foreign aid.” In fact, about 1% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid. Unfortunately, that lack of recognition and those gross misunderstandings were key factors in USAID’s elimination.
It may never be resurrected, but the question remains important: what could future foreign assistance learn from Nasa’s approach to public communications, to ensure broad public understanding and support? Without a doubt, stories were there to be told. In Colombia, where I was deputy director of the largest USAID mission in the hemisphere from 2021 to 2025, we contributed to solving major regional challenges.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
