Former USAID officer attributes 2025 elimination to weak public recognition

Kaiser: 86% of Americans overestimated share of budget spent on foreign aid

On the one-year anniversary of USAID’s elimination, a former senior officer at the foreign aid agency published an opinion essay in The Guardian attributing the rapid cuts to decades of weak public recognition of its work.

The Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration’s cost-cutting initiative then led by Elon Musk, began work in January 2025 with USAID as its first target, Carew wrote. Musk called the agency a “criminal organisation” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America,” according to the essay. Musk has since said he would not repeat the campaign, Carew noted.

Carew, who served as deputy director of USAID’s Colombia mission from 2021 until its closing in 2025, wrote that Americans “lacked the knowledge that could contradict the false narrative presented by Musk” when DOGE launched its campaign.

He attributed the agency’s vulnerability to what one USAID branding expert described as recognition limited to “the developing world, even if not well known in Washington” — a profile significantly weaker among middle-American audiences.

A March 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation survey reported that 86% of U.S. adults “overestimate the share of the federal budget spent on foreign aid, saying on average that the US spends about 26% of its budget on foreign aid,” according to Carew’s essay. Foreign aid actually accounts for about 1% of the federal budget, Carew wrote.

Drawing on his time in Colombia, Carew wrote that USAID “helped tens of thousands of Venezuelans take advantage of generous Colombian migration policies by processing legal residency cards, training them for jobs and establishing healthcare access,” work he said kept migrants from adding to northward migration pressure.

USAID also guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in Colombian bank loans to businesses promoting tropical forest products such as açaí and to farmers transitioning from coca cultivation to legal crops, Carew wrote. The agency was the largest donor supporting implementation of Colombia’s 2016 peace accord, helping prosecutors gather victim testimony and supporting ex-combatant reintegration, according to the essay.

Carew contrasted USAID’s communication approach with NASA’s, citing the 2014 book “Marketing the Moon” by David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, which reported that 94% of American televisions were tuned to the first lunar landing. He described NASA’s practice of describing a Mars rover as “about the size of a small SUV” rather than using technical jargon, and the agency’s strategy of linking unmanned missions to “timeless questions of science” such as whether Mars once supported life.

USAID instead relied on technical and bureaucratic vocabulary that failed to resonate with American audiences, Carew wrote, leaving the agency unable to push back effectively when DOGE’s attacks arrived.

Carew wrote that USAID “may never be resurrected” and argued that future foreign assistance programs should adopt NASA’s communications strategy “to ensure broad public understanding and support.”