When USAID Shut Down, Its Lessons Nearly Vanished

For people who move money in the name of impact, the shutdown of USAID landed like a star collapsing into itself. The United States government’s flagship development agency—once the world’s biggest patron of good intentions—closed its doors in July 2025, pulling billions of dollars of support for lifesaving humanitarian efforts around the globe into the void. What disappeared was also the world’s largest learning experiment: about $30 billion spent not on projects themselves, but on understanding them—six decades of field-tested trial and error across health, education, farming, governance and humanitarian response. Those evaluations lived in a public database, a kind of collective brain for the aid world. Now that brain is gone or hiding on some forgotten server. 

History will judge not only what we tried but whether we learned anything from it; this time, we cannot plead ignorance. Artificial intelligence (AI) has given us tools that expand the limits of human learning; there is no longer an excuse for not knowing what we already know. 

Before the lights went out, my social enterprise, DevelopMetrics, turned those tools loose on the USAID archive—one last look at what half a century of development really taught us. If you allocate grants, run programs or shape policy, this is the closest thing we have to a postmortem on how tens of billions of dollars in development aid actually behaved over the course of decades in the wild. It offers a model for future learning on a mass scale, and the results affirm some important guiding principles as the development ecosystem considers how to build going forward.

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