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In February 2025, the Trump Administration abruptly froze $845 million in U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) projects in Pakistan as part of its broad efforts to dismantle America’s foreign assistance infrastructure. This decision forced cuts to treatment programs for tuberculosis patients and the closure of over 60 health clinics without warning.
The end of a tuberculosis program in the city of Shikarpur, Sindh alone meant that over 100 workers had to be laid off almost immediately. This is just a microcosm of similar stories across Asia, and in many other countries with USAID programs. According to the United Nations, some 1.7 million people, including 1.2 million Afghan refugees, felt a direct impact as a result of the abrupt freezing of 39 USAID projects in Asia.
For civil society leaders and communities across Asia, this was a real demonstration of what happens when aid architecture is built without effectively prioritizing partners, long-term community impact, resilience, and sustainability. It exposed a design problem that local civil society leaders across Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh — and throughout the Global South — often point out: U.S. assistance is delivered top-down, and local actors are consulted only after a project is already designed.
Leaders from civil society organizations (CSOs) at the Pujino Center in Indonesia; the National Alliance of Humanitarian Actors and Dwip Unnayan Sangstha in Bangladesh; HANDS Welfare Foundation, the Veer Development Organization, and The Awakening in Pakistan; and Citizens Organization for Advocacy and Resilience in Afghanistan discussed these issues and more at a recent roundtable. Their insights are shared below.
Strengths and Weaknesses of U.S. Foreign Assistance
Despite fundamental flaws, U.S. assistance remains valuable in spurring economic development. Across Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, civil society leaders believe international assistance can be useful, and in some cases indispensable, in filling critical financing and capacity gaps, building systems countries could not build alone, and laying foundations for longer-term development.
But its usefulness has been limited by how it is designed and implemented, and often by how it is sustained. An advisor at the Pujiono Center noted that assistance works best "as scaffolding — necessary while a structure goes up, then removed." Too often, though, aid stays in place well past that point, driven not only by donor design choices, but also by recipient-government incentives and capacity constraints.
For Global South leaders, U.S. assistance is too often developed in a vacuum. Local stakeholder consultation is treated as a procedural afterthought, and U.S. assistance exit strategies are under-considered or absent. CSO leaders from Indonesia said decisions on priorities, indicators, partner selection, and disbursement are usually finalized before local organizations get involved, especially those not already among the U.S. government’s usual partners.
An Afghan local leader noted that local organizations are "frequently consulted during implementation, but have limited influence over program design, funding priorities, risk decisions, and partnership models," even though local CSOs have the "operational capacity, contextual knowledge, and community legitimacy."
The abrupt freezing of U.S. foreign assistance in Pakistan made it clear that no transition plan existed. The problem was not the volume of U.S. funding to Pakistan, but rather its unreliable design. Another flaw is short project-based funding cycles, which fail to build local institutions that can last and often collapse the moment donor funding stops. Pakistani CSO leaders argued that years of short-term, project-based aid did not leave behind strong local institutions that need less outside help over time, but instead built a parallel system run on international NGOs' timelines and paperwork, not Pakistan's own systems.
When the 2025 freeze was imposed, the Sindh Rural Support Organization, a non-profit development organization, had to shut down three health projects and lay off staff with almost no notice. About 90 percent of the affected staff were eventually rehired, but this happened only because the organization itself absorbed the shock, not because the funding system did. Bangladeshi CSO leaders framed this same pattern in institutional terms, describing organizations funded to disappear on an annual cycle rather than resourced to persist between crises.
U.S. assistance should be invested directly in local institutions, rather than parallel systems. Organizations and programs that still exist after the 2025 disruption received this type of funding.
Indonesian civil society leaders recommended that international partners shift posture from “architect” to “guest.” In practice, this means co-designing results frameworks together with local civil society before the funds are programmed, not after. This creates a clear, funded pathway for local organizations to become primary grant-holders instead of staying permanent subcontractors.
Accountability, Transparency, and Local Impact
Accountability works best when it stays close to the affected communities, not when it is routed upward through Northern intermediaries in the name of risk mitigation. Indonesian leaders argued that routing funds through Northern intermediaries for safety does not solve elite capture; it just moves it into institutions with their own overhead, risk tolerances, and definitions of safe.
To strengthen oversight, civil society leaders recommended joint arrangements where U.S. and partner-government auditors review the same records together, replacing donor-only defined conditions. CSO leaders across Asia note that this approach is more cost-effective to enforce than uncoordinated conditionalities and builds the trust needed to deliver stable, resilient program impact.
U.S. government partnerships with CSOs can improve aid effectiveness and advance workers’ power by creating direct, dedicated funding windows for local and national organizations, separate from government-to-government contracts and international intermediary grants. This is not only about who holds the grant, but about who has a seat at the table when the results framework itself is designed.
From Short-Term Projects to Long-Term Systems
Congress can improve the return on every dollar it appropriates by authorizing multi-year, flexible foreign assistance lines tied to clear milestones, creating a responsible, verifiable pathway for local organizations to build resilience and for aid to be scaled back as self-reliance is achieved. Matching funding cycles to the actual timeline of the problems being addressed is more effective and efficient than open-ended timelines.
Pakistani CSO leaders made this point directly, noting that floods, disease outbreaks, and poverty do not run on a 12-to-24-month clock, but almost all the funding does. Congress should fund pre-approved, trigger-based contingency mechanisms so that, during a crisis, already appropriated funds can be reallocated within days rather than requiring a new proposal process. Indonesia's initiative to establish an integrated early warning and early action system illustrates this model.
Flexible multi-year funding and pre-positioned contingency financing are tools for fiscal discipline and accountability, matching money to real timelines and avoiding wasteful restarts. Embedding responsible, genuine partnerships and carefully considered exits, including shared decision-making with local actors, clear transition plans, and sustained support for peacebuilding, social cohesion, and locally led development would also contribute to effective and resilient programming.
Shifting to a model where local institutions are funded to persist, if needed, between crises should coincide with strengthened systems for financial transparency, so autonomy does not come at the cost of taxpayer accountability. No matter how the United States approaches foreign assistance in the years to come, Global South governments and regional bodies should keep building South-South and regional financing architecture to reduce dependence on Northern aid cycles.
Rethinking Conditionality and Oversight
Bangladeshi and Indonesian CSO leaders drew a clear and deliberate distinction between two goals that the U.S. debate tends to conflate under a single banner. The first is taxpayers’ desire for accountability — ensuring that public funds are properly tracked, audited, and spent as intended — which they insist should be defended as a legitimate donor expectation. The second is control over a sovereign government's own development priorities, which they firmly maintained they shouldn't support, since it crosses from financial stewardship into political interference.
They further argued that financial transparency and audit access should be strengthened as genuine safeguards. But conditions that dictate which sectors or which civil society groups a government may fund fall outside that legitimate scope entirely and amount to control dressed up as oversight.
Afghan CSO leaders reached a similar conclusion from a different angle, calling for a shift from a risk-transfer model to a risk-sharing partnership model with joint oversight.
Conclusion
The U.S. decision to halt aid to Pakistan in 2025 demonstrated that a foreign aid architecture built on donor control, short funding cycles, and layered intermediaries is not sustainable. Indonesian, Pakistani, Afghan, and Bangladeshi CSO leaders are not asking Washington to walk away. But they are asking for real decision-making authority, multi-year financing, and shared oversight. Congress should build an architecture that is more likely to deliver the security, stability, and credibility that both American taxpayers and Global South partners are asking for.
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