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They take the money and go. Why Not Everyone is mourning the end of USAID by Mara Cardis Nelson, read by Lana Joffrey. Earlier this year, Donald Trump appointed a 28-year-old Doge alumnus, Jeremy Lewin, to oversee his administration's approach to global aid.

Lewin's primary task has been to gut the U.S. aid funding. In an interview with the New

York Times, Lewin argued that the traditional approach, which he termed the global

humanitarian complex, didn't help poor countries progress beyond aid, instead keeping them

dependent. The system he continued has demonstrably failed.

This isn't just the Trump administration's view. For decades, there has been a robust debate

in academic and policy circles, discussed over drinks by

development practitioners, written about by critical economists and post-colonial independence

leaders, and percolating into the broader consciousness that aid isn't working, or at least

not as promised. When the news of Trump's U.S. aid cuts broke this year,

President Hakayende Hichilema of Zambia told the financial times that cuts in aid were long overdue,

and would force countries such as his to take care of our own affairs.

This spring, a few weeks after the Trump administration began dismantling U.S. aid,

I visited the small West African nation of Sierra Leone.

I had worked there as a global health practitioner from 2015 to 2018, and in the years since,

I had returned often, this time as a journalist. The more I visited, the more I wondered about

the effectiveness of foreign consultants deploying technocratic approaches to entrenched poverty.

Not long before my spring visit, I had published

a book about microfinance, once hailed as a solution to world poverty, but which I had begun to see

...