Vox Announces Media Partnership With the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism for the Second Annual 'Liberalism for the 21st Century' Conference
Vox is sponsoring the panel 'Philosophical Roots of Illiberal Movements,' moderated by senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp, dissecting the diverse intellectual origins of contemporary illiberalism, and exploring ways in which liberalism can respond at the level of ideas. The panel will feature Damon Linker, senior lecturer, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Palmer, senior fellow, Cato Institute; and Laura Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
'Vox is proud to partner again with the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism in support of this important forum for dialogue in defense of democracy around the globe,' said Elbert Ventura, Vox's executive editor.
'We are at a dangerous moment, with the forces of authoritarianism gathering strength and threatening liberal democracy in the United States and elsewhere,' noted ISMA President and editor of The UnPopulist, Shikha Dalmia. 'These forces are aided by illiberal ideologies that deserve a forceful intellectual response. Ultimately, this is a battle of ideas, and we are very glad to have a partner like Vox with us.'
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Vox
2 hours ago
- Vox
Republicans want to give gig workers benefits. There's a catch.
is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade. California rideshare drivers, supporters and former drivers rally saying they want to be made whole in the settlement discussions in a massive wage theft scandal that robbed drivers of tens of billions of dollars collectively, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Should independent contractors get employment benefits? The question has fueled decades of legal and political battles — and it might finally be coming to an end for the roughly 58 million people who currently work as freelancers, contractors and gig workers across America. Three Republican senators — led by Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the chamber's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee — have introduced bills to expand benefits like health insurance and retirement savings for contractors. The legislation would protect companies from worker misclassification lawsuits if they offered contractors non-salary perks, and Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley (CA) introduced companion bills back in February. Advocates of these so-called portable benefits argue that they support the realities of the current workplace. In 1947, Congress explicitly carved out independent contractors from the National Labor Relations Act's definition of 'employee.' Today, most contractors say they'd prefer to keep their independent arrangements but want more financial stability. Cassidy has hailed passing these bills a top priority for him this year. The portable benefits most likely to pass now, however, are less robust and worker-friendly than some progressive Democrats were envisioning ten years ago. Back in 2015, tech entrepreneur Nick Hanauer and David Rolf, former SEIU president of the Seattle Local 775, pitched a proposal where employers would contribute $2 an hour to a 'shared security system.' Benefits would accrue by the hour, pool across multiple jobs, and be accessible whether someone worked for one company full-time or five part-time. A year later, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) outlined a different approach: Instead of requiring employers to pay in, she proposed building public systems that would let workers take benefits like health care and retirement from job to job. In his final State of the Union address that year, Barack Obama also endorsed the general idea, emphasizing that 'basic benefits should be just as mobile as everything else is today.' Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer, plus the most compelling stories of the day. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. But unions strongly opposed these efforts. Labor groups have long fought against worker misclassification, where wrongly designating employees as contractors allows employers to sidestep payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws and other obligations. Unions view codifying portable benefits largely as a way to keep misclassifying workers and therefore cut them off from core workplace protections, including the right to unionize. Unions and union-funded nonprofits argue that portable benefits offer a false choice between job security and flexibility, and point to examples like nurses and restaurant workers where employees can still enjoy more flexible environments. The portable benefits approach, they warn, will just hasten the outsourcing of work to contractors or encourage more companies to misclassify their staff. They point to lobbying efforts by companies reliant on contractors, like DoorDash and Lyft, as well as lobbying by advocacy groups funded by Instacart, Uber, and Grubhub. For a time, it seemed that Democrats might fight for a more progressive version of portable benefits: Warren in her 2016 speech talked about extending union rights to temp and gig workers, and the Hanauer/Rolf proposal resembled how most European countries administer job protections. But the politics of the last seven years have instead shifted the party's focus toward narrowing the legal definition of independent contracting and reclassifying more workers as traditional employees. This approach is a cornerstone of the Protecting Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a union-backed federal labor reform bill that passed the House in 2021, was enthusiastically endorsed by President Joe Biden, and currently has 44 Democratic sponsors in the Senate. Yet the bill stands little chance of becoming law any time soon — and in the meantime, Republicans have taken up the issue with a more employer-friendly bent. With a few exceptions, most Democrats have stopped talking about securing portable benefits for freelancers who want to remain independent. But the need to protect gig workers hasn't gone away; both their numbers and their vulnerability continue to rise. The long-running policy battle may finally be winding down—just not in a way that necessarily helps them. Federal whiplash over the 'independent contractor' question The fight over worker classification stretches back decades, but a good starting place is 2006, when a group of FedEx Home Delivery drivers in Massachusetts voted to unionize. The company refused to bargain, arguing the drivers were independent contractors and therefore ineligible for a union. Although the National Labor Relations Board sided with the drivers in 2007, deeming them employees eligible to unionize, the DC Circuit overturned that ruling in 2009, and asserted the NLRB 'has no authority whatsoever over independent contractors.' Undeterred, the Obama-era NLRB ruled in favor of a different group of FedEx drivers in 2014, declaring them to be employees, not contractors. (The NLRB does not treat rulings other than those from the US Supreme Court as binding.) By 2015, the Obama Labor Department also issued guidance clarifying that most workers should be considered employees. But the Trump administration reversed both efforts, and in 2017 the DC Circuit again sided with FedEx. The pendulum swung back — to classifying more workers as employees — under Biden, only to shift again under Trump in his second term. Turning points The politics started to change in 2018, when the California Supreme Court issued a landmark decision sharply limiting when companies could classify workers as contractors. In response, California lawmakers in 2019 passed a law known as AB 5, functionally codifying the decision's stringent 'ABC test'— a standard that defines most workers as employees. Under the ABC test, one can only be considered a contractor if they do work that falls outside the company's typical line of business. Gig companies began fighting back. In 2020, tech giants like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash successfully spent $200 million on a California ballot measure to exempt drivers from AB 5 in exchange for requiring companies to provide contractors with some limited benefits. The gig companies also turned their attention outside of California, working aggressively to prevent laws like AB 5 from spreading. In 2022 they prevailed in Washington state, which passed a law that provides limited benefits to gig workers in exchange for maintaining their independent contractor status. The Washington law was backed by the local Teamsters affiliate of drivers and the Washington State Labor Council, but vocally opposed by Sean O'Brien, the Teamsters' international president. Labor groups seeking to slow the momentum of portable benefits scored a win in 2021, when the strict 'ABC standard' was included in the Democratic Party's PRO Act. While a few tech-friendly Democrats continue to elevate the issue of protecting gig workers with portable benefits, most in the party have gone quiet on the subject, as doing so would be seen as undercutting a core goal of the PRO Act. The Democrats' central focus now is on reclassifying gig workers as employees, not protecting contractors with flexible benefits. Another political turning point came in 2023, when Utah lawmakers passed the country's first voluntary portable benefits law, enabling companies to contribute benefits to independent contractors without affecting their contractor status or implying employer liability. Companies like Shipt and Lyft started piloting new benefits for Utah workers months after the law took effect. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro last year initiated a portable benefits pilot with DoorDash, and Georgia, Maryland, and Tennessee have taken their own steps this year. Supporters say these new voluntary laws will give companies the confidence to provide workers with more competitive working conditions, and they point to preliminary results from Pennsylvania, where 4,400 DoorDash drivers signed up for the savings account program, and earned $400 on average in their first year. Labor leaders remain skeptical, warning this all may amount to little more than PR — or a way to treat workers like employees without providing real support. The new benefits may be pretty lackluster Independent contractors already have the ability to contribute to tax-deductible retirement savings plans known as Simplified Employee Pension plans, or SEP-IRAs. But under current law, employers can't also contribute to those plans without risking legal challenges. Cassidy's new proposal, the Independent Retirement Fairness Act, would amend federal law to allow employers to voluntarily contribute, while shielding businesses from having to provide broader employment benefits or protections. It's unclear whether companies would actually take advantage of this new freedom, though supporters point out that most private-sector retirement plans in the US are voluntary. In terms of health insurance, independent workers can already obtain portable coverage via the Affordable Care Act but a quarter of contractors lack coverage, typically because it's too expensive. This year, the average 40-year-old buying unsubsidized health insurance on the exchanges paid nearly $500 per month, while a family of four paid close to $1,600. Yet Republicans are not proposing to increase subsidies to independent contractors seeking health insurance on the exchanges. Indeed they just approved slashing subsidies to the Affordable Care Act, meaning those with coverage could see their premiums skyrocket, and millions more lose insurance altogether. Rather, Cassidy is looking to allow contractors to purchase pooled options known as Association Health Plans (AHPs), which might provide lower premiums but come with far fewer protections, for example, AHPs frequently lack coverage for preexisting conditions and preventative services. AHPs were originally meant to be options for businesses in the same industry or geographic area but in 2018 the Trump administration tried to expand them to let loosely affiliated groups — like freelancers — buy coverage together and avoid many Affordable Care Act requirements. A federal judge struck down that effort in 2019, saying it unlawfully stretched the definition of 'employer' and was clearly designed to evade the ACA's consumer protections. Related Trump is finalizing one of his big proposals to undercut the ACA Republicans reviving that effort now could both skim healthy, young individuals off the ACA exchanges, and mislead workers into plans far more skimpy and unregulated than they realized. 'In an ideal system employers would have no role in health insurance, but even in our current system, it typically would be better for workers to get subsidized health care on the individual exchanges than AHPs,' said Matt Bruenig, the head of the left-wing People's Policy Project think tank. 'These benefits don't seem like they would be much improvement at all, and could make things worse if they are a trojan horse for badly regulated AHPs.' Warren criticized Cassidy's proposal, but did not elaborate regarding where she falls today on portable benefits. 'I have always believed that all workers deserve access to quality health care and benefits, but unfortunately this Republican effort isn't about getting workers the benefits they deserve,' she told Vox in an emailed statement. 'This GOP legislation is about giving employers freedom to misclassify workers and deprive them of crucial workplace rights — including the right to form a union and be free from harassment.'
Vox
4 hours ago
- Vox
Turns out the Trump economy is not doing so well after all
is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs of between 10 percent and 50 percent on the imports of all foreign US economy is bending — but not yet breaking — beneath the weight of President Donald Trump's nationalist agenda. That is the story told by an avalanche of economic data released last week. According to those new figures, employers are pulling back on hiring to a dramatic (and unexpected) degree, economic growth is slowing, and consumer prices are rising. And there are strong indications that Trump's trade and immigration policies are driving all of these trends. While last week's data provides little sign of an imminent recession or inflationary crisis, protectionism is still imposing a heavy toll on US households and businesses. And if hiring continues to slow — while firms' input costs persistently rise — there is some risk that economic growth could stall out completely. Unfortunately, Trump chose to compound that risk on Thursday by doubling down on his radical trade restrictions, imposing tariffs of between 10 percent and 50 percent on the imports of all foreign countries. Here is a quick overview of America's darkening economic picture. American employers are pulling back on hiring America's labor market is much weaker than previously thought, a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report revealed on Friday. US employers added 73,000 jobs in July, far fewer than the 104,000 that economists expected. More alarmingly, the report suggested that job growth was markedly weaker in May and June than the government had previously believed. The BLS always revises its estimates of monthly employment gains, once more data becomes available. Usually, these updates do not fundamentally change the labor market outlook. This time, they did. The government initially thought that employers had added 144,000 jobs in May and 147,000 in June; it now believes that they added just 19,000 during the first month and 14,000 during the second. (Trump responded to this unwelcome information by declaring it fraudulent and firing the head of the BLS.) This updated data suggests that Trump's tariffs (and tariff threats) have had a detrimental impact on hiring. After he unveiled his plans for sweeping universal tariffs on April 1, employment in America's manufacturing and 'trade and transport' industries abruptly declined: Trump's supporters may find it surprising that the enactment of broad tariffs would coincide with a reduction in manufacturing employment. After all, Trump has often described his trade policies as a strategy for creating factory jobs. But the recent contraction in manufacturing employment makes perfect sense: Trump engineered a large increase in US producers' costs by making foreign-made metal, lumber, semiconductors, and myriad other industrial materials more expensive. This makes it harder for US manufacturers to expand hiring or gain global market share, as they are now less cost-competitive than rivals in countries without large tariffs. As trade-sensitive sectors have shed workers, employment growth has become almost entirely dependent on the health care sector, which has accounted for nearly all of the economy's new jobs added in the past three months. Related Why Trump is picking a fight with Brazil Economic growth is losing steam (and becoming more and more dependent on the AI boom) The latest data on US economic growth tells a similarly disquieting story. America's gross domestic product officially grew at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, after decreasing by 0.5 percent in the first quarter. But both of those figures are misleading. This is because Trump's trade policies have greatly exacerbated well-known flaws in the government's approach to calculating GDP. The reasons for this are a bit complex, but the upshot is that the government likely underestimated growth in the first quarter and overestimated it in the second, due to massive, tariff-induced swings in US imports. Thus, to get a clear picture of the economy's growth rate, it's best to look at GDP trends over the first two quarters combined. And over the first half of this year, America's gross domestic product expanded at a 1.2 percent annualized clip — a much slower pace than both its growth rate in 2024 (2.8 percent) and forecasters' expectations for 2025 GDP growth when Trump was elected last November (2.1 percent). As with employment gains, America's GDP growth is highly imbalanced: An explosion in AI infrastructure spending is playing an outsize part in sustaining our economic expansion. Over the past six months, the artificial intelligence buildout has contributed more to American economic growth than all of consumer spending, according to the Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims. Should anything cause America's tech companies to pull back on data center construction, the US economy could quickly sputter. Trump's trade and immigration policies likely explain the bulk of this slowdown in growth. Through ramped-up internal enforcement and restrictions on legal immigration, Trump has succeeded in shrinking America's foreign-born labor force while deterring the arrival of new migrants. Largely as a result of his policies, America has shed 1.7 million immigrant workers since March. Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve of Dallas estimated that Trump's immigration policies will lower annual GDP growth by about 0.8 percentage points. Meanwhile, Trump's tariffs are almost certainly dampening both consumer spending (by generating high prices that deter shoppers) and business investment (by raising input costs and uncertainty). As of last Wednesday, Yale's Budget Lab estimated that Trump's tariffs would lower real GDP growth annually by 0.5 percentage points. Trump's most recent batch of duties will almost certainly lower growth even further. Related Trump is frustrated by his own success on immigration Prices are rebounding Typically, when economic growth slows, inflation tends to cool. After all, lower consumer spending and business investment translates into reduced demand for goods and services. And when the demand declines, sellers are often forced to cut prices. Yet inflation in the US today is actually accelerating, even as growth slackens. Consumer prices in June were 2.6 percent higher than they had been one year earlier, according to Commerce Department data released last week. Food and energy prices tend to shift volatilely, so economists often focus on 'core' inflation, which excludes both categories. And core prices in June were 2.8 percent higher than 12 months earlier. Both of these rates were higher than they had been in May. And the underlying data strongly indicates that Trump's tariffs are largely responsible for inflation's resurgence. Over the past three months, the prices of non-housing services (such as air travel or car insurance) grew at a 1.85 percent annualized rate. That's an encouraging data point, as services had been the major driver of inflation last year. But a sharp rise in goods prices counteracted that disinflation, with core goods prices climbing at a 3.7 percent annualized clip in the second quarter. And price growth has been concentrated in trade-sensitive goods, such as home furnishings and electronics. In short, the data suggests that America plausibly would have enjoyed a return to the Fed's 2 percent target inflation rate this year, had Trump not manufactured a surge in the cost of imported goods. The risk of a recession is rising America's economy still shows some signs of life. The unemployment rate remains at 4.2 percent, a relatively low level by historic standards. And after falling by 0.3 percent in May, inflation-adjusted consumer spending ticked up by 0.1 percent in June. Meanwhile, aggregate weekly payrolls — the sum of all wages paid to private-sector workers in a given week — was 5.3 percent higher in July than one year earlier. This represents an improvement relative to June, when total weekly wages were up just 4.5 percent on the year. US consumers still boast significant spending power. The AI arms race doesn't appear to be ending anytime soon. And Trump's recent package of tax cuts — while detrimental to growth in the long term — could boost demand in the short run. Perhaps for these reasons, betting markets currently give the US economy an 85 percent chance of avoiding a recession by year's end. Nevertheless, America's economic outlook is much gloomier than it was one week ago. Trump's trade policies have already nudged the US toward stagflation, a simultaneous rise in inflation and stagnation of growth. And most of Trump's tariffs have yet to actually take effect. Many sectors are already responding to rising import costs by shedding payroll. If that trend continues, and unemployment rises, consumer spending will likely dip. Faced with less demand, more employers will need to lay off staff, which would further erode spending. A recessionary spiral could ensue. The Federal Reserve may try to preempt that dynamic by cutting interest rates in September. But if Trump's tariffs continue to lift consumer prices, the central bank could find itself at an impasse: The Fed normally raises interest rates when prices are too high, and cuts them when job growth is too slow. If both those conditions prevail at once, the Fed will find itself with no good options.
Vox
a day ago
- Vox
Some countries still want to save the world
is a fellow for Future Perfect , Vox's section on making the world a better place. She writes about global health, philanthropy, labor, and social movements. If the world has had enough of helping others, then somebody forgot to tell Spain. Yes, Spain. The same country that, a little more than a decade ago, desperately accepted billions in bailout money from its European neighbors to keep its economy afloat. That Spain is now doing something almost unthinkable. It's ramping up aid spending just as the United States notoriously retreats. And in the process, Spain is trying to remind the world why we give back in the first place. The crisis is steep. The pot of money going to global development is set to shrink by 17 percent, or $35 billion, in 2025, on top of a $21 billion drop the year before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That's a $56 billion funding vacuum where global aid for mosquito nets, vaccine research, and food assistance used to be. And the declines are likely to become even steeper in the years ahead, as cuts in the US take full effect. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It's far from enough to fill the foreign aid gap, however. And while the pain will fall primarily on impoverished recipient countries, foreign aid doesn't just help the countries that receive it. It helps everyone. Diseases and conflict don't recognize legal borders and aid helps keep these deadly problems at bay. Every $100 million spent on preventing tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria helps prevent about 2.2 million new infections total. And global cuts are already expected to exacerbate the spread of diseases; former USAID officials anticipate cuts from the US alone could cause 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg each year. 'Even if you're in this isolationist mindset, you can't actually isolate yourself from the rest of the world,' said Rachael Calleja, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development. The fact that some countries have managed to fight the impulse to isolate — convincing their citizens that problems abroad are interconnected with our problems at home — could help reshape the future of aid for the better. Their decisions point to the possibility of a new future for foreign aid that could be more collaborative and less paternalistic than before. Ready or not, the old club's grip on global influence is now breaking down. 'Nobody who works in development sat around saying, 'The system is great. We're awesome. Let's just spend more money to do more of the same,'' said Dean Karlan, who was, until recently, the chief economist at USAID. 'There is a blank slate. Let's put in place a better system.' Why are some countries bucking the trend? Spain, Ireland, Italy, and South Korea are all increasing aid — but most have a lot of room for growth. The United Nations set a lofty goal in the 1970s for wealthy countries to give away 0.7 percent of their gross national income (GNI) as development assistance. Half a century later, almost none do. That includes this year's overachievers. Ireland spent 0.57 percent of its GNI — $2.47 billion — on development aid last year. Spain spent 0.25 percent or $4.35 billion, and Italy, 0.28 percent or $6.67 billion. South Korea spent 0.21 percent or $3.94 billion. It's not a lot, especially compared to the $63.3 billion the US spent in 2024, although that only added up to 0.22 percent of its GNI. But these countries are moving forward at a time when everyone else seems to be moving backward. According to the global development consultancy SEEK Development's donor tracker, the US is now projected to spend just 0.13 percent of its GNI on overseas aid this year. There is a growing recognition that someone has to fill the gaps left by the US, but everybody balks at the price tag, Arturo Angulo Urarte, a Madrid-based development expert, said in Spanish. 'It's like, 'Yes, but gosh, and how much does that mean? Oh, it means money? Well, then no.'' Spain's aid increase, however, has been a long time coming. Spanish activists launched a kind of Occupy Wall Street in favor of overseas aid back in the 1990s. A group of global development workers and grassroots activists staged hunger strikes and protest encampments, chaining themselves to government buildings to demand that Spain give at least 0.7 percent of its GNI to aid. At the time, Spain was giving around 0.24 percent of its GNI to aid, but the protests helped propel the country to double its commitment to a high of nearly 0.5 percent in 2008. Then the 2008 economic turmoil left Spain once again with a wisp of an foreign aid budget. By the time its economy crawled closer to pre-crisis levels in 2015, its development spending had cratered to 0.12 percent of GNI. But the idea of Spain becoming a bigger player in global development never really left the public consciousness, remaining broadly popular even during the country's worst financial straits. In 2023 the country passed a law promising to rebuild its aid agency and bump up spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030 — effectively tripling its current rate. Spain has since increased its aid budget to about 0.25 percent of its GNI, or $4.4 billion last year — roughly $490 million more than it spent the year prior at 0.24 percent of its GNI — and says it will continue to give more in the year ahead. That's more money for climate resilience projects in Morocco and Algeria, LGBTQ rights in Paraguay, and HPV vaccine campaigns across Latin America and the Caribbean. A mother living with HIV since 2017 visits Kuoyo Sub-county Hospital with her child to collect their medications, on April 24, 2025 in Kisumu, dismantling of USAID has destroyed longstanding and hard-won infrastructure for implementing aid programs, especially in critical areas like HIV prevention. There's little that anyone can do to bring that infrastructure back, but countries like Spain, Ireland, or South Korea have been able to uplift and increase funding to the initiatives most affected by the cuts, like Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Ireland also aims to increase its aid spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030. It inched closer to that goal this year by boosting its development budget by about $40 million to $925 million. 'We wouldn't expect Ireland to be able to fill the USAID gap in any shape or form,' Jane-Ann McKenna, who heads Dóchas, an umbrella group for Irish development organizations, said. 'But that's where our positioning and our voice becomes more important.' That said, foreign aid has always been about more than just charity. It's a geopolitical tool that countries have used for decades to win friends and influence people. It's no coincidence that, according to a 2006 study, US aid increased about 59 percent to nations when they temporarily joined the UN Security Council. The birth of PEPFAR — the HIV/AIDS program that saves around a million lives per year, which makes it perhaps America's most effective ever form of foreign aid — helped boost public opinion of the US across sub-Saharan Africa. Much of Italy's recent aid budget has gone to its $6 billion Mattei Plan in Africa, which aims to collaboratively influence the continent's energy development and migration flows, but which some critics contend recreates old colonial patterns by relying too heavily on European priorities — not local expertise — to decide where the money ought to go and how its vision should take shape. But if you take countries like Ireland and Spain at their word, their approach to foreign aid is not just about soft power anymore. These countries also have something in common that can differentiate them from other larger donors: recent histories of underdevelopment. Some of the newcomers might have been aid recipients rather than donors just a few decades ago. South Korea received billions in foreign aid in the decades after the Korean War, which helped it grow to the point where it became the first former recipient to join OECD's forum for major aid providers in 2010. Spain's wealthier neighbors offered the country major financial support when it began integrating with Europe in the 1980s in the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship. That dynamic can make it easier, Calleja says, to empathize with others who need aid today. (Though let's not forget that Spain once colonized much of Latin America and the Caribbean — places that now receive the bulk of Spanish foreign aid — and therefore laid the groundwork for many patterns of exploitation and inequality there that its aid now seeks to resolve.) Ireland was never a colonizer, but was once colonized itself by Britain. That legacy, McKenna said, means that many Irish people are passionate about human rights abroad and highly supportive of overseas aid. 'We have the history of the famine and we've had conflict on the island and we've had to engage in a whole peace process ourselves,' McKenna explained. 'That's there in the background of all of our psyches.' As these smaller players like to say, it's about 'solidarity.' Spain's own development agency's four-year plan mentions the word solidarity 84 times. It explicitly calls for a move away from the old model, where wealthy nations dictated terms to grateful recipients, and toward a more equitable and collaborative model built on shared priorities and mutual respect. Crisis as catalyst? Of course, not everybody is buying it. Henry Morales is an economist and director of the Movimiento Tzuk Kim-Pop, a Guatemalan human rights group. He let out a little laugh when I asked him about Spain's solidarity plan. After all, he's seen foreign funders renege on their promises before. He's seen European powers pledge numerous times to do more to promote climate resilience in low-income countries before watching them give up when the politics become too difficult. Spain's plan for development stresses that it aims to approach its funding priorities — like combating climate change and promoting gender equality — from a place of consistency and genuine partnership, the kind that can't be abandoned on a whim when a new government takes power. Whether Spain's plan represents a form of global reparations or just colonialism with better PR remains to be seen, he said, but regardless, the old top-down model is clearly cracking. Countries who receive aid now want 'a voice and a vote, so that the decisions are no longer made by a private club of the big donors, the big traditional financiers,' he said. 'But by debates and global agreements that are much more transparent and much more democratic.' Fifty countries in the Global South now have their own agencies to exchange ideas, technical advice, and reciprocal funds for solving poverty, fighting climate change, and improving education. Ensuring that recipients have a big say in how aid gets around is not only good for building a better, more democratic system — it can also make it much more efficient. According to Vox's previous reporting in 2022, aid programs tend to work better when people from the countries they're targeting play a big role in directing how and where the money's used. Morales thinks that kind of collaboration is the real future of aid, which he prefers to see not as charity but as 'simply the fair distribution of wealth.' He's not the only one who thinks so. The director-general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, called foreign aid 'a thing of the past' at a meeting with African leaders in February. For his part, Karlan, the former USAID economist, doesn't think USAID will ever come back as the acronym or institution it once was, and although that's mostly a very bad thing, he sees a flicker of opportunity. Still, he isn't sure if he believes that a real change to the aid paradigm is afoot. 'Solidarity strikes me as a little bit of a softer way of saying soft power,' he mused, even if countries like Spain or Ireland aren't necessarily 'looking for flyover rights for the military.' What he is sure of is that the US is moving in a very different direction. If Spain's soft power is softening, then the United States' is calcifying into something more toxic, more transactional, and — as Karlan likes to add — less efficient than before. 'Imagine a marriage in which you never did something considerate for your partner just because you cared about them,' he said. Instead, everything is a negotiation. 'That isn't a healthy relationship. What we're risking is losing these long-term relationships, those long-term friendships.' By the time the US is ready to reopen the door on them, it may find a world that has already moved on.
