(US) Abundance > (US) Aid
USAID is gone. Unlock Aid has been thinking about this day for a while.
On January 24th, hundreds of organizations around the world received a Stop Work Order from USAID instructing them to pause all USAID funded or USAID related operations. About a month later these orders became full blown contract terminations. USAID as we knew it had ceased to exist.
No one really knows what will replace USAID, if indeed it will be anything. But Unlock Aid has done more thinking than most about Day Zero for the aid world. Along with the usual criticisms of waste and administrative bloat, Unlock Aid has long championed ideas that the US policy world now groups under the “Abundance Agenda”—breaking bureaucratic bottlenecks, reforming procurement, unlocking investment in innovation, and reducing dependence on entrenched contractors. For the sake of the world’s poor, it’s an agenda worth considering.
Unlock Aid: USAID’s Bête Noire (you know, when USAID existed)
Unlock Aid emerged in 2021 determined to “rebuild public institutions for the 21st century.” From the outset it positioned itself against USAID’s contractor heavy model. USAID was the beating heart of the industrial aid complex. The alliteratively named Beltway Bandits and other international contractors capturing 80-90% of the agency’s budget. Local implementors made do with crumbs from the table. USAID officials often bristled at Unlock Aid’s tactics and critiques and the group quickly became something of a bête noire for the agency.
But Unlock Aid’s founders are no Rand Paulian small government zealots who look to slash budgets for the sake of ideological purity. Rather they argue that USAID has shortchanged the world’s poor by adherence to rules that shut out innovators, kept communities away from decision making, and paid Washington salaries instead of funding local solutions. Long before billionaires entertained themselves over a weekend by feeding government departments into a woodchipper, Unlock Aid was agitating for more humane change.
The Abundance Agenda and Unlock Aid
At its core Unlock Aid wants more for the world’s poor. More results, more decision-making power, more progress, but not necessarily more aid funding. Those aims pre-date the recent popularisation of the Abundance Agenda but overlap neatly with the main critiques as they have recently emerged in US policy debates. Abundance thinking has been promoted by writers such as Matt Yglesias, think-tanks like Stand Together, and more recently by the New York Times Best Seller Abundance written by Derek Thompson, a journalist at The Atlantic, and NYT omnipresent columnist Ezra Klein. The core idea of the movement: stop fighting over a fixed pie of resources and create more pie(s)! Remove chokepoints so societies can create more—more housing, energy, health care, and growth—through lighter regulation and faster innovation.
Abundance, the book and the movement, lists the ills of American life and plots a course out of zero-sum politics and resource fights. Unlock Aid has long been singing from this hymn sheet. Its homepage pledges to build a system “on the principles of abundance … decentralizing decision-making power and resources to communities closest to the hardest problems.” Their 2023 listening tour manifesto repeats that a “vision of abundance” should anchor any redesigned US development model. Unlikely that Musk was reading this in 2023, but redesigned the US development model he has nevertheless.
The links to abundance are more than rhetorical flourishes. The first ever policy paper in 2021 talked about how procurement red tape stifled progress, argued for increases in focus on innovation to create more public goods, and challenged decision makers to move away from over-reliance on legacy government contractors. They got these views in Foreign Policy in May of the same year and when they aren’t low key trolling Marco Rubio with ads in his hometown paper, Unlock Aid continue to publish ideas and policy platforms. A few choice abundance inflected themes recur:
Moving “Beyond Aid” so the U.S. invests globally to expand supply. Unlock Aid isn’t looking for more money necessarily. Just moving beyond grants towards growth capital, echoing abundance writers who emphasize market-scale solutions. Their roadmap pushes compacts, co-investments, unlocking diaspora remittances (which dwarf official development assistance), and leveraging innovative finance instead of the classic project, aid-driven approach.
Cutting red tape and increasing state capacity. This mirrors US domestic abundance calls for permitting reform. Unlock Aid’s blueprint would let local firms bypass thousand-page solicitations via short concept notes, for example. Many of Unlock Aid’s proposals also deal with ways to enhance government agencies’ abilities to better respond to challenges, such as by recruiting a new generation of talent into federal agencies.
Localization. A shared insistence on decision making where problems occur and thinking critically about solutions that consider who is the long-term “payor,” whether it be via markets or host country governments rather than perpetual reliance on U.S. taxpayers and U.S. aid industry contractors.
Embracing innovation. Both the US domestic abundance movement and Unlock Aid call for ramped up public investments in innovation, both to propel the impact of existing, proven social innovators, and to unlock new science and technology discoveries such as to curb disease outbreaks and increase global food security.
Unlock Aid is an America-focused organization that works expressly through pulling and pushing on the (somewhat rubbery) levers of American politics and policy. They hope their platform has enough pro-small government pro-private sector fare for the Republicans and more than enough cosmopolitan internationalism for the Democrats.
The king is dead, long live the king
For too long African development, as viewed from the US and Europe, was focused on aid. The newly emerging abundance agenda is a step away from this mindset. Its very nature is about creating more. Something the private sector – and capitalism writ large – is very comfortable with. Charting a new abundance infused course where once there were DC-based bureaucrats contracting out four-year fixed programs to DC-based consultants is an agenda The GPI can get behind. Governments of Low- and Middle-Income Countries Just Don’t Have Enough Money. Only tax revenues, not aid from USAID or anyone, will be able to be enough to change that.
The implosion of USAID will hurt where aid dollars were overrepresented. But aid was never going to be the rising tide that lifted whole countries. With a bit of creativity and realizing that aid is, at best, a catalyst or a force multiplier for local solutions, the USAID aid apocalypse could clear the way for something much better. Or it might just be a humanitarian disaster zone and a generational stain on the US’s reputation. Fingers crossed that Unlock Aid—with their ideas, verve, and desire to see the welfare of the world’s poor improve as their sole focus—and allies can forge something anew.
If you want to be part of forging a new path away from foreign aid and towards Abundance, consider applying for our Sustainable Growth Fellowship. Applications open until July 15th.