As the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID reverberate throughout the world, Lebanon—a famously aid-dependent country and a frontline state in the transnational confrontation between the United States and the Iran-aligned “Axis of Resistance”—is undergoing an unprecedented energy transition with the ostensible support of international donors.
Camillo Stubenberg, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell, studies the adoption of decentralized electricity technologies in Lebanon—a sector that USAID had been trying to support. In this Q&A with Century International fellow Zachary Cuyler, Stubenberg talks about the role of USAID in Lebanon’s solar boom and the possible impact of Trump’s aid cuts.
Zachary Cuyler: How much assistance did USAID provide to Lebanon? What’s been the overall impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID?
Camillo Stubenberg: We do not, at the moment, know how much less the United States is spending on aid to Lebanon, so it’s somewhat hard to know exactly what the effects of cuts will be. One leaked document suggests that only 29 percent of all USAID assistance to Lebanon has been cut. Others think it’s more. There are many unknowns—among them, what the ultimate disposition of USAID will be once the dust settles from the ongoing lawsuits challenging the Trump cuts.
However, it’s clear that the Trump cuts will have a substantial impact. The United States oscillates between being the largest and second-largest bilateral donor to Lebanon. In 2024, Washington spent around $329 million in the country. About half of American support goes to the Lebanese Armed Forces—this assistance comes through Department of State programs. On the development front, USAID is active in various sectors, from health care to water and sanitation, community development, agricultural development, support for businesses and industries, and—more recently—energy.
One recently laid-off project manager I spoke to joked, “You know what? The only negative impact of the cuts is that all the people like me are losing their jobs.” That is certainly the most immediate, palpable effect of the financing cuts: stop-work orders that, in many instances, translated into firings. But we’re not talking about just a few people losing jobs. With Lebanon’s entire economic output being something like $28 billion—which, by the way, is a third lower than it was before the economy imploded seven or eight years ago—the aid cuts could represent a small but significant macroeconomic shock. And for a certain segment of Lebanese society, that is a massive, immediate, and very scary effect. It’s visible in terms of employment of a certain kind of middle-to-upper-middle-class, educated set of Lebanese who were able to live a decent life because of the good salaries in the aid sector.
One level up, I think it remains to be seen how much this will impact institutions such as the Michel Daher Foundation and the Renee Moawad Foundation (which are economic development nonprofits that USAID supported), and, below them, the various municipalities and the mayors or heads of unions of municipalities who had good ties with USAID. USAID was kind of an intermediary between these projects, these communities, and American aid money. Its role and standing will likely be diminished: there might not be any more mediating to do.
Zachary: Your research focuses on Lebanon’s post-2021 energy transition. How do—or how did—USAID and other development organizations fit into this energy transition? And how do the Trump cuts affect the transition, if at all?
Camillo: Lebanon’s energy transition was born out of severe fuel shortages in 2021, and it was decentralized—it happened on a household level, rather than being centrally planned. Lebanon’s state electricity utility, Electricite du Liban (EDL) had struggled to supply sufficient power since the Lebanese Civil War, which ended in 1990. A system of private neighborhood generators emerged to meet the gap. Under this “dual” energy regime, citizens relied on a cheap but ineffective state utility on the one hand, and functional but very expensive private generators on the other.
This system collapsed in 2021 when fuel shortages disrupted power generation both by EDL power plants and by the private generators. What ensued was an almost total blackout, since both sources of electricity were based on a functioning fossil fuel supply chain. Households scrambled to find an alternative, and solar power became the country’s hottest commodity.
Almost overnight, solar panels proliferated, and households became independent of both the state grid and private generators.
Private, small-scale solar entrepreneurs led this shift. Almost overnight, solar panels proliferated, and households became independent of both the state grid and private generators. However, this emancipation from the old “dual” energy regime brought new constraints and connections. What were previously collective questions became intimate. In my dissertation I describe this as life under the patronage of the sun. This change not only restructured how families went about their daily life (“we only run the washing machine on sunny days”) but also affected the way companies went about their business. Industries that had “solarized” their operations were now organizing their processes according to the rhythm of the sun. For instance, one food producer cancelled night shifts because it was more cost-effective to only operate when electricity was effectively free, during the day. Quite old, preindustrial temporal and spatial patterns of energy usage returned to both daily life and the broader political economy.
Lebanon’s energy landscape has changed dramatically, but not because of the intervention of international aid agencies or the Lebanese government. The transition had previously revolved around foreign-funded pilot projects meant to demonstrate the decarbonization benefits of solar and to form the basis for future larger-scale policies. But the rapid adoption of off-grid solar systems was entirely driven by private households and businesses seeking to increase their energy security. And many of the Lebanese I’ve spoken to are quite proud of the grassroots nature of this transition.
Zachary: Given how much the energy transition in Lebanon was driven both by necessity and by Lebanese people’s responses to this very complex, overlapping set of crisis conditions, what kind of support did USAID actually provide? And who did USAID tend to partner with for these projects?
Camillo: Before the 2021 energy crisis, USAID was financing a handful of solar projects under the framework of its Community Support Program. Solar panels would be installed to support local concerns like schools, wells, or small businesses. In Baaloul, for instance, a program called Baladi tried to support local rural economies and provided a grant to install a solar-powered irrigation system. Donors might provide small grants to an olive press to get some solar panels. But these were pretty niche, sometimes gimmicky projects.
But with the financial and energy crises, donors—including USAID—were dumbfounded as to how to proceed. Sam Heller’s 2023 Century International report on Lebanese aid described how donors were increasingly reluctant to spend any money that would go directly to Lebanese institutions at the national level. But the energy crisis was on everyone’s mind, including among international staffers living in Lebanon.
The main USAID response to the Lebanese energy crisis was a project called Inara, or Innovation for Affordable and Renewable Energy for All, which began in 2021 with a $29 million grant for decentralized energy access at the municipal level. The idea was that Inara would improve small sections of the EDL grid rather than attempting to fix the whole thing. Thus, in contrast to previous plans of building one or several large new power plants on the coast that would reduce electricity shortages in the entire country, Inara proposed to build new generation capacity near certain target communities.
The project had two phases. The first “trial” case was the refurbishing of one of Lebanon’s oldest hydropower plants in Rechmaya. The surrounding villages would receive at least eight hours of electricity per day, up from about one hour per day. The second phase of the project foresaw the building of a seven-megawatt solar farm that would benefit a particular set of villages.
The idea definitely had appeal. It was a way to leverage the impact of relatively small renewable energy projects to make a significant difference for local beneficiaries: eight hours of electricity per day is much better than one. That localized benefit was important because, otherwise, the benefit of the new installations would be diluted across the country. If Inara had panned out, it would have been replicable, and the grid might have been rebuilt piece by piece.
But Inara faced many challenges and delays even before the stop-work order came from Washington early in 2025. Today, the Rechmaya plant has been fixed, but the second phase of the project was halted just when it was about to start the tendering process. That’s a real pity, because now we don’t know if Inara’s proposition of rebuilding the grid locally through this kind of patchwork approach is feasible.
Caption: An aerial view at dusk of the Mar Mikhael neighborhood near the port during a power outage on August 2, 2021, in Beirut. Source: Roudy Doumit/Getty Images
Zachary: So what went wrong?
Camillo: The reasons for Inara’s difficulties reveal quite a lot about both the general difficulties of doing energy projects in Lebanon as well as the specific challenges that come with the USAID approach.
First, working with EDL is difficult. The company has a well-earned reputation for being dysfunctional to the core—corrupt, politicized, and wildly inefficient. EDL has a complicated and politicized governance structure, and also lacks basic operational capacity. One Inara employee explained to me that they would have to pick up their counterparts to go to visit field sites and even had to supply basic materials such as printer paper because of the dire economic circumstances of EDL.
The second challenge was to get local communities to buy into the project. With Rechmaya, there was a lot of pushback from farmers who had been using the river’s water for the many years that the power plant had been broken. The repair of the hydropower plant by USAID meant that they could no longer control the flow of water into their orchards and fields. Inara also had a lot of trouble finding the right target community for the solar component of the project. The set of villages had to be the right size for the planned seven-megawatt solar plant, they had to get along with each other, and—importantly—the project had to exclude any Hezbollah-led municipalities. The search for a technically and politically feasible project within these parameters took much longer than expected. In the end, Inara settled on Deir El Ahmar, a Lebanese Forces stronghold in the northern Bekaa valley.
Beyond these challenges, donors and local Lebanese partners have long complained about coordination problems with USAID. The agency is isolated—literally and figuratively. Its offices are in the highly fortified embassy north of Beirut. And the agency is also known to be secretive. I remember the UNDP and other people saying they had “no idea what these guys are doing.” Lebanese ministries and other aid agencies made similar comments.
Zachary: You mention that the community Inara chose was a stronghold of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian party-militia that is a rival of Hezbollah. What role did American political aims play in planning aid? And what were the consequences of those aims?
Camillo: In terms of USAID policies—or its role as a source of patronage—it was a key goal not only to preserve the multi-sectarian character of Lebanon, but also—and the agency has openly said this—to counter Hezbollah’s narrative and influence.
The United States also doesn’t want to have some new infrastructure that USAID paid for covered with Hezbollah flags, or to have a Hezbollah mayor say, “We did that.” And Hezbollah wouldn’t want that either—it’s a two-way street. There were also legal considerations. It all added up to a lengthening of the USAID implementation process, which was already famously bureaucratic and complicated.
USAID is also clearly more comfortable working with organizations and companies that are politically oriented toward the West, and which might have investments in North America and Europe.
The upshot of all of this is that USAID assistance tends to go to predominantly Christian, Sunni, Druze, and mixed villages—not predominantly Shia villages where Hezbollah or its allies are in charge. You can imagine the types of perceptions this creates in Lebanon, which has so many political and sectarian divisions. Passing through the Beqaa Valley, I’ve seen USAID plaques—“Funded by the American People”—riddled with bullet holes. Targeted, presumably, in opposition to what people perceive as U.S. imperialism.
Zachary: Are there any silver linings to the cuts, or anything we can learn from them?
Camillo: In the broadest sense, these aid cuts are a net negative. Even if there was an argument for reducing U.S. assistance to Lebanon, the way the Trump administration did it was completely irresponsible. At the same time, the cuts do provide an opportunity to consider the structural flaws with the aid regime.
One flaw is that bureaucracy seriously dampened the impacts of aid. It’s still very unclear what the effects of the cuts will be on big energy sector projects. I’m personally tempted to say that this experience has shown how incredibly inefficient it is to spend money through aid agencies. Inara spent $29 million, and doesn’t have much to show for it. A lot of work was done—legal, strategic, political—aligning EDL with the local municipality, getting some kind of contractual security. This was all hard work for the people who did it. But for the actual end-beneficiaries, nothing happened. There’s an argument to be made that it would have been better just to transfer $29 million to households to defray the costs of solar panels or higher-quality batteries.
Still, a curious outcome of the halt of U.S. foreign aid is that there appears to be astonishingly little immediate, day-to-day impact. Critics of development assistance might see this as evidence supporting their argument that development aid is too inefficient. And both in Lebanese media and among people I talk to, there is also a sense of emancipation that comes with the USAID breakdown—a kind of opportunity to take one’s development trajectory back into one’s own hands. We will see how long this feeling of emancipation lasts and whether the new government can somehow pick up the momentum of Lebanon’s recent energy transition.
Header Image Caption: A 2021 file photo shows a solar installation in Beirut, Lebanon. Source: IMF Focus via Flikr, used with a creative commons license.
Tags: beirut, lebanon, environment, usaid
What Trump’s USAID Cuts to Lebanese Solar Projects Reveal about American Foreign Assistance
As the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID reverberate throughout the world, Lebanon—a famously aid-dependent country and a frontline state in the transnational confrontation between the United States and the Iran-aligned “Axis of Resistance”—is undergoing an unprecedented energy transition with the ostensible support of international donors.
Camillo Stubenberg, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell, studies the adoption of decentralized electricity technologies in Lebanon—a sector that USAID had been trying to support. In this Q&A with Century International fellow Zachary Cuyler, Stubenberg talks about the role of USAID in Lebanon’s solar boom and the possible impact of Trump’s aid cuts.
Zachary Cuyler: How much assistance did USAID provide to Lebanon? What’s been the overall impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID?
Camillo Stubenberg: We do not, at the moment, know how much less the United States is spending on aid to Lebanon, so it’s somewhat hard to know exactly what the effects of cuts will be. One leaked document suggests that only 29 percent of all USAID assistance to Lebanon has been cut. Others think it’s more. There are many unknowns—among them, what the ultimate disposition of USAID will be once the dust settles from the ongoing lawsuits challenging the Trump cuts.
However, it’s clear that the Trump cuts will have a substantial impact. The United States oscillates between being the largest and second-largest bilateral donor to Lebanon. In 2024, Washington spent around $329 million in the country. About half of American support goes to the Lebanese Armed Forces—this assistance comes through Department of State programs. On the development front, USAID is active in various sectors, from health care to water and sanitation, community development, agricultural development, support for businesses and industries, and—more recently—energy.
One recently laid-off project manager I spoke to joked, “You know what? The only negative impact of the cuts is that all the people like me are losing their jobs.” That is certainly the most immediate, palpable effect of the financing cuts: stop-work orders that, in many instances, translated into firings. But we’re not talking about just a few people losing jobs. With Lebanon’s entire economic output being something like $28 billion—which, by the way, is a third lower than it was before the economy imploded seven or eight years ago—the aid cuts could represent a small but significant macroeconomic shock. And for a certain segment of Lebanese society, that is a massive, immediate, and very scary effect. It’s visible in terms of employment of a certain kind of middle-to-upper-middle-class, educated set of Lebanese who were able to live a decent life because of the good salaries in the aid sector.
One level up, I think it remains to be seen how much this will impact institutions such as the Michel Daher Foundation and the Renee Moawad Foundation (which are economic development nonprofits that USAID supported), and, below them, the various municipalities and the mayors or heads of unions of municipalities who had good ties with USAID. USAID was kind of an intermediary between these projects, these communities, and American aid money. Its role and standing will likely be diminished: there might not be any more mediating to do.
Zachary: Your research focuses on Lebanon’s post-2021 energy transition. How do—or how did—USAID and other development organizations fit into this energy transition? And how do the Trump cuts affect the transition, if at all?
Camillo: Lebanon’s energy transition was born out of severe fuel shortages in 2021, and it was decentralized—it happened on a household level, rather than being centrally planned. Lebanon’s state electricity utility, Electricite du Liban (EDL) had struggled to supply sufficient power since the Lebanese Civil War, which ended in 1990. A system of private neighborhood generators emerged to meet the gap. Under this “dual” energy regime, citizens relied on a cheap but ineffective state utility on the one hand, and functional but very expensive private generators on the other.
This system collapsed in 2021 when fuel shortages disrupted power generation both by EDL power plants and by the private generators. What ensued was an almost total blackout, since both sources of electricity were based on a functioning fossil fuel supply chain. Households scrambled to find an alternative, and solar power became the country’s hottest commodity.
Private, small-scale solar entrepreneurs led this shift. Almost overnight, solar panels proliferated, and households became independent of both the state grid and private generators. However, this emancipation from the old “dual” energy regime brought new constraints and connections. What were previously collective questions became intimate. In my dissertation I describe this as life under the patronage of the sun. This change not only restructured how families went about their daily life (“we only run the washing machine on sunny days”) but also affected the way companies went about their business. Industries that had “solarized” their operations were now organizing their processes according to the rhythm of the sun. For instance, one food producer cancelled night shifts because it was more cost-effective to only operate when electricity was effectively free, during the day. Quite old, preindustrial temporal and spatial patterns of energy usage returned to both daily life and the broader political economy.
Lebanon’s energy landscape has changed dramatically, but not because of the intervention of international aid agencies or the Lebanese government. The transition had previously revolved around foreign-funded pilot projects meant to demonstrate the decarbonization benefits of solar and to form the basis for future larger-scale policies. But the rapid adoption of off-grid solar systems was entirely driven by private households and businesses seeking to increase their energy security. And many of the Lebanese I’ve spoken to are quite proud of the grassroots nature of this transition.
Zachary: Given how much the energy transition in Lebanon was driven both by necessity and by Lebanese people’s responses to this very complex, overlapping set of crisis conditions, what kind of support did USAID actually provide? And who did USAID tend to partner with for these projects?
Camillo: Before the 2021 energy crisis, USAID was financing a handful of solar projects under the framework of its Community Support Program. Solar panels would be installed to support local concerns like schools, wells, or small businesses. In Baaloul, for instance, a program called Baladi tried to support local rural economies and provided a grant to install a solar-powered irrigation system. Donors might provide small grants to an olive press to get some solar panels. But these were pretty niche, sometimes gimmicky projects.
But with the financial and energy crises, donors—including USAID—were dumbfounded as to how to proceed. Sam Heller’s 2023 Century International report on Lebanese aid described how donors were increasingly reluctant to spend any money that would go directly to Lebanese institutions at the national level. But the energy crisis was on everyone’s mind, including among international staffers living in Lebanon.
The main USAID response to the Lebanese energy crisis was a project called Inara, or Innovation for Affordable and Renewable Energy for All, which began in 2021 with a $29 million grant for decentralized energy access at the municipal level. The idea was that Inara would improve small sections of the EDL grid rather than attempting to fix the whole thing. Thus, in contrast to previous plans of building one or several large new power plants on the coast that would reduce electricity shortages in the entire country, Inara proposed to build new generation capacity near certain target communities.
The project had two phases. The first “trial” case was the refurbishing of one of Lebanon’s oldest hydropower plants in Rechmaya. The surrounding villages would receive at least eight hours of electricity per day, up from about one hour per day. The second phase of the project foresaw the building of a seven-megawatt solar farm that would benefit a particular set of villages.
The idea definitely had appeal. It was a way to leverage the impact of relatively small renewable energy projects to make a significant difference for local beneficiaries: eight hours of electricity per day is much better than one. That localized benefit was important because, otherwise, the benefit of the new installations would be diluted across the country. If Inara had panned out, it would have been replicable, and the grid might have been rebuilt piece by piece.
But Inara faced many challenges and delays even before the stop-work order came from Washington early in 2025. Today, the Rechmaya plant has been fixed, but the second phase of the project was halted just when it was about to start the tendering process. That’s a real pity, because now we don’t know if Inara’s proposition of rebuilding the grid locally through this kind of patchwork approach is feasible.
Caption: An aerial view at dusk of the Mar Mikhael neighborhood near the port during a power outage on August 2, 2021, in Beirut. Source: Roudy Doumit/Getty Images
Zachary: So what went wrong?
Camillo: The reasons for Inara’s difficulties reveal quite a lot about both the general difficulties of doing energy projects in Lebanon as well as the specific challenges that come with the USAID approach.
First, working with EDL is difficult. The company has a well-earned reputation for being dysfunctional to the core—corrupt, politicized, and wildly inefficient. EDL has a complicated and politicized governance structure, and also lacks basic operational capacity. One Inara employee explained to me that they would have to pick up their counterparts to go to visit field sites and even had to supply basic materials such as printer paper because of the dire economic circumstances of EDL.
The second challenge was to get local communities to buy into the project. With Rechmaya, there was a lot of pushback from farmers who had been using the river’s water for the many years that the power plant had been broken. The repair of the hydropower plant by USAID meant that they could no longer control the flow of water into their orchards and fields. Inara also had a lot of trouble finding the right target community for the solar component of the project. The set of villages had to be the right size for the planned seven-megawatt solar plant, they had to get along with each other, and—importantly—the project had to exclude any Hezbollah-led municipalities. The search for a technically and politically feasible project within these parameters took much longer than expected. In the end, Inara settled on Deir El Ahmar, a Lebanese Forces stronghold in the northern Bekaa valley.
Beyond these challenges, donors and local Lebanese partners have long complained about coordination problems with USAID. The agency is isolated—literally and figuratively. Its offices are in the highly fortified embassy north of Beirut. And the agency is also known to be secretive. I remember the UNDP and other people saying they had “no idea what these guys are doing.” Lebanese ministries and other aid agencies made similar comments.
Zachary: You mention that the community Inara chose was a stronghold of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian party-militia that is a rival of Hezbollah. What role did American political aims play in planning aid? And what were the consequences of those aims?
Camillo: In terms of USAID policies—or its role as a source of patronage—it was a key goal not only to preserve the multi-sectarian character of Lebanon, but also—and the agency has openly said this—to counter Hezbollah’s narrative and influence.
The United States also doesn’t want to have some new infrastructure that USAID paid for covered with Hezbollah flags, or to have a Hezbollah mayor say, “We did that.” And Hezbollah wouldn’t want that either—it’s a two-way street. There were also legal considerations. It all added up to a lengthening of the USAID implementation process, which was already famously bureaucratic and complicated.
USAID is also clearly more comfortable working with organizations and companies that are politically oriented toward the West, and which might have investments in North America and Europe.
The upshot of all of this is that USAID assistance tends to go to predominantly Christian, Sunni, Druze, and mixed villages—not predominantly Shia villages where Hezbollah or its allies are in charge. You can imagine the types of perceptions this creates in Lebanon, which has so many political and sectarian divisions. Passing through the Beqaa Valley, I’ve seen USAID plaques—“Funded by the American People”—riddled with bullet holes. Targeted, presumably, in opposition to what people perceive as U.S. imperialism.
Zachary: Are there any silver linings to the cuts, or anything we can learn from them?
Camillo: In the broadest sense, these aid cuts are a net negative. Even if there was an argument for reducing U.S. assistance to Lebanon, the way the Trump administration did it was completely irresponsible. At the same time, the cuts do provide an opportunity to consider the structural flaws with the aid regime.
One flaw is that bureaucracy seriously dampened the impacts of aid. It’s still very unclear what the effects of the cuts will be on big energy sector projects. I’m personally tempted to say that this experience has shown how incredibly inefficient it is to spend money through aid agencies. Inara spent $29 million, and doesn’t have much to show for it. A lot of work was done—legal, strategic, political—aligning EDL with the local municipality, getting some kind of contractual security. This was all hard work for the people who did it. But for the actual end-beneficiaries, nothing happened. There’s an argument to be made that it would have been better just to transfer $29 million to households to defray the costs of solar panels or higher-quality batteries.
Still, a curious outcome of the halt of U.S. foreign aid is that there appears to be astonishingly little immediate, day-to-day impact. Critics of development assistance might see this as evidence supporting their argument that development aid is too inefficient. And both in Lebanese media and among people I talk to, there is also a sense of emancipation that comes with the USAID breakdown—a kind of opportunity to take one’s development trajectory back into one’s own hands. We will see how long this feeling of emancipation lasts and whether the new government can somehow pick up the momentum of Lebanon’s recent energy transition.
Header Image Caption: A 2021 file photo shows a solar installation in Beirut, Lebanon. Source: IMF Focus via Flikr, used with a creative commons license.
Tags: beirut, lebanon, environment, usaid