The Little Things
By 
One thing about King Trump and President Musk and Senior Advisor Big Balls destroying government capability is that it destroys all the little things that the U.S. government could do to make things just a little better. There are so many examples. Here’s one, on USAID and global cultural heritage.
Development agencies such as USAID have become increasingly entangled with heritage – an entanglement that has come in for criticism. Conflict in the Middle East – and the US ‘war on terror’ – has been one recent driver of such work, which has often been tied to community- and peace-building, and reconstruction initiatives (successfully or otherwise). Earlier drivers included disaster (heritage recovery efforts after the Venice and Florence floods of 1966, for example) and infrastructural projects with a modernising purpose: UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, which drew a variety of international donors including the United States, took place due to Egypt’s construction of the Aswan High Dam during the 1960s.
In recent decades, a veritable ‘heritage-industrial complex’ has therefore come to exist globally, with money provided by a variety of organisations. Those organisations are state-level ones such as USAID, non-state institutions such as the Aga Khan Trust, and also ones channelling donations from a number of member-states: ALIPH (the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage) was initially funded by France and the United Arab Emirates, but now has numerous state-level donors.
As US policy changes, however, and as European and other government spending is redirected towards defence against Russia, the likelihood of sustained levels of development funding for heritage projects is low, unless those projects can be attached to infrastructure work for the global defence industry (an unlikely proposition). Giving development money to heritage projects has never been straightforward. But it is because it has never been straightforward that the loss will be more keenly felt.
USAID’s funding of heritage work demonstrates why ‘heritage’ has never been the only objective of spending that money. Take the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), which was founded in 1948. ARCE administers an ‘Antiquities Endowment Fund’ (partially endowed by USAID) that ‘sustains an ongoing grants program to support the conservation, preservation and documentation of Egypt’s cultural heritage and the dissemination of knowledge about that heritage’. Many of the fund’s grants go to an international cadre of Egyptologists, who in this case have become ‘heritage professionals’ akin to the legion of outside experts so familiar from other kinds of development work around the world.
Such projects, though, also employ people locally. In 2023, USAID granted ARCE money for what was called its ‘Cultural Heritage Tourism II’ project. That project involved building a new storage magazine at Karnak Temple in Luxor and the ‘development of visitor infrastructure’ at the archaeological site of Abydos in Upper Egypt (the project ended in September 2024). Projects like these employ numerous people from such places: in tourism, building, conservation work and other fields. For better or for worse (there are arguments on both sides), these projects are a part of local economies. Removing that money suddenly is potentially disastrous, particularly as new projects along these lines are being launched all the time: in late 2024, the State Department partnered with ARCE to launch a central cataloguing system for Egypt’s museums.
The problem of course is that none of this has a political constituency, so it’s always vulnerable. Me, I’d say that cataloguing Egyptian museums is a really good thing to do. But really, hardly anyone cares. So here we are.