For decades, international aid mainly flew under the radar of public opinion. Politicians from across the ideological spectrum lauded programs that saved lives, nurtured democracy, and promoted American values and interests. Except during wars and natural disasters, aid was rarely in the news. 

That changed on January 20, 2025, when President Donald J. Trump issued an Inauguration Day executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance. Within weeks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and canceled 83% of the agency’s programs. Suddenly, foreign aid was at the center of an intense debate over national priorities and America’s place in the world. 

January 20 was also the day that political scientist Ellen Lust arrived at Cornell to direct the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies as the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies. One of her first actions was selecting a theme to guide the center’s programming and provide a focus for its Undergraduate Global Scholars for the 2025–26 academic year. 

Lust, who is also a professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences, chose “Is (Cutting) International Aid Good?” She said she meant the simple, yes-or-no question to be provocative at a university where “everyone understands how complex these issues really are.” 

“We have faculty, students, and staff engaged in food security, agriculture, development, public health, nutrition, education, economics, international relations, area studies, and so many other fields,” Lust said. “My hope was that this could provide an opportunity for us all to put our heads together and think about what can be done in the future.”

Lust recruited international development specialist Paul Kaiser to lead the conversation as the Einaudi Center’s practitioner in residence. Kaiser has worked on public policy and education reform in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, with agencies including USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the World Bank. 

“There have always been legitimate questions about aid dependency and corruption and the effectiveness of aid, but we’re facing a much more existential question, which is should there be any aid at all?”

“For me, aid starts off as a moral issue, but it's also an economic issue, it's a political issue, it's a social issue,” Kaiser said. “There have always been legitimate questions about aid dependency and corruption and the effectiveness of aid, but we’re facing a much more existential question, which is should there be any aid at all?”

That question was on the table at Einaudi’s Lund Critical Debate, which Kaiser moderated on October 22 in a packed Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall. The debaters were Cornell faculty members Chris Barrett, an agricultural economist and food policy expert, and Muna Ndulo, an expert in international law and governance.

“We need more, not less aid,” argued Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and a professor in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy. “We need it for moral reasons, for security reasons, and for economic reasons. But it needs to be fundamentally different than it has been in the past.”

Specifically, he said, “we need less bilateral aid—that is, government-to-government aid to support country-specific things—and we need far more aid for what some of us term ‘international public goods’—for things that cut across the global community.” 

“We need more, not less aid. We need it for moral reasons, for security reasons, and for economic reasons. But it needs to be fundamentally different than it has been in the past.”

Those include agricultural and biomedical research, infectious disease monitoring and prevention, emergency response, and climate change mitigation. “These are things that we underinvest in massively” despite their high long-term economic returns, Barrett said. Most are better delivered by multilateral agencies and organizations than by individual governments, he said. 

Ndulo, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International and Comparative Law at Cornell Law School, agreed that aid can be helpful and sometimes essential, but he said it can also do damage. “A constant feature in the field of development is the firm belief that low-income countries will always be poor and desperately in need of foreign assistance,” he said. “This mentality shapes the sorts of solutions that get fostered in those countries.”

Ndulo and Barrett both observed that aid often prioritizes donor countries’ interests over those of the recipients. Increasingly, Ndulo said, donors are conditioning aid on recipients’ willingness to support their foreign policy objectives. Overall, Ndulo said, aid has less impact than international trade, foreign direct investment, or remittances from people working abroad. 

“If we focus more on fairer ways of trading,” he said, “we might not need as much aid.” 

The Future of Aid

Rethinking the future of aid is the assignment for the 15 Undergraduate Global Scholars selected by the Einaudi Center in October. Over the course of the year, they will meet with experts, conduct research, and take part in discussions and events.

“For me, it’s personal,” said Sarvesh Prabhu ’28, who studies entomology and environmental sustainability in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As a teenager, Prabhu worked at an international agricultural research center in his native India. He could see how important agriculture was to the nation’s development, but he also saw how aid could undermine the country’s sense of self-determination.

Ariela Asllani ’26 also feels a personal connection. A public policy major in the Brooks School, she grew up in Albania with parents who housed war refugees from Kosovo in the 1990s. She said Kosovars were grateful for U.S. aid, even erecting a statue of President Bill Clinton after the war ended. But many of the programs the Americans started collapsed after they left, and she has witnessed how aid can fuel corruption and crime. “My interest is the intersection of military, intelligence, law enforcement, and humanitarian aid actors,” she said.

“I’ve noticed a change in the conversation around aid,” said Iskander Khan ’26, a government major in the College of Arts and Sciences. “People will talk about it in a humanitarian sense, then when they’re pushed, they justify it as a security issue. I thought these were two very different things. But the discussions we’ve been having make me realize that they’re a lot more intertwined than I realized.”

The Einaudi Center’s Lund Critical Debate Series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs ’57. Watch the video of the debate below. The future of aid will also be the subject of Einaudi’s 2026 Bartels World Affairs Lecture, to be delivered by former USAID administrator Samantha Power in April.

Story by Jonathan Miller. All photos by Simon Wheeler.