What If the Point of Foreign Assistance Was to End Foreign Assistance?
By Jacqueline Huh
August 31, 2026
Beneath the partisan debate on foreign assistance lies a remarkable consensus. Whether motivated by humanitarian obligation, national security, or economic opportunity, both Democrats and Republicans have long agreed that American support should advance the interests of the United States and the American people.
And yet the American people, whose taxes fund this work, have rarely been given a clear account of what their money concretely achieves and how they benefit. That gap between effort and explanation is one reason foreign assistance has been so easy to caricature and so hard to defend. The most basic question has also been the least consistently answered.
What does success actually look like?
The American people have been told how much foreign assistance costs and how many projects it funds. Too little attention has been paid to what those investments are supposed to produce over time. If American support is an investment made on behalf of the American people, then success cannot be defined by how much is spent or even by what is delivered. It must be defined by whether countries become capable of doing more for themselves and relying less on foreign assistance over time.
For decades, foreign assistance has been judged primarily by what it delivers, not what it leaves behind. A disease surveillance system may report impressive testing numbers while remaining indefinitely dependent on external technical support. A school is counted as built whether or not teachers are hired, students attend, or local authorities can maintain it after the project ends. These are real achievements, often lifesaving and lifechanging – but they answer only one question. What was delivered? They do not answer the more important one. What became unnecessary?
The real measure of success is whether countries become more capable of governing themselves, financing their own priorities, responding to crises, and sustaining progress after foreign assistance declines or ends. That shift in definition changes everything.
But success cannot be measured the same way across every form of foreign assistance and every country. Different objectives require different standards. One reason the debate has become so confused is that these distinct purposes are too often treated as though they were the same.
Emergency assistance answers to natural disasters, conflicts, and other crises. Its purpose is to save lives and relieve suffering. Food aid, for instance, is grown on American farms and carried on American ships before it reaches people in crisis abroad.
Recovery assistance restores basic security and essential public services after conflict or government collapse. Its purpose is to stabilize conditions long enough for reconstruction to take hold. The rebuilding, for instance, is led by American engineering firms and equipped with American-made machinery, from generators to water-treatment systems, before countries can govern, generate power, and rebuild themselves again.
Development assistance builds the institutions, systems, and workforce capacity that allow countries to govern themselves, fund their own priorities, and manage their own crises. Its purpose is to end long-term dependence on American support and to build more stable governments, more capable contributors to regional and global security, and more reliable trading partners. Development assistance is the rarest and most difficult of the three, and, on occasion, it has worked completely.
That is not an abstract aspiration. It has already happened.
After the Korean War, South Korea depended heavily on foreign assistance. But rather than remaining a permanent recipient, it invested in effective public institutions, education, and an export-oriented economy with a strong industrial policy. In 2009, South Korea became the first former aid recipient to join the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee as a donor nation.
Today, South Korea is one of the United States’ largest trading partners, with over $200 billion in annual two-way trade. Its firms manufacture semiconductors, batteries, and automobiles in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it rapidly scaled diagnostic testing capacity and, by April 2020, was exporting tests to more than 100 countries, including the United States. A South Korea that once depended on foreign assistance became one that strengthens the United States’ security and prosperity.
That is what success looks like. Not a dependency well managed. A dependency ended. Less of the same help, less often, for less long.
Each type of foreign assistance requires different tools, different timelines, and different definitions of success. Confusing them is one reason American support so often disappoints. Emergency assistance is judged as if it should build institutions. Recovery assistance is judged as if it should end dependence for good. But it is development assistance, more than any other category, where long-term success is ultimately decided, and where the greatest opportunities lie for the United States and the American people.
Too often, incentives reward continuation rather than progress toward independence. Development assistance can operate for years without demonstrating that governments are becoming more capable of performing core functions independently. Organizations are rewarded for delivering activities efficiently, not for making themselves unnecessary. Legislatures and boards demand results within political cycles, even though institutional capability is built over generations.
This is a problem of structure, not intention. Experts have spent years advancing ideas like local ownership, capacity building, and sustainability. But good intentions do not change what gets measured. And what gets measured is what gets rewarded.
Development assistance is routinely renewed even if it fails to demonstrate increasing local capability. Implementing organizations that produce dependency are rarely distinguished from those that produce independence. A system that cannot tell the two apart will reliably reproduce both.
Accountability is not a constraint on effectiveness. It is the condition for it. Countries start from different baselines, and the time it takes to build lasting capability will vary accordingly – some will need support for years longer than others. But implementing organizations should still be able to demonstrate, within defined time horizons appropriate to that starting point, that the countries they support are becoming more capable of performing core functions independently. Where that trajectory is absent, development assistance should be redesigned or ended, not simply continued.
Framing success in this way would not diminish humanitarian values. It would strengthen them. Countries that govern themselves effectively, finance their own priorities, and manage their own crises are better able to protect their citizens long after foreign assistance ends. They are also more stable partners, more capable contributors to regional and global security, and more reliable trading partners.
This is not a choice between charity and national interest. It is where they increasingly converge.
Foreign assistance will never disappear, nor should it. Earthquakes, pandemics, conflicts, and other shocks will continue to overwhelm even the most capable governments. Emergency and recovery assistance will remain essential tools of American leadership and engagement.
But development assistance should have different ambitions.
The argument is, in the end, a simple one. The goal of foreign assistance should not be how much is delivered, but what it leaves behind: capable governments, contributors to regional and global security, and reliable trading partners. Whatever form American support takes going forward, in whatever institutions, under whatever name, that is the outcome worth designing, funding, and measuring for. Not to keep it going. To make it unnecessary.
Jacqueline Huh is Head of External Affairs & Strategic Initiatives at the Stop TB Partnership. For more than a decade, she has led the design, development, and deployment of transformative public-private initiatives and partnerships across global health and development, working across civil society and community, local partners, governments, academia and research, the private sector, multilateral institutions, and donors to bring new approaches from idea to execution. The views expressed are her own.