With USAID and FEMA cuts, other actors are stepping up. But will it suffice?
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The U.S. development and emergency response apparatus is undergoing a quiet dismantling.
Long considered the backbone of global humanitarian leadership, agencies like USAID and FEMA are facing unprecedented cuts and operational constraints. USAID, already hamstrung by earlier freezes, is now expected to end several grant cycles early. FEMA, once the national emblem of disaster response, is projected to shutter large-scale operations after the coming hurricane season, with major preparedness contracts cancelled.
These cuts go well beyond the period belt-tightening we’ve seen in the past. Instead, they reflect a deeper political and ideological shift that questions the value of humanitarian work and revises national priorities. The U.S. withdrawal has sparked a cascade of budgetary consolidation from aid to defense and other priorities, with stalwart development champions like the United Kingdom lowering their aid spending to the lowest figures since 1999.
As the pillars that upheld the development industry for decades find themselves on loose foundations, the industry experts and their beneficiaries are coming face to face with an uncomfortable truth: no one, not philanthropists, not tech billionaires, no coalition of nonprofits, can fully backfill what has suddenly been lost.
Instead, we’re seeing a patchwork of temporary solutions emerge that are creative and mission-driven, but ultimately insufficient in scale. This does little to diminish the real life impact of attempts to bridge the gap, and among the most prominent of such lifelines is The Life You Can Save’s and the Founders Pledge’s Rapid Response Fund.
The Rapid Response Fund may be an initiative no one in the industry wanted to see, but all are grateful for it to exist. And in its existence and what it has accomplished we find a microcosm of humanitarian aid and the future it has ahead.
From Anxiety To Action
Amidst the initial confusion that followed the freezing of USAID grants, the mood across the humanitarian sector was one of panic, anxiety, and quiet despondence. In the skirmish programs lost much more than a funding source, they lost the ability to plan, to staff, and to survive the next few days, let alone until the end of their grant cycles.
Alongside the fear came something else: a sense of urgency. Within weeks, a new network of leaders began mobilising around the idea that even if the entire system couldn’t be saved, parts of it might be.
“The calls started pouring in,” recalls Jessica La Mesa, Co-CEO of The Life You Can Save.
“Organizations that had been doing high-impact work for years suddenly found themselves at the edge of collapse. What do you do when you know the program is working, and yet the floor is falling out from under you? You take action, because panic is not an option,” Jessica recounts.
From the sense of urgency became action.
The Life You Can Save, founded by renowned ethicist Peter Singer to support the world’s most effective, evidence-based charities, teamed up with Founders Pledge to launch the Rapid Response Fund. Designed as a contingency fund for decidedly contingency times, the Fund now provides stopgap support for programs at risk of being stranded mid-stream. From basic health services to infectious disease control, the focus is on scale, efficiency, and proven outcomes.
“We all know this was never going to replace public funding,” La Mesa says. “That’s not the point. The point is to plug holes. To keep the ship afloat just long enough. To stop the worst of the bleeding. And it’s working.”
She is quick to point out how difficult strategic resource allocation can be under extreme pressure. And yet, it is ultimately as simple as people continuing to want to do good even when the government itself is withdrawing.
“People underestimate what $10 can do. If deployed correctly, it can save a life, and in this context it can save a project that saves lives,” La Mesa continues.
She is also clear-eyed about the Rapid Response Fund’s limitations. “We can’t stem the tide forever. Our job is to hold the line until the sector figures out what comes next.”
And that’s precisely the point. The Rapid Response Fund is not a model for a new status quo or a template for others to replicate. What the team has put in place is a signal flare, showing what can happen when speed, ethics, and evidence align. It also offers a glimpse into what the future of humanitarian aid might look like if built with more agility and less assumption.
“People are ready to take action and to give, as long as their funding delivers outcomes, not overheads,” La Mesa explains. “The Life You Can Save is fundamentally committed to Peter Singer’s principled approach to doing the most good with the resources one has, and we’re nothing if not focused on the consequences the funding can bring.”
This emphasis on outcomes, not moral signals or ad copy, is what the humanitarian aid system will be rebuilt upon.
The success of the Rapid Response Fund also exposes the gaps that philanthropy, even at its most efficient, cannot fill. Gaps, that the future system will have to bridge by other means.
Can We Scale Altruism?
In that gap lies the next great challenge, and perhaps the next great opportunity, for the aid sector: scaling altruism.
Not just in the moral sense, mind you, but in the operational one. Donald Summers, founder of Altruist Partners and author of Scaling Altruism, works with nonprofit leaders trying to adapt to this new reality. He doesn’t sugarcoat it what he sees.
“Most nonprofits aren’t ready to scale without support,” he says. “They’ve been designed around government anchors that are now toppling down. Remove those, and they struggle to even exist, let alone scale. Many are still effectively ‘mom-and-pop’ shops when they would need to be agile, data-driven engines.”
He’s seen firsthand how severe the sector’s Gini coefficient has become. “The top 5% of NGOs are growing. The rest are flatlining or folding entirely. There’s a huge inequality problem inside the very sector designed to reduce inequality,” Summers explains.
That is why he argues that now, more than ever, nonprofits need to professionalize and adopt private-sector tools that build long term resilience. “Psychological safety at the workplace, rigorous change management processes, expertise in financial planning not just timely operational expenditures, succession planning from one grant to another are necessary survival skills for the industry. Without them, no amount of emergency funding will keep the sector afloat.”
This year, Summers is pushing to enroll 1,000 organizations in a leadership accelerator that blends finance, impact metrics, and governance design. “We’re running out of time for slow fixes and bandaids that don’t change the underlying issues,” he adds, a nudge towards a fact the Rapid Response Fund has also made very clear.
As Jessica La Mesa put it: “We aren’t here to be the solution. We’re here to make sure the best solutions still have a chance.”
Peter Singer, whose moral arguments catalysed The Life You Can Save and much of the effective altruism movement, agrees that the next era of impact will hinge on the infrastructure as much as on intent.
“If we want to scale altruism, we need to first make it worth scaling,” he explained in an interview.
For Singer, that means holding the entire industry to higher standards than ever before. “We need to be transparent about the outcomes we produce and we need to be honest when we fail. More than that, we need to be relentlessly focused on delivering real outcomes, not just promises.”
As Singer sees it, the credibility crisis facing the development industry is by no means the end state, as long as we take this opportunity to circle our wagons around scaling good outcomes.
“All humanitarian programs ought to work in a way that prioritize efficiency. It’s inevitable that some won’t meet their outcomes. That’s to be expected in a complex field such as this. But we have to say that out loud and learn from it. Otherwise, we’re asking people to invest in a black box, and to trust in a system that they can’t even evaluate.”
He believes the biggest unlock isn’t more money, even though it’s now desperately needed, but more trust. “The best thing we can do to expand the circle is to make sure we’re offering people something real. Not just a warm feeling or a tax deduction. But a system that is clear, accountable, and demonstrably doing the most good it can.”
Once that baseline of seriousness is in place, he says, the real work can begin: studying what scales and how.
What Can Humanitarian Aid Learn From the Climate Frontlines
As humanitarian actors look ahead, they would do well to ask: who has already faced large-scale pullback and survived? Who has built operating models that held together when governments walked away?
One such field is climate action.
Bill Flederbach, CEO of ClimeCo, sees strong parallels between what’s happening in development and what his clients experienced during the last major climate retreat.
“When Trump came into office, I literally dusted off a letter I wrote in 2017 predicting the U.S. would abandon climate commitments,” he recalls. “We were right. But what surprised us was how fast the private sector stepped in.”
Under his leadership, ClimeCo built a significant voluntary carbon portfolio during a period of regulatory backsliding. “Companies told us by their actions that they don’t need the federal government. We’ll do this ourselves, they said, and they did.”
But he’s cautious about drawing easy comparisons. “Climate markets can work with enough price signals. Development aid is different. One can’t commoditize relieving human suffering. That’s why contingency funds like this one matter. They offer space to regroup, but they can’t offer the structure upon which to rebuild.”
Flederbach’s ask to “Do the next right thing” feels especially apt in this context. “We need that mentality now more than ever. Do what you can, now. But don’t confuse band-aids for blueprints.”
That final caution is one the aid community must take seriously. Emergency funds, accelerators, and philanthropic ingenuity are critical in moments of crisis, but they are not the foundation on which to build the future. That foundation must still involve governments.
And yet, to bring governments back in, the sector will need to change how it engages them. It will need to offer better data, clearer accountability, and more evidence of cost-effective impact. It must rebuild its legitimacy not with aspirational language, but with irrefutable results. Governments don’t invest in hopes. They invest in systems.
What the sector needs is twofold: a recommitment to public financing rooted in shared outcomes, and a new generation of philanthropic models that refuse to treat efficiency and empathy as opposing forces. If we want development work to survive, and thrive, in a volatile world, we have to fund what works, at scale, with urgency.
As Peter Singer has argued for decades, doing the most good shouldn’t be radical. It should be the baseline.
