Evidence as an Antidote to Chaos

Carson Christiano is the executive director of the Center for Effective Global Action. Reflecting on the recent changes in federal support for research and the global development community, below she calls for a new investment in evidence.

Chaos — this is what the new administration has delivered to millions of people around the world who rely on U.S. foreign aid or contribute to the far-reaching ecosystem that supports it.

Lives are being lost, and the livelihoods of thousands of Americans have been upended by the wholesale dismantling of a 62-year-old government agency. In a few short weeks, 5,800 USAID contracts — including several led by CEGA and our peer research centers — have been cancelled mid-stream. One of the cancelled programs was, ironically, focused on improving the cost-effectiveness of USAID. Abruptly terminating it doesn’t seem like a particularly good faith effort to promote “programmatic efficiency” — one of the goals stated in the January 20th Executive Order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.” And if you consider that USAID spending has hovered around 1% of the federal budget for more than 20 years, it doesn’t seem like a good faith effort to cut costs either. 

Minimizing wasteful spending is precisely what motivated former USAID Chief Economist Dean Karlan and his team to set up “Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE).” Launched in September 2024, PILCEE was the most ambitious effort by a government aid agency to date to incorporate rigorous evidence of cost-effectiveness into the design and deployment of its programs. The initiative was led by CEGA in close collaboration with several of our peer research centers, including the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA). Our consortium members are well-known for their use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), a Nobel Prize-winning approach to addressing global poverty. Together, our PILCEE consortium offered unparalleled access to a closely coordinated network of over 1,500 researchers — including more than 250 from low- and middle-income countries — who are experts in the numerous fields and geographies in which USAID operates.

PILCEE was not the beginning of USAID’s evidence transformation.

USAID had been steadily increasing its commitment to evidence and impact over many years. Between 2016 and 2020, a suite of landmark “cash benchmarking” studies, involving multiple CEGA-affiliated researchers, were the first attempt by a bilateral donor to compare the impacts of its in-kind programming to an equivalent amount of cash — a clear signal that the Agency was committed to stewarding taxpayer dollars effectively. In November 2020, to better facilitate cost-effectiveness calculations, USAID issued new guidance stating that “all impact evaluations [funded by USAID] must include a cost analysis of the intervention or the interventions being studied.” In 2021, USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) program, which funded breakthrough solutions to the world’s toughest development challenges, calculated an impressive 17:1 social return on its investments.

In the midst of the U.S. transition away from foreign aid, several European governments have announced they will slash their own aid budgets, many reallocating funds to defense. While things are still changing faster than most of us can read the news, it’s clear the global development ecosystem will look very different moving forward. We will have substantially fewer funds to support critical humanitarian, economic development, and democracy-promotion efforts around the world, leaving a gap that private philanthropy is unable to fill. In all likelihood, we’ll have a smaller set of organizations providing programs and services, as many will shutter without sustained U.S. government funds.

With foreign aid resources substantially reduced, we simply cannot afford not to invest in evidence.

Thankfully, there are still a number of governments, foundations, and private philanthropists who see immense value in supporting the world’s most vulnerable people. These funders recognize how foreign aid drives global progress, and protects the security and prosperity of the wealthy nations offering support. Now, with mounting pressure to do more with less, these funders will need to be extra judicious with their spending, focusing on innovations and programs where there is a clear track record of impact.

A fire has been lit to generate evidence that is clear, timely, and responsive to the changing realities of policy and practice. We will need to be creative in terms of how we synthesize, package, and communicate this evidence so the resulting insights enhance programs, deliver greater efficiencies, and improve lives. In an upended world where the need for support is great and the truth is in short supply, evidence can be a powerful antidote to chaos. At the end of the day, evidence has no agenda and favors no partisan opinion — in this sense, it is the cornerstone of a functional democracy.