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Before it disappeared: archiving $1.5 trillion in USAID foreign assistance data

· 8 min read· AI Analytics
Regulatory dataUSAIDForeign assistanceOpen dataDOGE

On January 31, 2025, foreignassistance.gov went dark. The site that had tracked every US foreign assistance obligation and disbursement since 2001—$1.5 trillion across 200 countries—was taken offline by the Trump administration as part of the DOGE restructuring of USAID. It came back partially on February 3, 2025, but the episode made clear that 24 years of public spending data could disappear with no warning.

Fortunately, the data had been archived before the shutdown. This post documents what foreignassistance.gov contained, who preserved it, what the DOGE cuts actually show when you cross-reference the data, and where to access it now.

The site going dark

foreignassistance.gov was the official public transparency portal for all US foreign assistance—mandated by the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2016. It covered 2001–2024: every obligation and disbursement, broken down by implementing agency, implementing partner, country, and sector. The site went offline on January 31, 2025, and returned in partial form on February 3.

Andrew Heiss, a political scientist at Brigham Young University who had built research infrastructure around the dataset, archived the December 19, 2024 snapshot before the shutdown. His mirror is live at foreignassistance.andrewheiss.com. The OpenICPSR archive at openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/220227/view preserves both queryable SQL and downloadable CSV versions of the full dataset.

The data structure

Each record in the foreignassistance.gov dataset includes the following fields:

  • Transaction_Type — obligation (funds committed by Congress) vs. disbursement (funds actually transferred to implementing partners). The gap between the two is a measure of implementation pace.
  • Fiscal_Year — US fiscal year (October–September).
  • Funding_Agency_Name — which US government agency appropriated and obligated the funds: USAID, State Department, DOD, Treasury, HHS, USDA. DOD accounts for roughly 25% of all foreign assistance tracked in the dataset—an often-overlooked figure.
  • Implementing_Partner_Name — the NGO, contractor, or foreign government entity receiving the funds and responsible for program execution.
  • Award_Title — the specific contract or grant title.
  • Country_Name — the recipient country or region.
  • Sector_Name — programmatic category: health, democracy and governance, education, economic growth, humanitarian assistance, or peace and security.
  • Amount — USD value of the obligation or disbursement.

Scale of the dataset

Total US foreign assistance tracked in the dataset: approximately $1.5 trillion over 2001–2024. Annual appropriations ranged from $35B to $72B depending on supplemental war-funding and emergency appropriations. The agency breakdown across the full period:

  • USAID — ~47% of total obligations
  • State Department — ~28%
  • DOD — ~25%

PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is the single largest program by disbursement: approximately $7 billion per year across 50+ countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. It is funded through State and USAID and represents the largest bilateral health program in history.

What the DOGE cuts targeted

Cross-referencing the December 2024 snapshot with USAID Stop Work orders published in early 2025 reveals which implementing partners lost active contracts and which programs were terminated. The largest affected partners by active contract value:

  • Chemonics International — $2.5B+ in active contracts at time of shutdown. Chemonics is the largest USAID implementing partner by contract value, executing programs across agriculture, health systems, and governance in 80+ countries.
  • DAI (Development Alternatives Inc.) — $1.2B+ in active contracts. DAI implements economic growth, governance, and conflict programs across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
  • International Medical Corps — active humanitarian assistance contracts terminated, primarily in conflict-affected countries.

The data shows not just which partners were cut, but which countries lost which program types—enabling researchers to distinguish between, say, a health program termination in Ethiopia and a democracy-and-governance termination in Ukraine.

The DOD anomaly

One of the most instructive features of the foreignassistance.gov dataset is that it includes DOD foreign security assistance—funding streams that are almost entirely absent from public discussions of “foreign aid cuts.”

The dataset reveals that $17–18 billion per year of “foreign assistance” flows through DOD authorities: Section 1206/1209 train-and-equip programs, 10 USC 333 security cooperation, Coalition Support Funds, and the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP). These are appropriated under defense budgets, not the State Department or USAID foreign operations accounts, so they are politically classified as defense spending rather than foreign aid. DOGE's widely-reported foreign aid cuts targeted State/USAID foreign operations; DOD security cooperation was not in scope.

This distinction matters for any analysis of the actual foreign-assistance footprint reduction. The foreignassistance.gov dataset is one of the only public sources that consolidates both streams.

Country-level analysis

The data supports per-country breakdowns of all US assistance across all agencies and sectors. Key totals from the 2001–2024 period:

  • Afghanistan — $143B over 2001–2021, the largest single-country total in the dataset. The bulk is DOD security cooperation and reconstruction funding.
  • Ethiopia, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Colombia — perennial top recipients across successive administrations, driven by a combination of strategic interest, PEPFAR health funding, and counternarcotics programs.
  • Health sector — the largest single sector globally, due to PEPFAR and Global Health programs. Health disbursements have been relatively stable across administrations because of the bipartisan PEPFAR reauthorization track.

How to access the archive

Three access points for the preserved data:

Why this matters now

With the USAID restructuring ongoing and the official site operating in reduced form, the archived dataset is the evidentiary basis for understanding what was cut. Without a clean, searchable version, journalists, researchers, and oversight bodies have no reference point for answering the most basic questions: Which programs were terminated? Which countries lost assistance? Which implementing partners were affected, and by how much?

The foreignassistance.gov dataset is also one of the few federal datasets that makes the DOD foreign security assistance footprint visible alongside State and USAID spending. Any analysis of “how much foreign aid the US cut” that omits DOD is measuring the wrong denominator. The archived data makes it possible to work with the complete picture rather than only the programs that were politically visible targets.

For how foreign agent registrations connect implementing partners to their disclosed foreign-principal relationships: FARA foreign agent registrations: structure, filings, and what the data reveals →

For the compliance screening layer that cross-references implementing partners against federal enforcement and exclusion lists: Compliance screening across 30+ federal enforcement lists: how the risk score works →