2025 Letter from the Director

When the administration of President Donald J. Trump chose to “feed” the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) into the wood chipper, the resulting pile of sawdust included historical projects that DCID scholars had worked on for two decades, large-scale impact evaluations we had just contracted to complete, and all of the reports, datasets, and policy memoranda that we filed in the USAID’s Development Data Library (DDL) as part of a massive effort in transparency and fiduciary responsibility to the American taxpayers, so they could review the important global work we were doing on their behalf. And it was not just USAID; cuts by other major funders, including UKAID, and the general turmoil caused by U.S. trade policy in the global economy have set back decades of progress, threatening the lives and livelihoods of people around the world. 

At DCID, the fallout has been agonizing in a different way, even landing us on the front page of the Duke Chronicle. As part of streamlining and centralization efforts over the past few years, DCID’s suite of executive education and training courses and our signature Master of International Development Policy (MIDP) program shifted to the central administration of the Sanford School of Public Policy. Despite the global chaos, these programs remain healthy and thriving. The streamlining, however, left DCID with only a small, dedicated staff 100% devoted to research on international development. Their work was predominantly funded by USAID projects. Consequently, several of DCID’s longest-serving, talented, and most passionate officers were forced to depart. Those premature goodbyes have been the most painful moments of my career.  

One critical initiative that we completed was to create an accessible database of our research projects for public access. Our communications team and a group of energetic undergraduates worked with DCID faculty to translate their articles into short briefs that explained the goals, methods, and results of the research in jargon-free language. We completed dozens of these, concentrating on DCID’s four core research themes of economic governance, global value chains, climate and sustainability, and human development. I regularly see these briefs cited and used by practitioners, young researchers, and often undergrads starting explorations of their own.

A second initiative was to bring the highest levels of scientific rigor to global development projects. As part of this effort, we competed and won a large-scale omnibus grant for USAID called Research and Analysis for Development (RAD). Over the next three years, we were set to use our expertise in randomized field experiments, remote sensing, and large language models to assist USAID field offices in targeting their interventions, collecting outcome data, and ultimately evaluating whether USAID projects were successful and cost-effective. 

One comment that still burns me about the debate over the USAID closure was the insinuation that it was non-transparent or wasteful. USAID is 63 years old, and that may have once been true, but it certainly was not the case in 2025. RAD was specifically designed to identify what worked and what did not, what was cost-effective and what was not, and how USAID could get the biggest bang for the buck out of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. Moreover, we were obligated to post all of our analysis and data on a publicly available website, so anyone could check our work.  I know very few organizations that insist on this level of transparency. In fact, one tragic feature of the Trump administration’s closure was the destruction of this very repository, sending thousands of USAID employees and contractors scrambling to recover and preserve their hard work.

A third loss was DCID’s contribution to the USAID-funded the Vietnam Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI), a survey of over 14,000 businesses in the country that leads to the annual assembly of an index ranking provinces on their business environments. By some measures, the PCI was USAID’s largest continually funded development project. It was enormously successful. Vietnamese leaders cited it in policy debates, local leaders used it to plan reform projects, businesses studied it for investment decisions, NGOs deployed it for program evaluations, and U.S. diplomats even wielded it to argue on behalf of American businesses. In fact, the Vietnamese government recently officially declared that it planned to use the PCI to monitor the success of provincial mergers and promote local leaders. 

Fortunately, for the PCI, there is a silver lining; Tan Hiep Phat, a large private, domestic Vietnamese business, decided that the PCI was too valuable to lose and has provided its own funding to keep the research alive.  In many ways, this is the ultimate goal of development – to create a program so successful that it lives beyond the external funder and takes on a new life locally.

Speaking of silver linings, thanks to the continued commitment of generous private funders, critically important work continues at DCID. The Luce Foundation-funded Southeast Asia Research Group continues to nurture young scholars and build a network of researchers around the world dedicated to cutting-edge political economy work on the region. A related Luce-funded Track 1.5 will commence this October, helping U.S. and Vietnamese policymakers navigate foreign relations in the wake of turbulent, global hegemonic competition. Thanks to the support of HPS Investment Partners, Kapnick Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers, DCID’s Jonathan Stromseth is spearheading a major effort to catalog, study, and share climate solutions from the most innovative companies and investors in Southeast Asia. And last but not least, our long-term partnership with the Rotary Foundation’s Peace Center program will contribute to the training of the next generation of leaders, who are already hard at work analyzing and offering solutions to the world’s most intractable problems. Beginning this fall, the Duke-UNC Rotary Peace Center is under new leadership, as Jon Abels, the talented, 25-year veteran Executive Director of DCID, steps in to take over the incredible work of Susan Carroll, who retired this past July. 

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Finally, in May 2026, DCID will host the annual Evidence for Governance and Politics (EGAP) Workshop, which will bring the most talented sustainable development researchers to Duke's campus to discuss their research on the future of international development.

Sadly, this will be my fifth and last annual letter as the Director of DCID. I will be stepping down in May after EGAP, a fitting time to depart. Reading over previous Annual Reports to prepare for this final missive, my heart swells with enormous pride for what the DCID team has accomplished. We have produced pathbreaking findings, graduated ambitious young leaders, hosted the world’s best and brightest, and set the agenda for research in international development in our specialties. As a community, we have also weathered the storms of COVID-19, devastating climate disasters, and horrific domestic and international conflicts in our homes and research sites. Through it all, a selfless team dedicated itself to getting the work done. This storm will also pass. I am confident DCID will emerge from the sawdust of Trump 2025 to continue its mission.

Sincerely,

Edmund Malesky, PhD
Professor of Political Economy
Director of DCID