The power of transparency: fighting disinformation and defending USAid

For years, organisations like Publish What You Fund, through meticulous research, painstaking data collection, persistent advocacy and continuous engagement, have worked to ensure that aid transparency is not just an ideal but a reality.

We have pushed for the disclosure of aid flows, improved data quality and built systems that enable the public, journalists and policymakers to scrutinise how development funds are spent. This work has been slow, technical, and at times frustrating. But as recent events have shown, it is also indispensable.

Transparency and data: our most powerful defence

Today, we find ourselves in a moment where the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) is under direct assault. The US administration has put a freeze on almost all USAid funds, while it undertakes an unspecified 90-day review of all US foreign assistance spending.

The review has been accompanied by a number of serious allegations about USAid for which there has been little to no evidence, including labelling USAid a “criminal organization” and describing it as  “beyond repair”. Government employees have even shared posts calling USAid “the most gigantic global terror organization in history”. One of the first major claims, made during a press briefing on 28 January,  stated that “50 million taxpayer dollars were about to go out the door to fund condoms in Gaza”. This was swiftly debunked by major media outlets, including Reuters, in part by using publicly available USAid programme data.

Staff at USAid have also begun a large-scale destruction of classified documents at their headquarters, adding to the opaqueness of the process.”

Transparency and data remain our most powerful defence, and a number of responses to these false statements are now making their way into the public domain. Last week, the Washington Post thoroughly discredited many of them in its article The White House’s Wildly Inaccurate Claims About USAid Spending, which found that 11 out of 12 claims were either misleading, incorrect or lacked critical context. Despite this, the administration has continued to fuel misinformation, driving public perception against USAid.

Thanks to years of hard-fought transparency measures, these accusations have been relatively easy to challenge. USAid has consistently scored well in the Aid Transparency Index, publishing large datasets which document projects in detail. This information, largely consisting of data provided using the International Aid Transparency Initiative reporting standard, remains live and accessible, enabling journalists, researchers and advocates to fact-check claims in real-time. Without this level of transparency, the defence of USAid against these politically motivated attacks would have been infinitely more difficult. ForeignAssistance.gov – a dashboard established by US law – also provides valuable information on all US foreign assistance, and it is required by law to be updated quarterly.

The legal obligation to uphold transparency

For its part, US Congress has mandated that transparency and evidence-based decision-making is a legal requirement. In 2016, it passed the Foreign Aid Transparency And Accountability Act, which established ForeignAssistance.gov, and has paid a great deal of attention to enforcing it. During the first Trump administration, Congress passed the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, requiring agencies to use evidence in its decision-making. This means the standard US policymakers have set is to honour and embed transparency, data and evidence, and this should now be enforced.

Unfortunately, we cannot take this transparency for granted. In recent weeks, we have seen efforts to circumvent transparency altogether. Instead of engaging with official, verified data, critics of USAid have started creating alternative datasets  – rapidly assembled, poorly sourced and methodologically unsound – to construct misleading narratives about aid spending. These developments risk creating a strange world where defenders and attackers reference their own separate data and “truth”, eroding any shared basis for debate.

Holding power to account

USAid may not survive this political onslaught, and it would be a profound shame if the institution were to be lost, not because of a genuine analysis of real data and evidence, but to misinformation. Everyone is free to form their own opinion about USAid – and to review all US programmes  – but they should do so with factually accurate information. The fight for USAid does not appear to be over. At some point, whether through judicial or congressional review, one hopes that the evidence will be brought to bear and allow for evidence-based decisions on the way forward. When that moment comes, transparency and data will provide that necessary information.

Without transparency, we run the risk of a devastating loss to global development. It’s also worth considering that, without established transparency norms, the ability to counter misinformation would have been greatly diminished. Without public access to USAid’s extensive records, it would have been far easier to manipulate public opinion, undermine trust in aid institutions and dismantle an agency that has, for all its flaws, played a critical role in international development.

At Publish What You Fund, we have spent years fighting for transparency, and our work is far from over. In the coming weeks, we will launch our new five-year strategy, with a renewed focus on strengthening data quality and broadening engagement with organisations across the sector. Most importantly, we will work to raise awareness of how this data can be used—by journalists, civil society, and, if necessary, opposition governments—to hold power to account and challenge misinformation about international aid.

The current attacks on USAid are a stark reminder of how fragile the truth can be. The systems we have built over decades can be dismantled far more quickly than they were constructed. If we lose them, we risk returning to an era where aid decisions are made behind closed doors, unchallenged and unscrutinised. We cannot afford to be complacent. The fight for transparency is, at its core, a fight for accountability, truth and the ability to stand up to power when it seeks to obscure reality.

For full transparency, Publish What You Fund has never received USAid funding.