Welcome to the President's inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Marion David Boyes Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S.

Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is, the future of U.S.

Foreign Aid. With me to discuss the current state of U.S. foreign aid programs and the impact of President Trump's changes is William Hennigan.

William is a research fellow here at the Council working on U.S. industrial policy and economic security issues.

He previously served as a director

for international economics on the staffs of the National Security Council and the National Economic Council

in the Biden administration. In that position, William was one of the lead authors of the

National Security Memorandum on Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience,

which was the first major update to U.S. critical infrastructure policy in more than a decade.

He recently wrote two research papers for cfr.org titled Sovereign Funds and American Investment Strategy,

How to Responsibly Create a U.S. Strategic

Investment Fund, and reauthorizing the Development Finance Corporation, a primer for policymakers.

William, thank you for joining me on the president's inbox.

Thanks for having me, Jim.

Let's sort of talk big picture.

There's been a lot of changes in U.S.

foreign aid programs since Donald Trump took the oath of office on January 20th, sort of fill me in

as to what's changed and where we are now. Sure, yeah. So just to back up one step, I like to think

about the U.S. providing sort of three kinds of direct assistance to other countries,

military assistance, humanitarian assistance, and development assistance.

The 800-pound gorilla in the U.S. development and humanitarian assistance world is USAID,

traditionally 10,000 employees, $23 billion budget.

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