Process over Progress
The Biden-Harris Administration spent too much time talking and not enough time doing, putting well-intentioned change at a great risk of repeal
Dear Unlock Aid community,
As we reach the end of the Biden-Harris Administration in just over four weeks, it’s time to take stock of what this administration has achieved in global development, what’s left to be done, and how our strategy at Unlock Aid will need to adapt over the next four years under what will be a very different President of the United States and U.S. Congress.
If we had to sum up the Biden-Harris Administration’s work on global development in one sentence it would be this: They showed the right intentions and got a lot of the policies right, but they did not move fast enough to translate their policy changes into real, tangible results, nor did they demonstrate a strong-enough willingness to challenge an entrenched status quo that resisted change. As a consequence, the Biden-Harris Administration largely tinkered at the margins and can show only incremental gains for their work. Many may take issue with the adage “move fast and break things,” but this administration moved extremely slowly and achieved too little.
Humanitarian crises, such as the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, or Sudan may have distracted the administration from prioritizing long-overdue reforms, such as to promote sustainable economic growth and to transition the basis of our relationships with most countries in the Global South from aid to trade. However, humanitarian crises are a constant. They happen during every administration, whether as a result of conflicts, natural disasters, or other catastrophes. U.S. foreign policy agencies have shown that they cannot manage crises while also pioneering at scale new 21st-century models for development. This itself underscores why a major transformation is so necessary.
U.S. global development investments will almost certainly come under attack over the next four years, just like it did during President Trump’s first term in office. However, unlike last time, there are now fewer champions inside and outside of the U.S. Congress who are left to defend an increasingly untenable model.
Despite widespread and bipartisan belief of the overwhelming need to reform our U.S. global development system, the Biden-Harris Administration failed to seize on their time in office to champion major reforms to change the system on their terms, including when they controlled the presidency and both chambers of the U.S. Congress. Now the Trump-Vance Administration will almost certainly try to change the system on their terms.
The good: This administration set many of the right policies
When U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power came into office, she outlined a bold new vision for global development. She described a compelling strategy to achieve that vision, too, including in a speech entitled “Progress, not Programs,” where she explained why USAID needed to shift its business practices in a big way. “It is somehow about changing a power dynamic which creates the impression that only the capital “D” development community can run development projects,” she said. The Biden-Harris Administration got a lot else right as well. For example:
It correctly diagnosed that more global development funding needs to leave the Washington, DC Beltway and to reach those communities closest to the challenges, both as a way to increase the impact and financial sustainability of U.S. development investments;
It changed policies to make the use of evidence much more central to its decision making, especially at agencies like USAID, which elevated the role of the Chief Economist, made programs like Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) more prominent, and increased investments in areas where we can save more lives per dollar spent, such as by eliminating lead from consumer goods;
It undertook a rewriting of federal grant rules to lower the barriers to working with the U.S. government, recognizing that unnecessarily complex bureaucratic rules and procurement red tape locks out non-traditional and more innovative players from working with the public sector; and
It established new policies and programs to help the U.S. move away from top-down, aid-driven development models in favor of those that promote trade and sustainable economic growth. Investments in the Lobito Corridor in Southern Africa are evidence of this shift taking place.
These kinds of changes are in line with the types of reforms that we’ve wanted to see. Since our founding three years ago, we’ve called on U.S. foreign policy and global development agencies to increasingly pay for results, double-down on investments in innovation, and partner more with a new generation of innovators and local actors by using investment models that propel inclusive and sustainable economic growth.
For example, working with the U.S. Congress, we’ve unlocked approximately $300 million in funding for social innovators that pay for results. Our coalition also developed multiple “moonshot” initiatives funded by the Biden-Harris Administration, such as one to create a Plant Genome Project to increase global food security. We also influenced executive branch policies on procurement and innovation that will affect more than $1.2 trillion of annual spending, and worked with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to introduce a framework for legislation that promises to transform our U.S. global development system.
The Biden-Harris Administration also helped to shift the Overton Window towards progress
All of this adds up. As a result of this administration’s efforts, combined with the efforts of past administrations, and those of outside pressure groups like Unlock Aid, the Overton Window on many issues in global development is shifting, and now more quickly than ever. Narrative shifts inform trends, which means the question is no longer if big shifts will ever happen, but when they will. For example:
The writing is on the wall for big aid industry contractors: While full of many well-intentioned people, the dinosaurs of development are stuck in a Grapes of Wrath moment, grappling with an increasingly uncertain future as they fall further and further out of favor, lose relevancy, and the spotlight is shone on the exorbitant sums they cost U.S. taxpayers. No country has ever graduated out of poverty as a result of aid, nevermind because of an aid contractor. More and more officials are also waking up to the fact that, too often, many of the aid industry’s biggest contractors do more harm than good, including by perpetuating dependence on U.S. foreign aid, creating brain drain in the communities to which they’re sent, and by displacing the very local markets they purport to serve. Instead, as now four successive administrations of both political parties have repeatedly emphasized, we need to ditch the “industrial aid complex,” to use Administrator Power’s framing, and instead invest much more in organizations, communities, and frontline service providers that are closest to the challenges.
Our collective understanding of the purpose and potential of foreign aid is changing, too. As Administrator Power said last week, what countries and communities around the world tell her is a constant: “We want trade, not aid. We want to grow our economies; we do not want to be dependent in any fashion on foreign support." Increasingly, political support is diminishing for spending on traditional “aid” projects as a way to promote long-term development, while support is growing for investments that propel sustainable and broad-based economic growth. Making this shift started in a big way with the Clinton Administration and its passage of the African Growth and Opportunity Act; continued during the George W. Bush Administration with the creation of the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation; and extended with the Obama Administration’s creation of programs like Power Africa. The first Trump Administration accelerated this trend by creating programs like Prosper Africa and agencies like the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Administrator Power’s recent push to make economic growth and trade promotion a more central priority for USAID sets the stage for a trend that is likely to turbocharge during Trump 2.0.
In the early days of the Biden-Harris Administration, we made the case that investors, philanthropists, and donors like the United States had invested millions of early-stage dollars to test, incubate, and develop new innovations for the world’s hardest problems. But too often, donors only budgeted for pilots to test out those new ideas, though not enough to also scale up what worked. As a consequence, we’ve seen many innovators close their doors or walk away entirely from trying to solve challenges in the social sector, and instead to serve only commercial clients. To address this, we challenged donors to solve the “missing middle” in global development. The good news is that this trend seems to be changing, too, with greater donor and public sector focus on increasing global technology adoption and funding to scale proven innovations: Gavi is raising $200 million for an Innovation Scale Up Fund, for example; The U.S. Senate just passed a bill to create a dedicated fund to scale the most cost-effective solutions borne out of USAID’s early-stage innovation programs; USAID also created a "Stage 4” program to bring the DIV unit’s most effective solutions to greater scale; The Global Innovation Fund (GIF) also just announced GIF Growth, a $100 million scale up fund. The trend line points to growing donor support to scale what works.
But the Biden-Harris Administration focused too much on process over progress and ran out of time to translate rhetoric into action
Administrator Power wrote in the executive summary of the agency’s policy framework, “The development challenges of today are more formidable than those the world has faced at any time since World War II, with significant implications for America’s national security.” If that’s true (and we agree that it is), the Biden-Harris Administration should have acted with unprecedented urgency. Instead, it too often prioritized process and made performative policy announcements at the expense of delivering real, tangible results.
For example, USAID spent more than two years to develop its policy framework (it was announced on March 23, 2023, 792 days into the administration), more than two years to develop a new acqusitions and assistance strategy to outline how it planned to spend nearly $40 billion annually, and nearly three years to even define what counted as a “local” partner, despite this being a major agency goal. In September 2024, the White House announced a new global development strategy, which it published with fewer than just two months to go before the November presidential election, setting it up either for a major revision or complete rejection, no matter who won and took office just four months later.
In sum, the Biden-Harris Administration spent too much time talking, deliberating, and signaling intentions from Washington, DC, and not enough time doing by translating good intentions into real-world results. The consequence: there’s too little that this administration can show in terms of actual funding moving in new ways, despite the fanfare that the agency received when it made its biggest announcements. Much about the way the United States spends on global development today still looks a lot like it has for the past many decades. For example:
Shifting a greater share of development resources out of the Washington, DC Beltway to local actors was said to be a major priority for this administration. However, USAID was only able to shift the share of funding to local actors from 7.4% to just over 9.6%, according to its most recent progress report, and even this may be overstating progress because USAID does not measure all of its funding to make this claim. Meanwhile, big aid industry players, including UN agencies, international nonprofits, and for-profit contractors still capture more than 90% of every dollar the agency spends, and they keep the vast majority of what they make for themselves. All this despite marketing themselves as “intermediaries” that serve the principal purpose of passing on funding to local groups. Administrator Power admonished unethical aid industry practices such as “pulling in a local organization as a subcontractor simply to win a bid, only to see them ignored," but the agency took no meaningful action to actually crack down on these kinds of behaviors, despite repeated calls from hundreds of civil society groups, local communities, and Congress to do so.
Major administration initiatives received significant political support, such as those focused on bolstering investments in the private sector, investing in evidence-based innovations, and combating lead poisoning, but funding for these programs tended to be very small, with annual budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, which is a rounding error for an agency that spends nearly $40 billion every year. More significant administration investments to boost economic growth, such as those along the Lobito Corridor, were good, but there were too few examples like this.
Meanwhile, while USAID dedicated a lot of high-level political attention to relatively small but flashy programs, it did not devote that same level of attention to challenging the status quo to reform its existing and often much-larger and more problematic programs. For example, the Biden-Harris Administration did not attempt to break up the agency’s proposed $17 billion Next Generation Global Health Supply Chain project, which had become the subject of much media and Congressional attention over the past four years as an exemplar for everything wrong with the status quo in U.S. global development. The Biden-Harris Administration should have used its political capital to stand up to the aid industry, break up this albatross of a project, and use the billions of dollars of unlocked funds to pioneer a new model for development, including to match rhetoric with action by investing in ways that promote sustainable economic growth, bolster local markets, and put countries on a path to financial sustainability.
Finally, USAID did make changes to its procurement policies, of which we gave it great credit, including by making paying for results a major priority for the agency. However, we have been disappointed that these changes have yet to translate into meaningful behavior change. For example, the share of grant funding that paid for results increased from just 1.3 percent in FY21 to 2.1 percent by FY23, which hardly represents a sea change in the way the agency does business.
At a more fundamental level, this administration failed to use its political capital to enact changes to significantly modernize our approach to foreign policy and global development to keep pace with the 21st century, even when it controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House. Over the next decade, billions of people around the world will grapple with sudden geopolitical shifts, climate shocks, and new technologies like artificial intelligence and synthetic biology will reshape the global economy, presenting both enormous opportunities and perils. Yet our approach to development is still steeped in the language of a different era, obsessively focused on ideas like “capacity building” and investing in small-ball projects that may marginally improve some people’s lives, but will do very little to bring about transformation of a scale that equips the United States and its partners to create 21st-century jobs and participate in the new global innovation economy.
The Biden-Harris Administration’s failure to affect big change in global development reflects larger challenges across government
Zooming out, our frustration with the Biden-Harris Administration’s failure to drive real-world results is not just limited to U.S. foreign policy and global development. Indeed, these themes are reflective of broader trends in U.S. policymaking, an issue which has increasingly received attention from critics on the left (check out this recent Ezra Klein podcast), the right (see this Elon Musk tweet), and which has become one of the underpinning motivations to create the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Indeed, the Biden Administration’s signature achievements include passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), CHIPS and Science Act, and bipartisan infrastructure law. But three years after passing these bills, the Biden Administration had built just seven electric vehicle charging stations despite receiving more than $5 billion from Congress to do so. As of May, it spent fewer than 17% of the funds it received from Congress from the CHIPS and Science Act, IRA, and bipartisan infrastructure law to build new bridges, roads, and factories that are critical for America’s economic and national security.
Failing to focus on execution as well as policy change translates to diminished faith in the U.S. government’s ability to deliver, both among American citizens and its partners around the world. While many in Washington, DC are content to wait for the glacial pace of change, especially those who have been part of the system forever and who trade in the currency of received wisdom, voters are fed up with performative acts and with a status quo that fails to deliver real results they can see. The November election demonstrated that fact. In the context of foreign policy, the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit may have generated buzz among DC insiders, but it was met with skepticism by many Africans because the U.S. has such a spotty record of matching lofty rhetoric with real-world action.
Our dream is for a new generation of officials and policymakers who will show a bias for results over process to step up and serve. Officials in government, as a justification for the slow pace of change, repeatedly told us that “this is just how government works.” That answer can’t be considered acceptable in the years ahead.
Here’s how we’re preparing for what’s next
Looking ahead to the Trump Administration and the next U.S. Congress, we expect a wrecking ball to come to the government, and U.S. foreign affairs agencies like the State Department, USAID, DFC, and MCC will not be spared. Some good programs are bound to get broken, and the failure of this administration to meaningfully implement and solidify well-intentioned reforms puts much of their good work at a very high risk of repeal.
Our challenge to the next Trump-Vance Administration would be to keep those policies in place that make sense, and to focus more on delivering real results rather than spending the next four years rewriting paper. The reality is there should be some continuity between what the Biden-Harris Administration pushed for and what the next Trump-Vance Administration should want to do, such as to shift resources out of Washington, DC, reform outdated procurement rules and cut red tape, pay for results, and promote economic growth.
At the same time, this is also a time to be bold in bringing about a much more modern approach to U.S. global development. President Trump’s time in office is likely to be defined by three themes: disruption, conservative ideas, and an America First agenda.
In this context, while a wrecking ball approach brings substantial risk, it may also create a white space to enact long-overdue reforms that were once thought impossible, as well as to finally drive progress in areas where the Overton Window has shifted and where we just need behavior change to catch up. Here are ten ideas for the next administration and U.S. Congress that are consistent with those themes, which we developed in concert with our coalition partners and with many individuals who are likely to enter and lead in the new administration.
We don’t want to sound Pollyannish about what’s ahead. Many in the global development community are concerned about likely overall cuts to the top-line foreign aid budget. We share those concerns.
But as we wrote earlier this year in Foreign Policy, “Faced with the prospect that U.S. foreign aid could go away, those who care about the United States’ role in the world can do better than to just say “no” and instead propose a better, more defensible model.”
Now is a moment for us and those in the U.S. global development and foreign policy community who think that America can do better to get more involved, not less, including to work with commissions like DOGE, and with partners in Congress who also want to see bold and transformational change. By effectively shaping the first 100 days of the next administration and the U.S. Congress, we can set the tone for what’s to come for the next four years.
To Progress,
Unlock Aid