Accelerating Innovation, Performance, and Impact at USAID
Summary
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) tackles some of the toughest challenges in some of the toughest places on earth, including fighting global pandemics, growing economic prosperity, strengthening democratic institutions, and providing humanitarian relief. USAID plays an important role in addressing global development problems that initially lack effective, scalable, and sustainable solutions. Yet USAID’s activities allow little room for the risk taking or iteration needed to drive significant improvements and encourage disruptive new ideas, with most programs implemented through detailed plans with rigid designs.
Imagine if the pace of progress for global development could match the breakneck pace of advances in the tech sector. The next administration should assess where current USAID interventions are inadequately meeting global need, applying best practices from innovation to improve programs accordingly. This will include shifting to outcomes-based performance metrics, dedicating budget for experimentation, establishing incentives that encourage risk-taking, linking payments with outcomes, and conducting ex-post evaluations of scale and sustainability.
We sat down with biomedical research pioneer Lee Hood to talk moonshots, metascience in medicine, and the Human Phenome Initiative.
DNA synthesis and export controls remain the primary regulatory safeguards against de novo production of harmful biological agents, yet governance frameworks lack the situational awareness and enforcement capacity to keep pace with rapidly falling technical barriers.
These ideas aim to advance the detailed policy solutions needed to foster public trust and implement fairness in the adoption of AI across diverse domains, from healthcare and government benefits to rural access, education, and worker protections.
The evidence is clear: algorithmic pay-setting is established in app-based work, and payroll/timekeeping failures show how software can produce systemic wage harm at scale