The Cabinet Division is where the Pakistani state is meant to coordinate itself. It services the Cabinet, moves business between ministries, and is supposed to keep the machinery of government running as one thing rather than thirty-odd separate ones. It sits in the Secretariat that an Italian designed. Gio Ponti drew the ministries of Islamabad in the 1960s, a Greek firm paid for by an American foundation planned the city around them, and British architects supervised the work. The apparatus we use to govern ourselves was, from the first brick, drawn and part-financed by foreign hands. Two generations on, the buildings still stand, long after the foreigners and their money went home. The concrete stayed.
I keep thinking about that now, because in July 2025 USAID, after sixty-four years, formally ceased to exist. The agency is gone, its work folded into the State Department, most of its programmes cancelled. Foreign money and foreign hands built far more here than buildings. They helped build a great deal that was never made of concrete, the systems, the training, the working habits of departments. The buildings stayed. The question is whether the rest did.
For decades our development work has rested on a broad group of partners: USAID, the World Bank, ADB, the European Union, FCDO and the UN agencies. Their money reached well beyond roads and clinics. It paid for policy advice, data systems, regulatory work, and the people who spend years inside government departments making all of it run. In 2023 alone the Government of Pakistan signed a five-year agreement with USAID worth 445.6 million dollars for climate-resilient growth, governance and health. So the useful question after USAID is not how much money we have lost. It is what that money was building, and how much of it stays now that the money has gone.
Development is usually counted in dollars, projects and people reached. Those numbers miss the part that lasts. A programme described as supporting trade may in fact be teaching a department how to make policy. A governance programme may be rewriting a law or repairing an administrative process that outlives the grant by twenty years. The money moves through the programme, but capability can move with it, and capability is the part that is hardest to keep.
We can already see how fragile that keeping is, on both sides. When Washington dismantled USAID, the handover was not clean even for the Americans. A recent review by the State Department's own Inspector General found staffing shortages, shifting guidance and data problems as awards carrying 51.5 billion dollars in committed funds changed hands. Here the effect was immediate. Dozens of organisations shed staff within weeks, and a tuberculosis programme that had been reaching some 1,500 families a month simply stopped. The service was real. What was missing was anything underneath it that could keep going once the money did not.
A project can deliver a great deal and still fail that test. It can train officials, reach thousands of families, and leave real gains behind, and still leave nothing that lets the government carry the work forward. The benefit is real. The open question is whether anything was built to sustain it.
When a programme ends, does the function end with it? Did the department keep the capacity, did the data system become part of government, did the trained people stay, did our own budget take over? A project can deliver a great deal and still fail that test. It can train officials, reach thousands of families, and leave real gains behind, and still leave nothing that lets the government carry the work forward. The benefit is real. The open question is whether anything was built to sustain it.
I do not ask this from the outside. I have spent years inside these programmes, and the lesson that stays with me is that the visible project is rarely the real outcome. The institution being built behind it is. Take GRASP, the EU-funded programme in Sindh and Balochistan where I led the policy and governance work. It delivered a great deal that should outlast it. It trained thousands of farmers, linked them to markets, upgraded testing laboratories, and the Sindh government has said it wants to scale up what worked. Of the twenty provincial policy instruments my team developed, five were approved and are now under implementation, among them strategies for leather, meat and dairy, a plan to control foot-and-mouth disease, and a food-safety action plan for the province. Those are real gains, and more than many programmes leave behind.
But the two I think about most are the ones that did not make it. We built export strategies for mango and banana, two of Sindh's most promising crops, and they had real departmental ownership behind them, backing at secretary level and dozens of consultations. They stalled at the approval line the moment GRASP closed in June 2025. The momentum carrying them was still the project's, not the institutions, and when the programme ended the push ended with it. That is what it looks like when the money moves and the capacity does not stay behind it. The real test for everything else we built is the same one. Does the department that owns it now have the staff, the budget and the mandate to keep it moving on its own?
There is a harder truth here, and it is ours. Donor money has not always produced lasting ownership, and often that is not the donor's fault. Projects create parallel structures and short-term incentives. Expertise sits outside the permanent civil service. A department leans on a project for five years and cannot hold the function together once it closes. That failure is not just the donor's problem. It is a governance problem, and it is ours to fix.
This is why the argument has to move past the size of the cheque. When a programme ends, who owns the reform? That question applies to every partner, not only USAID. The World Bank and ADB remain central to Pakistan, and they should. ADB has just launched a country partnership strategy for 2026 to 2030 built around private sector growth and, in its own words, institutional strengthening. None of this is a case for those institutions to leave. It is a case for changing the terms, with more support for reform our government owns and less for projects the donor owns.
It is tempting to treat the retreat of Western aid as a simple change of creditor, and to assume China or the Gulf will fill the gap. Development does not work that way. China can finance infrastructure, energy and connectivity. Western partners have tended to do more on governance and institutional reform. A road cannot substitute for a working local government. A power plant cannot replace a capable regulator. A port cannot reform tax administration. Infrastructure matters, but institutions decide whether the investment ever pays off, and institutions are what a departing donor is most likely to leave half-built.
So, what do we actually do differently? Not mourn one donor or wait for the next, but stop signing programmes built to collapse the day the money leaves. We are not short of paperwork for this. Every project files a completion report, and the rules already say the department taking it over must secure an operating budget from the Finance Division to keep it running. The trouble is the timing and the teeth. The report is filed after the money has gone, and the operating budget usually never comes. The fix is to move the commitment to the front and make it bind.
The Cabinet should make it a standing rule, held across every ministry by the Cabinet Division, that no major donor programme is signed until three things are settled on paper: the department that will own the function when the programme ends, an operating budget the Finance Division has actually committed, and the date the handover takes place. The Economic Affairs Division, which signs these agreements with donors, would not initial one without them. A programme with no named owner and no committed budget is not a development programme. It is a temporary arrangement wearing the clothes of one. We have signed too many of those, and we are about to feel the cost of every one USAID leaves behind.
Which brings me back to the Secretariat. The foreigners who designed it left us the concrete, and the concrete was the easy part. It stays whether or not we know how to use it. Everything harder than concrete, the capacity to govern, to regulate, to carry a policy forward after the consultants have gone, only counts if it becomes ours. And the stakes only rise from here, in climate finance, in economic reform, in everything we will soon have to fund and run ourselves. The question after USAID is not who replaces USAID. It is what we have built, across sixty years of help, that can keep standing once the money moves somewhere else. That is the real measure of development, not the size of any cheque. And the place built to coordinate this state is the place to start answering it.