A new study in Science links the Trump administration’s abrupt USAID shutdown—followed by the agency’s informal dissolution in July—to an uptick in violent conflict in parts of Africa over the roughly 10 months after aid was withdrawn. Researchers and outside
For roughly a year, USAID kept operating in some of the most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions across Africa. Then it stopped—suddenly, and at scale.
Days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. the administration issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs. Last July. it informally dissolved the agency. triggering what the report describes as the largest withdrawal of American international development aid in more than 60 years.
Now. a new study published May 14 in the journal Science points to a possible consequence that reaches far beyond aid budgets: the sudden USAID shutdown may be linked to an uptick in violent conflict across much of Africa. with the most politically fragile regions seeing the largest spikes. The study’s authors argue the timing is hard to ignore. But outside experts caution the picture is incomplete—and that the sharpest harm may be what the shutdown prevents policymakers from measuring.
The argument begins with a chain that’s familiar to anyone who studies humanitarian crises. Farming and agricultural markets are easily disrupted by conflict. When fighting starts, food security worsens as communities lose access to food. Deepening food insecurity then feeds social unrest in fragile political states. Climate impacts add another layer: extreme weather. second only to conflict in having the greatest effect on global hunger. food insecurity. and malnutrition. can drive migration as people flee places damaged by rising seas and catastrophic storms—migration that can also fuel conflict.
In that context. Zia Mehrabi. a food security and climate change researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. said the question is not whether USAID matters. but how anyone could pull the rug out so abruptly. “Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly?” Mehrabi asked. He added that USAID programming around food aid—including emergency food kitchens and therapeutic foods—along with health and water programs that support basic food and nutritional security. “provided a critical lifeline to millions of women. children. and families in severe nutritional deficits.”.
The Science paper focuses on what happened after the withdrawal. In analyzing the impact of funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational African regions that had been receiving different levels of USAID services. the authors found that in the roughly 10 months that followed the administration’s immediate withdrawal of aid. areas that had previously received more USAID support may have experienced more or different types of conflict.
The study’s central figures are stark. In areas with high historical USAID funding, conflict overall rose by 12.3 percent, and armed battles increased by 7.3 percent. Protests and riots in those areas climbed by 6.8 percent, and battle-related fatalities rose by 9.3 percent after the shutdown.
Still, the data don’t close the debate. Austin Wright. a University of Chicago researcher who studies the political economy of conflict and a co-author of the paper. said the effects appear “swift and destabilizing.” “There is nothing that we’re aware of in recorded human history of the magnitude of that shutdown. in terms of ending a country’s commitment at a global scale. ” Wright said.
But the ability to know what caused what is already compromised.
“The end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID,” said Wright.
USAID was created in 1961. The agency’s stated mission has been to encourage economic and social development in emerging nations while countering Cold War influence from the Soviet Union. Building resilience in foreign political systems has. in recent decades. been “one of the main goals of the work of USAID. ” said Chelsea Marcho. a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and a former USAID official under former President Joe Biden. who was not involved in the Science paper.
Marcho argued that the study’s findings—showing violence may have been less severe in places where USAID helped build stronger institutions—only underscores the value of those investments. She pointed to largely discontinued work to develop more resilient food systems across sub-Saharan African nations facing higher rates of poverty. hunger. and malnutrition.
But Marcho also focused on a second. less visible function USAID performed: collecting the data that lets the world track food security and hunger risk. USAID funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts across much of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions. With the dissolution of the agency. Marcho said. there have been widespread disruptions—from localized weather monitoring to “one of the primary global famine early-warning systems.” She noted that some of these systems have since been restored. but said gaps in monitoring and reduced capacity across aid organizations make it harder to understand what is happening on the ground.
“The visibility that we have around food security is potentially in decline at the same time that the risks to the system are increasing,” Marcho said. “How do we actually get the data we need?”
Mehrabi. meanwhile. said the new paper raises “more questions than answers.” He argued that the mechanisms of measurement are unclear. the analysis period is too short. and the authors do not adequately separate USAID’s specific effects from Trump’s simultaneous cuts to other US international funding sources. including the State Department. “The results are clearly early and tentative,” Mehrabi said. “I think it is a leap to say this is all attributable to USAID.”.
Wright acknowledged limitations that could temper the conclusions. He said the observation window after the shock is just 10 months. He also said the disbursement baseline is drawn from the first Trump administration rather than the period immediately before the cuts. and the geographic scope is confined to Africa—leaving open work for future research. Wright said the team ran extensive robustness checks addressing these concerns, detailed in the paper’s appendix.
Even so, Mehrabi said he ran his own reanalysis of the data and remains unconvinced. He warned against a possible takeaway that the mere presence of American developmental intervention equals stability. Mehrabi argued the United States could help deter widespread conflict and hunger more effectively in nations such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo through more equitable benefit-sharing of resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains. That approach would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid,” he proposed.
Through all of the debate about attribution—what’s caused by USAID withdrawal and what isn’t—one point runs through the reporting: USAID’s footprint was not small, even as its absence becomes easier to measure on a spreadsheet.
With an annual budget of tens of billions and an institutional history spanning 64 years. USAID’s development work across the African continent was “no small thing. ” Wright said. “One cannot simply create USAID all over again. or give it a mandate and give it funding and assume that we have waved a wand and we can reverse the damage done. ” he added.
For now. the study in Science and the arguments around it leave a reader with a hard choice: accept the possibility that a sudden aid shutdown helped reshape conflict dynamics. or treat the findings as a warning that policymakers will struggle to see clearly what’s happening after the lights go out. Either way. the shutdown’s timing and the struggle to measure its impact have put the world’s most vulnerable systems in the center of the dispute.
USAID Donald Trump Elon Musk United States foreign policy Africa conflict violent conflict hunger food security famine early-warning Science study May 14 Zia Mehrabi Austin Wright Chelsea Marcho