Ten Years That Changed Evaluation · Part 11 of 12

The 2025 funding shock and MEL after USAID

Andrej Salner · researched and written with AI assistance · September 2026 · links checked September 2026

The 2025 funding shock in numbers~83 %of USAID awards terminatedwithin weeks of 20 January2025~200 000documents in the DevelopmentExperience Clearinghouse takenoffline~4 500USAID evaluation reportsrescued in the AidData archive(July 2026)0.3 %of GNI: where UK aid isheading, with cuts also in DE,FR, NL and CHFigures as reported in the sources cited below; USAID functions were folded into the State Department on 1 July 2025.
The world's largest buyer of MEL services disappeared within six months. Source: Devex, The unraveling of USAID. Figure: evaluacia.sk, based on the sources cited in the article.

What changed

On 20 January 2025 an executive order froze US foreign assistance for review. Within weeks roughly 83 per cent of USAID awards had been terminated, staff were placed on leave and, on 1 July 2025, the agency's remaining functions were folded into the State Department.

USAID had been the world's largest single buyer of MEL services — mission-level MEL platforms, third-party monitoring, evaluations mandated by its evaluation policy, the CLA infrastructure — so the shock hit the evaluation industry disproportionately: specialist firms and research groups lost contracts and laid off staff, and the effects spread to Geneva agencies and development academia.

The Development Experience Clearinghouse, the public archive of some 200,000 documents including decades of evaluations, went offline; rescue efforts included I4DI's DECfinder, an independent mirror and, in July 2026, AidData's archive of around 4,500 USAID evaluation reports. Cuts by the United Kingdom (aid falling toward 0.3 per cent of GNI), Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland compounded the effect.

Responses fell into three camps: evidence advocates arguing that scarcer money makes rigorous evidence and cost-effectiveness more essential; "leaner and politically smarter" arguments (ODI's Samuel Sharp) and AI-enabled synthesis of old evaluations as ways to do more with less; and practitioner reflections on supporting local partners and rethinking MEL in a world without its main client.

Vocabulary to recognise

  • Post-aid world
  • salvage and synthesise
  • evidence as antidote
  • radical simplification
  • DEC
  • RIF (reduction in force)
  • "MEL without USAID"

Live controversies

Whether the evaluation industry had become donor-compliance machinery that deserved trimming; the ethics and credibility of AI-scraping the DEC; localisation rhetoric against the reality that local MEL firms lost work fastest; and whether the new US reporting to Congress on "evaluation quality, cost and other matters" signals a narrower and cheaper evaluation regime.

Further reading

About the author. Andrej Salner is an economist and evaluator, co-founder of the Slovak Governance Institute and of evaluacia.sk. He has designed and led evaluations for Slovak ministries, EU and EEA programmes and NGOs since 2004. More about the team · Impact measurement & evaluation services.
A note on authorship and method. This series was researched and written by Andrej Salner with the assistance of AI tools (large language models used for literature search, summarising and drafting). The framing, the selection of sources, the judgements and the final text are the author's, and the author takes responsibility for them; links were checked in September 2026. The Slovak version is an AI-assisted translation of the English original, reviewed by the author. Corrections and additions are welcome at info@evaluacia.sk.
← PreviousNext →