On January 20, 2025, the Trump Administration in the United States issued an Executive Order effectively gutting the country’s Agency for International Development (USAID), declaring that “. . .no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”1 Marking a decisive shift in US politics following a near 60-year history of semi-autonomous aid administration, the decision to downgrade the country’s once world-leading official development assistance (ODA) programs to sit within the State Department was not, in fact, unprecedented. Instead, it reflects a wider global trend. Today, many Western donor countries deliver development assistance through bureaucracies that combine aid and foreign policy, a significant shift given the contemporary trend toward this approach among some of world’s most significant development donors. Previous and controversial mergers in New Zealand (2009), the United Kingdom (2019), Canada (2013), and Australia (2013), through reforms that mirror integrated approaches such as those in Denmark and Norway, foreshadowed this growing trend. The US closure and folding of USAID into the State Department marks a potential nail in the coffin for autonomous aid administration, requiring scholars and practitioners to reconsider aid’s future position in contemporary foreign policy.

Current international relations scholarship has offered limited analysis of this consequential shift. Despite significant media attention, little has been examined within the discipline with a specific focus on how the trend emerged, and what it might indicate for future approaches to theorizing aid’s role in the future of foreign policy. Existing studies offer an important glimpse into effects of mergers in some countries,2 but these studies primarily look at single-country contexts, with few scholarly studies looking cross-nationally and most analyses emerging in the form of policy reports.3 This research note aims to fill this gap, examining the drivers and implications of this shift from the perspective of international relations, and offering an analytical framework for scholars and practitioners to consider mergers within the study of foreign policy.

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