USAID and the new burning of the books in digital and ideological epistemicide. A call to action

Introduction

We are writing this article out of concern for the recent crisis facing the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and particularly the effect of the crisis on the agency’s knowledge as a global public good. In this article, we discuss the loss of USAID’s knowledge as a possible epistemicide – or destruction of knowledge systems – and what we can do as professionals in the domain of knowledge and sustainable development to mitigate this destruction by supporting our USAID colleagues and partners.

We identify two interlinked forms of epistemicide and have struggled to find names for them as they are not evident in the literature: there is a digital epistemicide which reflects a more general vulnerability of data, information and knowledge which is in digital form on websites, and what we are calling an ideological epistemicide in which the new regime of President Trump is seeking to destroy the knowledge related to gender and other issues with which it is in ideological opposition. Together, these two forms of epistemicide have represented a perfect storm for USAID’s knowledge and correspond to a new burning of the books, something that authoritarian regimes have done throughout history.

Before discussing these two postulated forms of epistemicide, we will consider USAID’s role and two reasons why the destruction of the agency’s knowledge is particularly surprising and shocking. First, since its inception in 1961 to consolidate programmes coming out of the Marshall Plan¹, USAID has been a powerful, resource-rich institution while epistemicide is usually the fate suffered by marginalized groups and marginalized knowledges. If USAID can suffer an epistemicide, no-one and nothing is immune. Second, USAID’s approach to knowledge management has been recognized and appreciated by the professional community. Although this recognition has had no direct bearing on the postulated digital and ideological epistemicides, the knowledge skills of USAID colleagues may make them better placed than others in a comparable situation to rescue the books from the flames. In addition, the fact that these colleagues are embedded in professional networks, such as the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community, may also create a situation where it is also easier to call on the help of colleagues with similar skill sets

In terms of limitations, we have tried to piece together this article from sources in the news and from LinkedIn, making sense of a rapidly developing situation. There are many uncertainties, such as what has happened to the data, information, and knowledge on USAID’s websites. Are they lost forever? With hindsight, it might be that we did not have the full picture. As we go to press on 26 February, we are also seeing increasing levels of misinformation about USAID’s international role² which we are unable to take into account and some of which appear to be coming from the US government itself³. Finally, this article represents our own personal views and does not reflect the views of our institutions.

A brief introduction to USAID

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is the USA’s primary bilateral development agency which implements programmes in global health, disaster relief, socio-economic development, environmental protection, democratic governance, and education. According to The Guardian, USAID has a current budget of USD 42.8 billion for global humanitarian operations⁴. With headquarters in Washington DC and with missions in over 100 countries⁵, primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, USAID employed more than 10,000 staff at the end of 2024⁶.

Knowledge management at USAID

USAID has been particularly praised by its peer organizations and colleagues for its approach to knowledge management. First, USAID has developed the Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA)⁷ framework which comprised a set of practices to improve development effectiveness, involving strategic collaboration, continuous learning and adaptive management, and the conditions that enable them (i.e., culture, processes and resources). Since 2015, USAID has held annual CLA case competitions among USAID missions and implementing partners⁸. By 2020, USAID’s CLA Case Competition had generated a ‘goldmine of knowledge’ with 444 cases submitted from 61 USAID missions and eight USAID bureaus in Washington. By its 10th year in 2024, the CLA Case Competition had resulted in more than 800 cases⁹. Not only has it fulfilled the team’s original goal of crowdsourcing stories of CLA in action, but it has also now created an accompanying evidence base around the contribution that CLA makes to development efficiency and effectiveness, which has become an invaluable source of inspiration for USAID, its partners, and other members of the Multi-Donor Learning Partnership (MDLP)¹⁰, a network of donor organizations that USAID has co-chaired since its inception in 2018¹¹. Second, USAID set out to intentionally address the barriers and incentives to identifying and integrating principles of “a learning organization” through a substantial investment over more than five years, beginning in 2014¹². Third, USAID has developed highly innovative approaches to local knowledge since 2020 with the development of a learning agenda. This agenda aims to address questions about how local knowledge is defined in the development context and what enabling factors need to be in place for international development organizations (including donors such as USAID) to understand and leverage local knowledge and engage local knowledge holders inclusively¹³.

As a result of colleagues’ respect for these approaches to knowledge management and learning, Dr Stacey Young, the first Chief Knowledge Officer of USAID, received the International Knowledge Management Award 2023 from Knowledge Management Austria and the Knowledge for Development Partnership, two international non-governmental organizations. Sarah Cummings, co-author of this paper, made the laudatory address to an international audience. In this laudatory address, Dr Young’s contribution to USAID and the field of knowledge management was praised:

Dr Young became USAID’s first Chief Knowledge Officer in April 2024, a role that reflects her deep expertise and longstanding commitment to improving how knowledge is shared and utilized… [She] has driven efforts that make knowledge more accessible, inclusive, and useful. Her work has helped the agency embed knowledge management into its core functions, fostering a culture of learning that’s essential for addressing today’s global challenges.

An attack on USAID and its global public goods

From 20 January 2024 when President Trump took office, USAID has been a primary target of the government reorganization programme, led by businessman Elon Musk. This has seen the freezing of foreign aid, purging of staff¹⁴, and halting of humanitarian programmes around the world. This triggered an immediate toll on knowledge. Valuable knowledge stored on agency websites, such as the main USAID website at usaid.gov and the Development Experience Clearinghouse were shut down, the Learning Lab site, and nearly all of the Links sector-based sites have been pulled down when contract funding was frozen. There is both an information blackout and significant concern about the fate of the invaluable content that was held on those sites. As this article goes to press, the main USAID website only gives access to notice that all USAID staff have been put on administrative leave (see Figure 1).

There has been an enormous toll on people working in the aid field. Many of our knowledge colleagues at USAID, their contractors and national partners, all with signed, legal contracts, have been summarily put on leave, or dismissed with no notice, cause or due process.  This is a rapidly changing situation but most recent news from the USAID website from 23 February 2025 (Figure 1) is that almost all USAID staff globally are on administrative leave with a reduction-in-force or redundancy notice that affects 1600 USAID staff with duty stations in the USA. Staff and their families have been stranded overseas, some in dangerous conflict situations with a loss of support and safety¹⁵. They find themselves in an information blackout and total uncertainty. Finally, there is a huge, untold toll¹⁶ on the lives of the people who were receiving aid and the development and humanitarian organizations which support them.

These are not planned and phased activities. Funding has been cut, programmes halted, jobs lost with no notice, no clarity and without any opportunity to prepare and adjust. This is the work of a malevolent bull in a china shop with no care regarding the people and the knowledge that USAID stewards. This reorganization programme and the impact on USAID are now being contested in the courts¹⁷. Although we recognise that the crisis in USAID will have extremely serious implications for life saving programmes and famine relief in addition to the personal cost and anguish to USAID staff and contractors, potentially crippling global efforts to relieve hunger¹⁸, our focus is on the implications for USAID’s knowledge. From a knowledge perspective, we must call out and speak against the purging of life-saving data, information, and knowledge which we considers constitutes an epistemicide.

Global public goods and epistemicide

USAID’s knowledge represents a global public good, meeting the definition of Joseph Stiglitz¹⁹:

Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good. We have also come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The international community, through institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good — knowledge for development.

In the destruction of USAID’s knowledge, we are seeing the unprecedented destruction of knowledge as a global public good which, itself, supports other global public goods, such as public health and global peace and security which are critical to managing complex challenges like climate change and infectious diseases²⁰. We consider that this is an unprecedented situation, equivalent to the burning of books by authoritarian regimes in history, and that it may represent a new form of epistemicide.

According to Patin and colleagues^21,22, epistemicide represents the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system. They argue that epistemicide happens when several epistemic injustices occur that collectively reflect a structured and systemic oppression of particular ways of knowing. Epistemic injustice, first defined by the philosopher Miranda Fricker²³, comprises²⁴ “unfair treatment in knowledge-related and communicative practices in which the voices, experiences and problems of marginalized individuals, communities and societies are not being taken seriously.” In the literature, epistemic injustice and epistemicide are argued as presenting primary, secondary and third harm. Fricker has defined²⁵ primary harm as the harm to the individual, representing a loss of knowledge, and second harm as the loss to the larger society who then misses out on the chance to learn from that individual’s experience. Patin and colleagues consider that there is also a third harm²⁶ which acknowledges the loss of a potential knowledge legacy with having a potentially incalculable, intergenerational harm. For example, we know that the destruction or hiding of archives²⁷ can cause long-lasting epistemic harms and constitute complex ethical challenges. The case of Kenya’s ‘migrated archives²⁸ demonstrates how actions from the past can have long-lasting epistemic consequences and cause contemporary epistemic injustices and harms related to knowledge of the past. We argue, however, that the loss and destruction of the USAID’s knowledge represents a new type of fourth harm from epistemicide, namely the destruction of previously public knowledge created as a public good with public funding, which makes the global community less able to respond to complex challenges.

Digital epistemicide

According to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), digital preservation²⁹ is the challenge of the generation because of the fundamental vulnerability of digital resources as a result of their machine dependency. Although digital materials are core resources for industry, commerce, government, research, law, medicine, creative industries, cultural heritage and the media, their longevity and retention is under threat. According to the DPC³⁰, “The greater the importance of digital materials, the greater the need for their preservation: digital preservation protects investment, captures potential and transmits opportunities to future generations and our own.” Websites are particularly vulnerable³¹ because of the rapid evolution of technology in which the software to create and access them can become obsolete, file formats change, and the need for constant migration to newer storage mediums to prevent degradation. USAID itself has also recognized the vulnerability of digital public goods, announcing its support for the Charter for Digital Public Goods³² in April 2023³³. USAID contributed to the Charter’s commitment framework through its digital development work³⁴ in health, food security, humanitarian assistance, democracy and governance, climate and the environment, and inclusive economic growth.

The websites of USAID, like the websites of research institutes³⁵, have multiple roles: disseminating the innovative work and knowledge generated, providing the most accessible and comprehensive source of information on projects and findings, showcasing results and telling the stories of research journeys, and engaging with potential collaborators from around the world. Against this background, a website is potentially the most comprehensive and representative source of data on the work, knowledge generated, projects and findings of USAID, like it is for a research institute or a community of practice³⁶. Recent research indicates that digital content is being lost continually with more than one third of webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible³⁷, generally because an individual page was deleted or removed from a functional website. This gradual, so called “digital decay”³⁸ is very much different from the process which took place on 1 February when the USAID website and related digital repositories were shutdown which is why we are calling it a digital epistemicide or the intentional destruction of digital knowledge systems. As Elon Musk announced on social media³⁹: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.”

As a consequence of putting USAID into the woodchipper, many USAID websites now state they are “temporarily down” with a message prompting visitors to “check back soon…” For example, the main USAID website at usaid.gov⁴⁰ and the Development Experience Clearinghouse⁴¹ were shut down, and the Learning Lab site, and nearly all of the Links sector-based sites have been pulled down when contract funding was frozen; fa.gov (foreign assistance data from across the federal government) was also shut down. This is a double tragedy – both an information blackout and significant concern about the fate of the invaluable content that was held on those sites. These were global public goods, funded by the US taxpayer, which have been condemned to the flames.

The example of one specific USAID website demonstrates how taking a woodchipper to an organizational website can have huge global impact on a global public good, namely food security. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), the US entity that produced regular food security alerts to prevent famine, has also been shut down⁴². On 27 January 2025, Chemonics, the global company which manages FEWS NET for USAID, received a stop-work order⁴³. Two days later, FEWS NET’s website went down, halting access to many thousands of reports funded by US taxpayers. According to Andrew Natsios, a professor at Texas A&M University who was the Administrator of USAID during 2001-2006: “Ending FEWS NET is sort of like taking the steering wheel off the car… Even if the car is working fine, if there’s no steering wheel, you don’t know where the car is going.” The loss of FEWS NET apparently leaves aid organizations without a key source of guidance on where and how to deploy humanitarian relief which will impact people suffering from famine extremely vulnerable. This is one example, but it is likely that there are many similar ones.  As Don K. notes on LinkedIn⁴⁴:

Are there any large-scale efforts to chronicle any of this for knowledge and history? It seems like no matter one’s opinion on the matter, documenting acquired knowledge and history is pro-US, pro-human, pro-civilization.

Ideological epistemicide

These actions by the US administration are part of an ideological war in which knowledge is being destroyed. Since Trump came to power, US federal research institutions have removed vaccine, pandemic, and other health related data. LGBT references have been scrubbed from Federal websites, and research is being amended to exclude something known as ‘gender ideology’. Under threat by the Trump Administration, prominent US companies and major media outlets (Meta, Walmart, Target, McDonalds, and more) have reduced or completely stopped their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives⁴⁵ which were introduced following the protests that accompanied the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in 2020. This destruction of knowledge represents an epistemicide, motivated by ideology, which we are identifying as an ideological epistemicide.

The blueprint for the ideological epistemicide can be seen in Project 2025 which has developed a manifesto⁴⁶ for the Trump administration. In this manifesto, USAID has its own chapter (pp. 253-279) and there is a commitment to “…remove all references, examples, definitions, photos, and language on USAID websites, in agency publications and policies, and in all agency contracts and grants that include the following terms: “gender,” “gender equality,” “gender equity,” “gender diverse individuals,” “gender aware,” “gender sensitive,” etc. It should also remove references to “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual and reproductive rights” and controversial sexual education materials” (pp. 258). Although Project 2025 urged the President to reduce USAID’s global footprint, “deradicalize” its programmes, and reduce its funding, the Administration has gone much further⁴⁷ by freezing foreign aid and putting all staff on administrative leave with many job losses in the offing. Indeed, some commentators are arguing that⁴⁸ “But now (President Trump is) making (Project 2025) look downright timid.” This ideological epistemicide does appear to be particularly addressed to the previous Biden Administration because the USAID website for the 2017-2020 period is available in archive form (Figure 2).

We have a new burning of the books in which a digital and ideological epistemicide are combined. In previous burning of the books, books and other written materials were burned in public as a form of censorship by the Nazi sympathizers, Islamic State and other authoritarian regimes. In the case of USAID, the destruction has been of digital resources. Epistemicide and the (digital) burning of the books can be seen as “the warning lights of a disaster to come” because, where books are burned, people will be burned⁴⁹.

In summary, removal and destruction of USAID’s knowledge should be identified as epistemicide. It should be stopped. It violates the fundamental understanding that all knowledges and unheard voices must be included if we are to solve complex problems. Undermining this knowledge will lead to less effective development. It will bolster ignorance that will hurt many initiatives and approaches. We must examine these actions in the context of a wider epistemicide, including the purge of diversity and inclusion initiatives, ending access to critical health data, and the rewriting of science to exclude reference to gender.

Taking action as knowledge workers

People across the globe are swinging into action, scraping sites and downloading knowledge artifacts. Individuals become the librarian heroes of Richard Ovendon’s Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge⁵⁰, rescuing what they can from the flames. As knowledge managers and researchers, we are concerned about the impact on the lives of our colleagues and the poor and vulnerable people world-wide who depend on them. We are deeply concerned about the impact on USAID’s knowledge itself. Below we are proposing some actions that we can take as individuals and knowledge professionals. The list is not exhaustive and we recognize that there are more initiatives our there and that we should document and support those too.

Spotlight the value of USAID’s knowledge

The work of USAID is humanitarian. It additionally brings jobs and income to the USA where huge amounts of food is grown to be distributed by USAID, important to so many people. People are publishing clear, coherent examples of where and how USAID does critical work. We must share these stories.

Find, organize, and protect knowledge artifacts

There are two areas for action. First, we must find and aggregate the materials at risk, such as the content rescued from Learning Lab, the other Links sites and the Development Experience Clearinghouse. There need to be copies stored outside of the USA.  We as experts in knowledge management can immediately identify and make copies of USAID knowledge artifacts. We have seen colleagues on LinkedIn talking about how they saved files and documents when the USAID website was shut down unexpectedly on 1 February 2025. Many of us have copies of such documents. This means that we need to establish a simple interface where people who hold the content can indicate what they have and where to find it, and people who need it can figure out where to find it. Second, we need to develop a place where the rescued content can safely be collected, catalogued and stored for future use, outside the USA as a sort of “seed vault” to keep this knowledge safe for some future moment when something like USAID may be revived. To provide inspiration, there are number of examples of this being done. Given the removal of the US Department of Education’s guidance on artificial intelligence from their site, Pat Yongpradit of Code.org has compiled all of the reports in one 254-page document⁵¹. Wired Impact, a website developer for non-profit organizations based in the USA, is signposting where to find US government resources which have been taken down⁵².

Advocate

Organize and speak up from each of our own personal, national, and professional perspectives for a halt to the freezing and defunding of lifesaving programmes. We don’t question the value of efficiency and the importance of evaluating programmes on their merit but we need to stop the epistemicide. On Thursday 27 February, for example, the KM4dev community is convening a knowledge café⁵³ at which actions to retain and protect USAID’s knowledge will be discussed with some key stakeholders.

Support our colleagues

Finally, we must stand up for our colleagues, their incredible work, the value they bring to the world and their worth as human beings and American civil servants. People may not know just how vicious and voluminous the attacks on USAID staff are, how staff across federal agencies are being doxxed by their own government, and taking reputational hits as they are looking for work. Lies are being spread, such as the mendacious attack reported by a USAID staffer who originally came from Nigeria and is now a US citizen (personal communication). She is devastated that her government is wrongly telling people in her birthplace that USAID funded Boko Haram⁵⁴. We must connect with our colleagues, help them find work, and speak against the baseless devaluation being spread by the current US Administration.

Recognize the power of communities of practice

Global communities of practice, such as KM4Dev, should support USAID colleagues and others affected by the aid freeze. They also represent a way to retain the tacit knowledge of colleagues who remain within the international development community, although no longer working for USAID.

Recognize the vulnerability of your own digital resources

Taking the example of the Digital Preservation Handbook⁵⁵, we need to recognize and respond to the vulnerability of our own digital knowledge as individuals and organizations. This could involve working with international non-governmental organizations, such as the Digital Preservation Coalition.

Other actions you can take

Signing the petition Stop the USAID Stop Work Order – Protect Jobs, Security, and America’s Future.

About the authors

Sarah Cummings PhD is the Editor-in-Chief of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal. She was previously co-Director and Communications Director for the IKM Emergent Research Programme. She is a member and co-leader of the KM4Dev community. She has her own business, Knowledge Ecologist, where she undertakes knowledge-related consultancies for the UN and other clients.

Nancy White56 is the founder of Full Circle Associates, her consulting practice that includes an extensive network of professionals. She is a frequent contributor and a past core group member of KM4Dev, a global networked community of international development practitioners interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues and approaches, who seek to share ideas and experiences in this domain. Nancy is a leading thinker, writer, and practitioner of online facilitation (group facilitation for distributed environments). She supports distributed learning, teams, and communities of practice, where technology is just the tip of the iceberg. She believes that organizational capacity and strong processes are the links to success.

Bruce Boyes is a knowledge management, environmental management, and education thought leader with more than 40 years of experience. As editor and lead writer of the award-winning RealKM Magazine, he has personally written more than 500 articles and published more than 2,000 articles overall, resulting in more than 2 million reader views. With a demonstrated ability to identify and implement innovative solutions to social and ecological complexity, Bruce’s many other career highlights include using agile approaches to oversee the on time and under budget implementation of an award-winning $77.4 million recovery program for one of Australia’s most iconic river systems, leading a knowledge strategy process for Australia’s 56 natural resource management (NRM) regional organisations, pioneering collaborative learning and governance approaches to empower communities to sustainably manage landscapes and catchments in the face of complexity, being one of the first to join a new landmark aviation complexity initiative, initiating and teaching two new knowledge management subjects at Shanxi University in China, and writing numerous notable environmental strategies, reports, and other works. Bruce is currently a PhD candidate in the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group at Wageningen University and Research, and holds a Master of Environmental Management with Distinction and a Certificate of Technology (Electronics). As well as his work for RealKM Magazine, Bruce currently also teaches in the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) Certified High-school Pathway (CHP) program in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China.

Header image source: Created by Bruce Boyes with Perchance AI Photo Generator.

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