It’s been one year since NPR reported that USAID had shut down and merged its operations into the State Department. Over the last year, the termination of USAID shuttered health programs, collapsed local partnerships, and eliminated thousands of jobs. It showed how Congress’s decision to let USAID fall helped lay the foundation for the haphazard, unilateral foreign policy now visible in Iran and Venezuela.
In early 2025, the administration told Congress it would effectively close USAID and move or terminate most functions. Within weeks, missions were ordered to halt new awards and issue stop‑work notices, and by March 10 roughly 83 percent of USAID’s initiatives had been terminated, according to Roots of Development . On July 1, after more than 60 years, USAID ceased to exist as an independent agency.
For those of us who worked in or alongside USAID, this was not abstract. It meant programs shuttered midstream, partners laying off staff, and communities learning that the health worker or extension agent they relied on would not be coming back. The shutdown ruptured trust in fragile settings and turned legal obligations and congressional directives into inconveniences just when Congress should have insisted that the executive does not get to decide which laws it will obey.
The estimates of the human cost have become much clearer. A Harvard analysis found that dismantling USAID contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths in its first year. A study coordinated by UCLA and ISGlobal, summarized by the BBC , projects that if defunding continues, global aid cuts could result in at least 9.4 million and potentially more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.
Congress cannot claim it was unaware. A KFF timeline shows early warnings about unconstitutional freezes of appropriated funds, and researchers and humanitarian groups sounded the alarm as programs were cut and lives put at risk. Congress answered with statements and hearings but no sustained bipartisan push strong enough to stop the closure or restore USAID’s core accounts.
Under the Constitution, Congress holds the power of the purse. As the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown has emphasized, that authority is central to the separation of powers. Congress created USAID by statute, allocated its funding, and wrote the laws that governed its work. USAID’s closure was not just a bureaucratic mistake. It was a test of whether Congress would defend its role in foreign policy when a president chose to ignore law and long‑standing practice, and Congress failed. In doing so, it signaled to the White House that America’s tools of statecraft could be rewritten by executive fiat with little fear of pushback.
The episode also exposed that USAID lacked a large, organized domestic constituency to make defending it politically costly. As Oxfam America has noted, foreign aid was easy to caricature and cut, even though it represented a tiny share of the budget and served strategic purposes. Once development and diplomacy were sidelined, it became easier to reach for force and tariffs abroad, confident that Congress would mostly object in press conferences rather than in binding law.
That pattern now defines the foreign‑policy record of the past year. The war in Iran was launched without meaningful public debate. The improvised assault and seizure operation in Venezuela lacked a clear plan for what would follow. As Ebola spreads across borders , the administration has relied on ad‑hoc quarantine deals and military deployments instead of sustained public‑health assistance and diplomacy, repeating the improvisation that began with USAID. In each case, the style looks like what was tested on USAID: sweeping decisions without a strategy, legal constraints treated as optional, and human costs accepted as collateral.
At the same time, the State Department was weakened. NPR’s reporting and subsequent analyses described senior expertise lost, key posts vacant, and morale plummeting. A depleted civilian foreign‑policy infrastructure made it easier for the executive to lean on military tools and emergency rationales rather than diplomacy and development. What began as a test on USAID became a template for foreign policy.
There have been glimmers of congressional pushback. In January 2026, Brad Sherman and Gregory Meeks introduced the Evan Anzoo Memorial Act—named for a five-year-old Sudanese boy who died of HIV after he lost access to medicine provided through USAID programs—which would require a Government Accountability Office accounting of deaths attributable to the USAID shutdown. In June, CNN reported that the Senate approved a war powers resolution directing the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran. Because the measure is a concurrent resolution, it does not bind the president, but it shows Congress can act when pressure finally builds.
The tragedy is that Congress did not act with the same urgency when USAID was being dismantled, before this foreign‑policy template took hold.
It is not enough for Congress to treat USAID’s closure as an unfortunate episode. The conditions that made it possible still exist: a weak domestic constituency for development, presidents willing to stretch impoundment and rescission powers, and a legislature that confuses press releases for power. If Congress wants to reclaim its role, it must tighten rules around how presidents can withhold or redirect appropriated funds, especially in foreign operations accounts, and enact protections for civilian foreign‑policy institutions so that no administration can hollow them out without a clear plan and real congressional buy‑in.
It also means taking war powers seriously and using the power of the purse when an administration refuses to follow appropriations law. None of these steps will bring back the lives already lost to USAID’s shutdown, but they would send a different signal than the one Congress sent when it watched USAID fall: that there are still lines that cannot be crossed without consequence, that institutions still matter, and that Congress does not intend to remain a spectator while U.S. foreign policy lurches from the haphazard dismantling of USAID to the debacles in Iran and Venezuela, instead of following any coherent and principled foreign policy.
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