On the history and future of USAID
America, according to Donald Trump, is surrounded by parasites. “For decades”, Trump claimed on 2 April—“Liberation Day”—“our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far.” A classic case of victimhood reversal, Trump cast the United States as the primary victim of a global system it has played the greatest role in shaping since the Second World War.
For Trump, this is about more than just trade and tariffs: other sites of alleged theft include international commitments like the Paris Agreement and USAID. Their abandonment, since Trump took office for the second time, alongside a cascading series of fiscal contractions and deregulations, has seen retrenchment emerge as one of the defining features of a new global and domestic order. These withdrawals have rightly triggered “shock and awe” across the world, exactly as they were intended to. Yet to understand them, we need to look beyond the immediate context. To do so, we must place them within the long arc of what the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.” Positioned within this framework—and the imperial logic that sustains it—Trump’s exit from the Paris Agreement and dismantling of USAID emerge not as ruptures, but as natural extensions of US statecraft.
Capital’s Fix
For Gilmore, organized abandonment is the process by which institutions systematically withhold or withdraw support—whether social, economic or infrastructural—from communities deemed unprofitable or expendable. Far from random neglect, it is a calculated redistribution of care and risk that leaves specific populations exposed to harm, while protecting or insulating others. In some cases, this takes the form of capital chasing profit elsewhere, abandoning certain communities in the process; in others, it is the state’s failure to respond to crises. In either case, abandonment exposes the dependencies built up before the rupture and the indifference that follows.