When he saw the bombshell in his inbox, Tom Purekal ’98 and his colleagues from Notre Dame’s Pulte Institute for Global Development were in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. They had just completed a workshop — in French — on interventions that build social and emotional skills among students who have suffered severe trauma.
The date was January 24, 2025, and President Donald Trump had just started his second term.
“We receive an email saying that there’s this executive order that suspends all projects and awards by USAID,” the United States Agency of International Development, Purekal says. “No guidance, no instructions until the following Monday or Tuesday, because then we’re hopping on a flight to go back to the States and figuring out, ‘Are we going to have jobs coming out of this? But also, can we keep going with this?’”
Purekal had been planning to travel to Ethiopia. Then he learned that rebels had invaded Goma, another city in Congo, so the Notre Dame team would have had to evacuate the country anyway.
A civil war emergency would be an everyday hurdle in international aid work. But the Pulte team’s efforts in the country were upended overnight by an extraordinary policy decision that promises devastating effects on global education, health and development — not to mention American influence in the developing world — for decades to come. In July, The Lancet, a leading peer-reviewed international medical journal, published a study finding that USAID’s de facto dissolution could lead to 14 million additional deaths worldwide over the next five years, a third of them among children under the age of 5.
The USAID cuts further hamstrung the Pulte Institute, which lost nearly all its funding, accounting for $20 million of the roughly $32 million in eliminated or reduced research grants across the University since the Trump administration took office.
The institute’s faculty director, Tracy Kijewski-Correa ’97, ’00M.S., ’03Ph.D., says her first thought was that Pulte’s federal funding might survive, because the institute’s core task is to evaluate foreign aid programs and ensure they provide the best long-term return on investment, a mission seemingly in line with the administration’s stated goals of preventing “waste, fraud and abuse.” Then “it became clear this was wiping the slate, rather than phasing things down,” she says. “We evaluate the effectiveness of programs, but if the programs all actually go away, then [we] are no longer needed.”
In the months since, Pulte has retrenched to continue some of its core work. Its staff of more than 40 was reduced to 10. Most of the employees who were let go found other jobs on campus.
A life in aid
Purekal’s career might stand in for those of many Pulte employees who have devoted their lives to helping the most vulnerable people in the world.
Born in Yonkers, New York, to Indian immigrants, he attended Catholic schools and chose Notre Dame without visiting. After graduating with a political science degree, he worked in advertising in New York City for three years. But he felt it wasn’t his calling, and a visit to a friend working at the Farm of the Child, a Catholic children’s home in Honduras, convinced him to quit advertising to take a position there for several years.
“That was life-changing,” he says. “I went down as a cocky advertising executive, thinking that they just needed somebody to help them with a good planning process, and I quickly realized that I didn’t have a clue what they needed.”
After completing graduate studies in business, Purekal joined Catholic Relief Services in 2007. His first post was in southern India, where he made connections with family, learned his mother tongue and discovered that his parents had once received USAID food distributions such as cheese and rice.
Specializing at first in flood and water management and later in peace building, he worked over the next seven years in South Sudan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Philippines. In 2014, he took a leave to help contain an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.
“That was probably one of the times I’d been most scared, because you’re hearing about all kinds of people contracting it,” he says. “It was so potent, and it doesn’t discriminate. But I didn’t have a spouse or any kids. And so, who else is going to respond to this?”
He returned to his alma mater in 2017. A few years later, he was the lead writer of a grant that led to a $40 million cooperative agreement with USAID, one of the largest federal awards in University history. The program, Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education (SHARE), would be responsible for more than 55 studies and research initiatives across 23 countries. It focused on improving USAID’s education outreach around the world.
“We certainly made our mistakes, but we were also learning as we went,” Purekal says. “There was no frame of reference for thinking that USAID would just go up in smoke. It was such a small percentage of the national budget, but it was doing such amazing work overseas.”
The shutdown of USAID programs will have severe implications, he says. For instance, children who lose school-based feeding programs will likely have to stop going to school. “It could take decades to resuscitate some of the assistance,” he says.
Purekal did not want to compete for campus jobs with the Pulte colleagues he recruited, so he decided instead to pursue a master’s degree in divinity at Notre Dame. “I think what many of us are struggling with is that we have this phenomenal experience that we’ve gained over the years,” he says, “and how do we continue to apply it in meaningful ways?”
What was USAID?
President John F. Kennedy founded USAID in 1961 as a response to the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War. Modeled on the Marshall Plan’s rebuilding of Europe after World War II, it had humanitarian and political ambitions from the start.
Scholars have come to understand USAID as America’s “soft power,” in contrast to the “hard power” of the military. Rice or wheat bags stamped with “USAID . . . a gift from the American people” are an inexpensive way to cultivate a positive image of America. Purekal believes real change concerns behaviors and attitudes — and that is soft-power work.
“With hard power, you can try to push for change and maybe see some immediate results and superficial outcomes,” he says. But transformative, enduring change “takes a great deal of finesse, patience, humility and a commitment to learning and doing better. That takes time.”
The work delivered other benefits, too: new outlets for American produce; reduced vulnerability among aid recipients to terrorist recruiters; the containment of deadly diseases.
Foreign aid has had bipartisan support for decades. President George W. Bush started PEPFAR, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, to bring AIDS medicine to Africa, saving more than 25 million lives since 2003. Other programs addressed such lethal scourges as tuberculosis and malaria.
USAID’s $35 billion budget for fiscal 2025 is a lot of money but amounted to only 0.2 percent of the $7 trillion federal budget. While the U.S. did spend more in total than other countries on foreign aid prior to 2025, it spent a smaller percentage of its gross national income on it than many other wealthy nations. Yet the agency may have been an easy target because, as polls show, Americans drastically overestimate the cost of foreign aid. Many wrongly believe it to comprise about one-quarter of the federal budget.
Immediate consequences
Rather than reform USAID, the second Trump administration attacked it from the start. The president and his allies have said it promoted un-American interests such as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and a green-energy agenda. Elon Musk, who briefly led the Department of Government Efficiency, said USAID was “a criminal organization” that must “die.”
At a March meeting of faith-based charities, administration officials spoke of a future where church groups would replace the government in ministering to the world’s most vulnerable people. They asked whether they would rather have the government or God get credit for saving lives. But this saintly vision omitted the fact that many religious missions formerly drew a massive portion of their budgets from USAID. Catholic Relief Services, which reaches about 200 million people in 134 countries, received nearly half of its $1.3 billion budget from federal grants in 2024. The organization has begun halving its staff and projects.
Despite the near-certainty of rising mortality in areas formerly served by USAID projects, The Atlantic magazine reported in July that the Trump administration had incinerated some 500 metric tons of USAID emergency food — costing nearly $800,000 and sufficient to feed 1.5 million children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the intended recipients, for a week.
Maggie O’Brien, a Saint Mary’s College senior nursing major, witnessed the impact of the cuts in Uganda this past summer while working at a rural health clinic almost entirely supported by USAID. The clinic served about 1,000 HIV patients, from children to adults.
“People would get medication refills for three or six months, but because of the cuts, they could only get a month supply,” she says. “Some of these people had to walk for miles through the mountains to get there. They worried they would transmit the virus to their families.”
O’Brien also faced an ethical crucible one day in the clinic’s emergency department. A mother brought in twin babies covered in sores and reeking of urine. Tuberculosis had caused rapid weight loss, but the mother couldn’t pay for treatment, which had been free until funding cuts forced the clinic to conserve its supply.
“The religious sister there said we [students] couldn’t pay for the treatment, but it was only about $6, like a Starbucks coffee,” O’Brien says. “So we had to lie . . . and give the money to the doctor in secret. They came back two weeks later, and the boys looked so much healthier.”
Promising work cut short
Kijewski-Correa says Pulte’s best-practices research typically required years of data collection to support valid analysis. The USAID cuts affected projects at every point along that pipeline. “We had some at the finish line killed, and when they’re so close, that’s what hurts. That evidence is on the cusp.”
TJ D’Agostino ’04, ’06M.Ed., an assistant professor of the practice with expertise in education policy and effectiveness, offers this example of a project interrupted: While attending a meeting for a SHARE project in Africa, a local partner asked about improving literacy for deaf children. The idea struck D’Agostino and motivated him to dive into the issue. A new project, he says, can take years to create a design, secure funding, cultivate local relationships and conduct training to build functional capability.
“In no SHARE project, I think, were we doing more beautiful and challenging and exceptionally cool work than this project, because deaf kids in rural Africa are really marginalized,” he says. But the effort “got its knees cut out” mid-project. “Those partners were all in the field doing data collection when we got the final cut to stop funding. They were starting their main round of interviews with schools, and it was like, ‘Sorry, you have to stop immediately and go home.’ It was horrible.”
Annie Conaghan ’22MGA, a Pulte program manager, had taught herself to be conversant in sign language, D’Agostino says, “to better communicate with our deaf partners because the work was so important, so interesting, that it mattered to be a good partner to them and to do the work with integrity, and that is completely indicative of the incredible staff that we had.”
Michael Sweikar ’03, the founding executive director of the Pulte Institute, left to take a position with Notre Dame’s development office in July. He worries about Pulte’s overseas partners because they suffered the worst effects of the USAID cuts.
Kijewski-Correa agrees: “For folks who lost those jobs in those countries, most likely there’ll be no severance, there’ll be no benefits, they’ll be flushed into a job market that’s already pretty scarce in those countries. So their prospects of reemployment, particularly at the level that they were at, are probably almost zero.”
In contrast, Notre Dame was able to find new positions for three quarters of its Pulte staff and provide severance benefits for those who decided to move on or retire, she says.
“It was almost like a draft board, where I could see all my staff and the different opportunities they were being paired with,” Kijewski-Correa says. “But I felt like I had to pick winners and losers of who got to stay and who had to leave. It was the worst semester of my life. I want to build a model that never has to do that again.”
The mission continues
Kijewski-Correa says Pulte was lucky to survive. Other universities closed similar programs, but Notre Dame leaders felt Pulte’s work was integral to the University’s Catholic mission. Much of the $1.5 million to run the rebooted institute now comes from the University’s Poverty Initiative, launched in 2023 as a high-profile part of the University Strategic Framework.
She sees her task as developing “a rightsized business model that can operate on what we have internally. . . . And then as grants and opportunities open up again, whenever they do, we can expand when those come, but always contract back to a core that we know we could support no matter what.”
A few Pulte projects were spared. The annual Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders again offered its six-week Leadership in Business Institute this summer with funding from the State Department, as it has since 2014.
D’Agostino says he is finishing up the reports based on one SHARE program for which the data collection was complete. The project sought to determine how and when to transition classroom teaching from indigenous languages to a given country’s national language. His research showed that bilingual instruction should persist for at least six years to minimize the risk of kids dropping out.
The Philippines, for instance, has nearly 200 local languages. Pulte received a video greeting from the country’s vice president personally thanking the institute for helping the country unpack this politically charged challenge.
Kijewski-Correa says she understands the arguments against foreign aid that she hears from friends who cite domestic priorities. Rather than get stuck in the political quagmire, she wants Notre Dame to position itself between the political aisles as it did when the federal government invited a Pulte representative to discuss the future of foreign aid. Notre Dame was among the few schools trusted to give input about the role of universities in evaluating where the government should direct its money, she says.
Losing USAID funding could have a silver lining for the Pulte Institute, she says, because it allows Notre Dame researchers to pursue their own goals, not those defined by USAID and its stringent rules.
“Rather than us chasing whatever idea they were putting in front of us with a paycheck, I want us to set the agenda and then have sponsors come to us and say, ‘Notre Dame, I love what you guys are looking at in the area of early childhood education; we want to invest,’” she says. “And that’s actually quite beautiful. And a little scary. What are the questions we want to ask about what’s working and not working in the world?
“We’re not beholden to anyone anymore. That’s the one liberating part of this. This is my call to Notre Dame and our benefactors to say, ‘Hey, we care about poverty. We don’t like that Lancet report that millions will die. Well, let’s do something about it.’”
Brendan O’Shaughnessy is executive communications writer and editor, brand content, in Notre Dame’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications.