Guest Blog - Why US foreign assistance data must stay public: The case for aid transparency

This blog first appeared on Brookings and is authored by Sally Paxton, U.S. Representative, Publish What You Fund and George Ingram, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Center for Sustainable Development, Brookings

‍In a hearing on February 13, 2025, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Republican Representative Young Kim asked Max Primorac, a witness representing the Heritage Foundation and author of the Project 2025 chapter on foreign aid, what reforms could be put in place to ensure proper audit and review processes in order to determine alignment with U.S. national interests.

His answer: “I think transparency is probably the most important.” He also explained that data could be improved by consolidating websites so that all Americans could understand what was happening.

On transparency as a foundation for understanding U.S. programs, we agree.

On improving data and websites, we also agree.  

And it is the law:

• The Foreign Aid Accountability and Transparency Act of 2016(FAATA) requires all US agencies involved in foreign assistance to publish detailed, project-level information on a quarterly basis to ForeignAssistance.gov.  In fact, the Partnership for Public Serviceand USAFacts have selected ForeignAssistance.gov as the winner of the inaugural Federal Data Excellence Award in the financial product category.
• The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018,signed in January 2019, required each U.S. agency—including USAID and the State Department—to improve the generation, accessibility, and use of data and evaluations in their programs.

This administration is in the process of undercutting much of the transparency that has been built through hard work over the past decade, dismantling and degrading many of the websites and data sets that would allow for an evidenced-based assessment of foreign assistance programs.

No data sets or websites are perfect, but U.S. foreign assistance, out of all U.S. government spending, has probably been the most transparent. For example:

• Foreignassistance.gov allows a user to access information by type of funding, activities, countries, sectors, agencies, and more. Clicking on the tab Beyond USAID allows users to compare U.S. programs to other donors at the country level.
• USASpending.gov includes spending for all federal awards across every agency—including USAID—and extends its coverage to subcontractors.

There are also other comprehensive data sets, which provide vast amounts of information on USAID’s programs, that are available on other sites:

• USAID data is reported to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and is accessible through a number of weblinks, such as the D-portal. IATI provides financial, programmatic, progress, and evaluation data, often updated on a monthly basis, in a comparable, comprehensive, machine-readable format. All major donors, not just official bilateral and multilateral donors, but also private foundations and civil society organizations publish to this standard. Importantly, it allows for the attachment of documents, including evaluations, but all of those  document links are now broken, leaving no USAID documents on the IATI dataset.
• USAID and USG data is also reported annually to the Creditor Reporting System (CRS) of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which goes back decades.
• USAID Audits are publicly available.
• U.S. Government Accountability Office provides reports and testimonies.
• USAID’s aid transparency performance is assessed in the 2024 Aid Transparency Index, which compares the top fifty donors and rates USAID’s as “good.”

While some USAID data and information has and is being regularly curated at this site by Publish What You Fund and can be found through Wayback Machine, the dismantling of the main USAID website has meant the loss of an enormous amount of data and information, including (as of the date of the publication of this commentary):

• USAID’s homepage, which directs users to policies, programs, reports to Congress, strategies, and results, and much more information.
• Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC), which is the repository for all evaluations and other USAID reports.
• A separate USAID Evaluation Dashboard, which makes it easy to track and access USAID evaluations across the globe.
• Country Development Cooperation Strategies, which provide five-year plans for countries where USAID was working.
• Dollars to Results, which provides information on spending and impact.
• USAID business forecasts and procurement plans.
• USAID’s progress reports on its efforts to direct more local funding to partner countries, with the underlying data used to measure that progress.

This is just a representative list of data and information that has been removed from public view. The amount of information that is now unavailable makes a credible assessment of USAID’s work impossible. Reviewing programs of work is to be applauded, but it must be done in a way that allows for the review of the evidence—what works, what doesn’t, and the impact of that work.

Data—and the usefulness of that data—can always be improved. We would welcome, for example, the inclusion of subcontractors in both ForeignAssistance.gov and in the United States’ IATI data. The publication of more evaluations, both mid-stream and final, could improve the effectiveness of U.S. programs paid for by the American taxpayer. There is no rationale for taking down or compromising U.S. foreign assistance data at the same time as the administration is undertaking a review of all programs.

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