A Review of the President's Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Request for the U.S. Agency for International Development

ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Graham, and thanks to the other distinguished members of the Committee. Grateful for your comments but above all, grateful for your leadership. And you were right in crediting USAID’s teams for the sacrifices and the work that they do all around the world. I would also just thank your teams – this budget process is not easy because so many of us here believe in everything that we do and recognize that everything is connected to everything else, it is very hard in an environment of cuts to find places to cut. And the collaboration we have in thinking these problems through together has been absolutely pivotal. So thanks really to the people, to you, here and to those that sit behind you. 

I want to start just by reflecting and really speaking to, I think Senator Graham’s comments, but reflecting on the lobby of the Republic of Korea’s development agency — which is their equivalent of USAID – they actually display an old bag of flour from the 1940s, which is marked with the words: “From the American People,” which is, of course USAID’s motto today. But this is a reminder of how the United States showed up, supported them when they were one of the poorest countries on the planet, to fight hunger and disease and kick start a journey of remarkable economic growth. Today, of course, South Korea is one of the world’s richest nations – and last year spent nearly four billion dollars – and this is the critical point – providing assistance to other countries. And while a lot of countries are experiencing cuts at a time when we can least afford it, I will say, this coming year, Korea plans to go up from four billion to five billion dollars in assistance to other countries. 

The decades that the United States has invested in supporting countries chart their own paths of development has in fact, notwithstanding today’s problems, brought extraordinary results – not only for our partners but for our own people. We’ve helped stop the spread of diseases that threaten us all and develop more resilient, and high-yield crops that can feed growing populations. We’ve helped people and nations rise up from poverty, and in doing so invested billions in American small businesses and opened up new markets for American products. This is the really important fact: eight of our top ten trading partners today were once recipients of U.S. assistance – it’s a long game, I get. 

Under President Biden’s leadership and in partnership with this Committee, we are building on this legacy. In Ukraine – such a vivid example – USAID has helped Ukrainian farmers withstand Putin’s attempts to destroy the agricultural sector. We have done this, thanks to you all, by getting them the seeds, the equipment, and initially, the alternative export routes that they needed. This has remarkably helped Ukraine rebound their grain exports to very close to pre-war export levels. That is just extraordinary when you think about the systematic bombardment of the agriculture infrastructure by Putin’s forces. This in turn, because everything is connected to everything else, has helped bring global food prices down 26 percent from their 2022 peak. 

In Nigeria, we’re providing community health workers with technologies to spot diseases like tuberculosis (TB) early, which helped increase TB diagnoses by a third in a single year — this allows patients to get treatment so that outbreaks won’t spread across the planet. Across Africa, we are working to connect African and American companies and reduce barriers to trade through the Prosper Africa Initiative – efforts that since 2019 have generated some $86 billion in trade and investment that builds prosperity, again, both for our African partners and for businesses here at home.

Bipartisan support for these efforts makes Americans safer and more prosperous – and provides a critical foundation for U.S. leadership and influence in a world where other global powers are working aggressively to erode U.S. alliances, undermine democracy, and diminish basic rights and freedoms. 

For example, the PRC's global lending spree has made it the world’s largest debt collector. For every dollar of aid that the PRC provides to low-income and middle-income countries, China has provided nine dollars of debt. So one dollar of aid, nine dollars of debt. The opposite is true here in the United States: for every dollar of debt we provide, we provide at least nine dollars of aid. The PRC’s assistance tends to be negotiated behind closed doors, fueling corruption, and can demonstrate a flagrant disregard for human rights. One chilling example of course, is the PRC’s “Safe Cities” initiative, which provides surveillance and facial recognition technology that can monitor critics, journalists, and activists – and that technology has been given to 80 countries so far, at least. 

We need U.S. leadership to advance models of development and governance that honor freedom, transparency, human dignity, and opportunity for all, which in turn will be more stabilizing.

The Biden-Harris Administration's FY 2025 request of $28.3 billion for USAID’s fully- and partially-managed accounts would give us the resources to continue that leadership. 

With these funds, we will help nations around the world strengthen food security, improve health, and drive economic growth. We will respond to, what have already been described as, historic levels of humanitarian need. USAID teams have been working day and night to address the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where nearly the entire population is living under the threat of Famine. Add to that ongoing crises in Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond, and continued battering from a growing number of natural disasters, and the number of people requiring humanitarian assistance has increased by nearly a third – from 274 million in 2022 to 363 million at the end of 2023. If you think about that time margin and the number of people with new needs, it’s breathtaking. To meet these needs, and this is really something that I think we all must stress, we will need both the $10 billion in humanitarian assistance in this budget request, as well as the $10 billion in emergency humanitarian assistance in the pending national security supplemental request. Otherwise, we will be forced to make draconian cuts to rations and support all around the world.

I want to be clear that the FY 2025 Request recognizes the need for tradeoffs. Crucially, this budget gives us specific resources to help us deliver even better value for money. We have inaugurated, as many of you know, a new Office of the Chief Economist just last July, and the team is already expanding our use of rigorous analysis across the agency to identify the programs with the highest impact per dollar invested so they can be scaled. They identified a poverty reduction program in the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance which is being piloted in Uganda, which is offering a sequenced set of supports like trainings and financial services that help refugees move from requiring humanitarian assistance to earning livelihoods for themselves. For every dollar we invest there, households are seeing over four times the return in economic benefits. And we are now taking that program on the road to other nations.

I’m going to wrap up here just in a minute. Beyond maximizing our own resources, through efforts like that of the Chief Economist, we are drawing in new partners through tools like the new EDGE Fund – and here I really just want to thank you for supporting that fund, it is an innovation, it meets this moment, and we need to scale it. This is an incentive fund designed to apply the private sector’s unique comparative advantages to some of the largest global development challenges. We are working with companies like Citibank, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson to boost our impact. I want to be clear that from FY 2021 to FY 2023 alone, private-sector partner contributions to USAID activities jumped by over 60 percent. And this is something we need to make more broadly known so people understand how we are trying to leverage taxpayer dollars so that they go further. We also recognize that the future of development in so many countries is going to be driven by the private sector. 

If we make these investments, we really can catalyze change and I have no doubt that we can continue America’s extraordinary legacy of leadership in building a more secure, prosperous, and stable world for us all. 

Thank you.