Philanthropy Needs a New Playbook
This article was originally published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy on June 4, 2025 in a special report titled Nonprofits and the Trump Agenda.
Even before Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced deep cuts to the State Department’s staff and structure, agency employees were increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with working there. Photo licensed under Creative Commons.
Why Philanthropy Should Help Build a Better State Department
By: Dan Spokojny | June 3, 2025
Decades of investments demonstrate that philanthropy’s foreign assistance playbook is, at best, incomplete. The size and scope of the international challenges are far too great, and grant makers have yet to identify cost-effective solutions that can be widely replicated and scaled.
The situation is complicated by the closure of the United States Agency for International Development and the evaporation of government foreign aid. Some have called for private philanthropy to rush to fill the space vacated by the federal government. Others argue that philanthropy’s most valuable role is to invest in pilot programs, which could be broadly adopted through government funding under a more receptive future presidential administration.
But these strategies need to be reconsidered. While direct charitable support for international peace and development will always be critical, working around the government is an ineffective — and perhaps even counterproductive — approach. Instead, philanthropy should use its limited resources to bolster the capacity of the U.S. government itself. I’m not talking about funding yet another study of China policy. Philanthropy should help improve how the State Department and other civilian functions of national security work. The ongoing reorganization of the State Department and dismantling of other institutions of civilian foreign policy, including the U.S. Institute of Peace, Radio Free Europe, and the Millenium Challenge Corporation, makes this work more urgent than ever.
Not All About Trump
It’s easy to blame President Trump for the current situation, but doing so ignores a broader trend. Three-quarters of Americans expressed trust in the government 60 year ago. Today only one-fifth say the same. Morale inside the State Department — ostensibly the government’s lead peacemaking institution — has followed a similar downward arc. Even before Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced deep cuts to the organization’s staff and structure, agency employees were increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with working there. A survey taken during the Biden administration found that a third of career diplomats planned to quit.
This dissatisfaction crosses political lines. Republicans believe the State Department is bloated and ineffective and needs to be gutted. When Democrats are in charge, government institutions like the State Department “face a different kind of danger,” suggests political commentator Ezra Klein. “Democrats are too quick to defend and to fortify them, even when they don’t work. The Democrats are often committed to the institution in name, to the process as it exists, as opposed to the outcomes the institution is supposed to deliver.”
A common assumption of philanthropic international assistance is that the government is either not doing enough or is doing the wrong thing. Certainly, this is always at least partly true, and investments in NGO-led foreign assistance, academic research, and peace advocacy have all paid dividends. But limited resources and short time horizons are often tragically misaligned with challenges: To end a war within one year, a funder proposes conducting a 20-person peacebuilding workshop.
While examples of extraordinary successes in peacebuilding have been achieved by nongovernment organizations, they are uncommon. Public health interventions may save lives, for example, but national or international instability is itself a cause of poor health.
An additional challenge is that the assistance provided by funders is often directly contradicted by government policies. For instance, an organization might invest in grassroots peacebuilding at the same time the government bolsters a country’s corrupt elites. Or peacebuilders may work to generate support for reconciliation, while Congress funnels military support to only one side of the conflict.
Meanwhile, the civilian instruments of power — especially the State Department — are growing increasingly outdated. A 2020 report from the Council on Foreign Relations, authored by two high-level Biden administration appointees, cited the State Department’s “lousy reputation of being effective policy players.” Former CIA Director William Burns, one of America’s most respected living diplomats, called diplomacy a “lost art.” The result is an increasingly unhealthy U.S. foreign policy that favors military options over diplomacy and development.
And yet, absent a concerted effort to invest in improving the quality of our national security institutions, the status quo approach churns on year after year.
A New Playbook
Philanthropy may represent the best hope to change this sorry state of affairs. Grant makers will largely need to start from scratch, investing in think tanks, academics, and experts to study how to bolster civilian institutions, especially the State Department. These research projects might explore how to build organizational cultures that can innovate and learn new methods of preventing and resolving conflict, improving methods of decision making, and strengthening the responsiveness of bureaucracies.
Only a handful of small grants currently support such work. For example, the Bridging the Gap project, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and a few others, works to better integrate scholarly research into foreign policy decision making. Other efforts have attempted to popularize the idea of making foreign policy more relevant for the middle class — and increasing domestic political support for the institutions that guide it.
Grant makers can also amplify calls to upgrade the outdated culture that permeates the foreign policy process. Fortunately, a vehicle already exists to help them do that. The bipartisan Congressional Commission on Reform and Modernization of the Department of State, launched during the Biden administration, was born from widespread agreement that the State Department is not performing up to expectations — yet almost no external research or advocacy is available to help Congress strengthen it. The commission was largely ignored by the Biden team, and its future under Trump may suffer a similar fate.
Ensuring this commission is a success could be one of the most effective investments funders could make toward international stability. One model for this work is the role former Google CEO Eric Schmidt played in chairing and helping Congress design the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. When the commission’s work finished, Schmidt committed his own money to build a new think tank dedicated to implementing its recommendations.
Philanthropists are rightfully motivated by acute international crises, such as protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty from a belligerent Russia or stopping the war in Sudan. Investing in improving the government’s capacity to address conflict may not feel as urgent but in the long run is likely to more meaningfully improve the likelihood of peace.
There is sound research to back this up. When governments rely on flawed information, misperception, or poor institutional decision-making, they inadvertently fuel conflicts. Overconfidence seems to have been a damning factor in nearly every war the United States has fought since WWII: Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. Research demonstrates that cognitive biases — unchecked within our intuition-based foreign policy process — steer decision-making toward hawkishness and war.
Whether one believes that U.S. foreign policy should be more dovish, or that peace is best achieved from a position of strength, history demonstrates that when American diplomacy fails, unnecessary conflict often results. Philanthropists can help avoid these disasters.
It isn’t a viable strategy to simply defend the status quo and lament the loss of USAID. Philanthropies are positioned to drive a more productive conversation about systemic change in the government’s approach to conflict prevention. International peace depends on getting this right.