Lund debate kicks off yearlong conversation on foreign aid

For decades, international aid mainly flew under the radar of public opinion. Politicians from across the ideological spectrum lauded programs that saved lives, nurtured democracy and promoted American values and interests.

That changed on Jan. 20, 2025, when President Donald J. Trump issued an Inauguration Day executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance. Suddenly, aid was at the center of an intense debate over national priorities and America's place in the world.

In a packed Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall on Oct. 22, campus audiences had an opportunity to join the national debate. This year's Lund Critical Debate, hosted annually by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, brought together Cornell faculty members Chris Barrett, an agricultural economist and food policy expert, and Muna Ndulo, an expert in international law and governance.

Einaudi Center director Ellen Lustchose the topic - "Is (Cutting) International Aid Good?" - for the debate and as a theme to guide the center's programming and provide a focus for its Undergraduate Global Scholarsfor the 2025-26 academic year.

Lust, who is also a professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she meant the simple, yes-or-no question to be provocative at a university where "everyone understands how complex these issues really are."

Lust recruited international development specialist Paul Kaiserto lead this year's conversation as the Einaudi Center's practitioner-in-residence. Kaiser has worked on public policy and education reform in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, with agencies including USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the World Bank.

"There have always been legitimate questions about aid dependency and corruption and the effectiveness of aid," Kaiser said, "but we're facing a much more existential question, which is should there be any aid at all?"

Kaiser put that question on the table when he moderated the Oct. 22 debate.

"We need more, not less aid," argued Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and a professor in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy. "We need it for moral reasons, for security reasons and for economic reasons. But it needs to be fundamentally different than it has been in the past."

Specifically, he said, "we need less bilateral aid - that is, government-to-government aid to support country-specific things - and we need far more aid for what some of us term 'international public goods,' for things that cut across the global community."

Those include agricultural and biomedical research, infectious disease monitoring and prevention, emergency response and climate change mitigation.

"These are things that we underinvest in massively" despite their high long-term economic returns, Barrett said. Most are better delivered by multilateral agencies and organizations than by individual governments, he said.

Ndulo, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International and Comparative Law at Cornell Law School, agreed that aid can be helpful and sometimes essential, but he said it can also do damage.

"A constant feature in the field of development is the firm belief that low-income countries will always be poor and desperately in need of foreign assistance," he said. "This mentality shapes the sorts of solutions that get fostered in those countries."

Ndulo and Barrett both observed that aid often prioritizes donor countries' interests over those of the recipients. Increasingly, Ndulo said, donors are conditioning aid on recipients' willingness to support their foreign policy objectives. Overall, Ndulo said, aid has less impact than international trade, foreign direct investment, or remittances from people working abroad.

"If we focus more on fairer ways of trading," he said, "we might not need as much aid."

Rethinking the future of aid is the assignment for the 15 Undergraduate Global Scholars selected by the Einaudi Center in October. Two of the students asked questions at the debate and all joined Kaiser and Barrett for an extended discussion over breakfast the folllwing morning.

"I've noticed a change in the conversation around aid," said Iskander Khan '26, one of the Global Scholars and a government major in the College of Arts and Sciences. "People will talk about it in a humanitarian sense, then when they're pushed, they justify it as a security issue. I thought these were two very different things. But the discussions we've been having make me realize that they're a lot more intertwined than I realized."

The Einaudi Center's Lund Critical Debate Series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs '57. Video of the 2025 debateis available on YouTube. The future of aid will also be the subject of Einaudi's 2026 Bartels World Affairs Lecture, to be delivered by former USAID administrator Samantha Power in April.

Read the complete story on the Einaudi Center website.

Jonathan Miller is a freelance writer for Global Cornell.