Aid, Interrupted: Inside USAID and the Collapse of American Health Diplomacy

The 2025 dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)'s global health programs under the Trump administration marked one of the most abrupt and far-reaching rollbacks of U.S. foreign assistance in modern history. But behind the budget lines and agency memos lie human stories: career officials uprooted overnight, life-saving partnerships abandoned, and a global health infrastructure thrown into disarray. This project explores what happens when decades of American global health diplomacy are dismantled in a matter of weeks. Through interviews with longtime USAID officials and a senior member of Congress, this profile-driven policy analysis traces the real-world impact of the cuts — from HIV clinics in Haiti to pandemic surveillance in Indonesia. It draws on testimonies from officials who built and managed these programs, documenting the rupture as both a strategic failure and a moral reckoning. My findings show that the collapse of USAID's infrastructure has weakened America's credibility on the world stage, emboldened adversaries, and jeopardized vulnerable populations worldwide. With Congress structurally constrained and the public largely disengaged, the capstone urges a rethinking of how we protect development institutions in times of political upheaval — and whether American soft power can ever be rebuilt once trust is lost.