Weeks after Donald Trump won reelection, Keith Ives held an all-staff meeting at his Denver-based company to reassure his 30 employees that their work evaluating the success of US aid projects overseas wasn’t under threat.
“I enthusiastically told them, ‘I’m not worried at all — the work we do isn’t political,’” said Ives, who founded Causal Design more than a decade ago. “We weren’t working in climate. We’re not working in gender. We’re not doing DEI work. We’re monitoring and evaluating emergency food aid.”
But President Trump’s administration quickly froze all foreign aid spending, dismantled the US Agency for International Development and halted payments to contractors including Ives’ firm, which examines USAID projects to better understand their impact.
He and other contractors are trying to get paid by challenging the freeze in court. But he thinks the company will probably have to go out of business, eventually costing the jobs of all 30 employees. MORE