View / Trump didn’t blow up foreign aid — he’s trying to rebuild it in his own image

The easy storyline about the Trump administration’s approach to development aid is that it has torched a decades-old system. In reality, he’s trying to reinvent it.

In US President Donald Trump’s new world, America still spends money in poorer countries. But the logic has flipped. Aid now flows according to a worldview that is part-mercantilist, part-missionary, and wholly transactional. Under the emerging America First Global Health doctrine, the US will still back big public-health efforts and support essential services. But every dollar must also advance American commercial interests, spread US science and technology — and reinforce American influence.

Crucially, partner countries must pay. No more open-ended, NGO-mediated projects that churn out glossy reports and diplomatic goodwill. Client governments must co-invest upfront, agree on a timetable for taking over full costs, and treat the US as a hard-nosed business partner. Nowhere is that clearer than in the example the administration has chosen to showcase the new approach: Zipline.

The 11-year old drone company is one of the few Silicon Valley startups that found its highest-profile markets in Africa rather than at home. Since pivoting to medical deliveries a decade ago, it has built a business almost entirely on contracts with African governments shipping vaccines, blood, and other supplies to remote clinics. The Trump administration just handed the company a $150 million grant to prove the MAGA thesis on aid.

On paper, Zipline is a perfect fit. Governments must sign commercial agreements that demonstrate demand and commit real money. In theory, the company grows, essential services reach communities, and US technology gains ground. In practice? Not so simple.

Take Ghana, Zipline’s flagship African client. Since 2018, the country has accumulated around $22 million in unpaid bills (far more in Zipline’s eyes after the cedi’s steep depreciation from 2021 to 2024). The company has now shut down half its bases, partly in response to a new Ghanaian administration arguing that over 95% of deliveries weren’t essential and 85% of target clinics weren’t remote enough to make drone transport a sensible cost.

So, yes, alignment of interests, the holy grail of the America First approach, can be messy. Finding synergies across public policy, commercial interests, geopolitical reciprocity, and operational efficiency is easier said than done.

For instance: Zipline’s $150 million grant will only be fully disbursed if it earns $400 million from African governments over the next three years. That number dwarfs a decade’s worth of drone-delivery profits on the continent. For this strategy to work, African governments will have to massively ramp up spending. But that only makes sense if a volume-shift away from niche emergency deliveries truly reflects public priorities rather than elite whims.

And that’s the real test. America First aid assumes partner countries can articulate transparent, evidence-driven priorities and defend them to their citizens. But in much of Africa, priority-setting still happens far from scrutiny. Without a critical public to keep leaders honest, even the most disciplined transactional model collapses into chaotic, opaque, and impossible-to-scale policymaking.

Trump’s aid doctrine isn’t incoherent. It’s ambitious, provocative, and potentially disruptive and transformative in parts. But it rests on an assumption that can’t be taken for granted: that client governments will do the hard policy work the model requires. The next three years will show whether that’s visionary. Or delusional.

Bright Simons is an honorary vice president at Imani, a think tank in Accra, Ghana and a visiting senior fellow at ODI Global, a London-based think tank.