APRIL 2025
Preserve the Dealmaking
Capability of the Millennium
Challenge Corporation
By Daniel Runde and Richard Crespin
Introduction
Last week, the Department of Government Eciency (DOGE) notied the Millennium Challenge
Corporation (MCC) that it would “shutter” the agency, instructing the MCC to terminate all its compact
and threshold agreements with partner countries, terminate all contracts, and re or retire its sta
within 90 days.
1
While this may seem aligned with President Trump’s executive order (EO)pausing
U.S. international assistance to reevaluate aid eectiveness, the MCC does foreign investment, not
foreign aid. Instead of shuttering, the administration can easily reform the MCC to meet its goals and
eliminate wasteful spending. But shuttering the MCC will hinder—not help—better aligning investment
with American interests and cost more than it saves.
The MCC’s ability to make deals via bilateral country compacts is unique in the U.S. government and
ideal for advancing administration goals. The MCC method of developing investment packages provides
tremendous political leverage with governments, and the programs have solid evidence of eectiveness.
Terminating the MCC’s compacts and programs will provide China and other U.S. adversaries
diplomatic and economic wins while leaving blighted, half-built infrastructure scarring both the
landscape and minds of former U.S. partner countries and their citizens for a generation. If the Trump
administration wants to reorganize and eliminate the MCC as an independent agency, at a minimum,
it should transfer its capabilities and personnel, especially in blended nance, to the U.S. International
Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and allow it to administer existing compacts, agreements,
and contracts.
1 These are binding bilateral agreements between the United States and recipient countries, with compacts taking on treaty status and
approved by countries’ respective legislatures.
