USAID’s funding largely leaves out the people it’s supposed to work for.
In 2021, USAID — the agency of the US government tasked with international development — disbursed $28.3 billion in foreign aid to an assortment of humanitarian causes ranging from hunger programs to medical treatment to education.
But how much good is this money doing? And is that money accomplishing as much as it could be?
The answer, it turns out, is much more difficult to find than you would think — and that’s a problem. USAID is one of the most consequential institutions in the world when it comes to aid for the poor.
Since the world’s resources aren’t unlimited, we have a “moral imperative to use evidence and data to ensure we get the most impact per dollar spent as possible,” says Anne Healy, former head of USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures.
Over the past two decades, researchers have become much better at determining whether a certain idea actually achieves intended goals. The focus on results — evaluating whether a program benefits people cost-effectively — has changed philanthropy and even the US government’s domestic programs.
In theory, USAID recognizes the importance of making sure their programs work. But in practice, it’s largely failing to do so.
Two USAID reviews, one by USAID’s office of the inspector general in 2019 and another commissioned by the agency in 2020, reveal two dismal facts: The agency gives out billions to programs that don’t achieve their intended expectations, and, worse, it’s not even sure of the impact of most of the money it gives in aid. Recent agency moves and statements suggest that USAID wants to fix this problem. Whether it can will determine the fate of billions of dollars — and the health and well-being of many millions around the world.
How USAID works
Since 1961, USAID has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into foreign aid, with the aim of delivering humanitarian assistance to millions globally. Foreign aid accounts for less than 1 percent of the US federal budget — far less than what most Americans think it does. But because of the federal budget’s massive size, even 1 percent is much larger than all of private philanthropy for global development in a given year combined. USAID spends tens of billions of dollars a year on global development programs, the largest categories of which are health, humanitarian assistance, and economic development.
The agency, which works in over 100 countries, usually doesn’t implement programs directly, but partners with different organizations, including NGOs, universities, and faith-based and community groups. Its yearly grants and contracts comprised on average almost $18 billion over the last decade.
When looking into USAID’s effectiveness, it’s important to note that other US government priorities will influence how money is allocated even before USAID itself can make any decisions. As an example, USAID presents its budget requests within five strategic foreign aid objectives developed by the State Department: humanitarian assistance, peace and security, democratic governance, economic growth, and social services.
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Ben Curtis/AP
Foreign aid has of course been deployed by US administrations to advance their geopolitical goals. But that complicated record doesn’t mean aid can’t do a lot of good. USAID has been a major contributor to polio eradication in over 100 countries. PEPFAR, the US government’s anti-HIV/AIDS initiative, has led to an estimated 20 percent lower mortality rate in countries that received its aid, and has saved millions of lives. USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, which funds innovative projects around the world, has funded a handful of highly cost-effective programs in global health and education. USAID has contributed to many other effective global health programs, including developing meningitis vaccines that prevented an estimated 1 million cases.
US foreign aid isn’t working as well as it should
But those success stories can obscure an uncomfortable truth: We don’t really know whether most of US foreign aid is improving anyone’s lives.
To understand why this is, let’s look at USAID’s own evaluations of its programs. In-house reports on the impact of USAID programs abide by the usual academic standards — they need adequate sample sizes and valid control groups, among other criteria. The agency uses a checklist to monitor whether each impact evaluation meets these different criteria, and gives them a quality designation. These evaluations are only one way USAID monitors performance — for other programs, they instead monitor processes or use qualitative work — and they are meant to assess whether or not USAID-funded programs are achieving milestones, such as lowering malnutrition.
But to prove success, the evaluations have to be high-quality, and most of them are not.
“USAID is failing to generate rigorous evidence on which of its programs do or do not work,” wrote three former USAID administrators in an article for the Wilson Center in 2021.
For one thing, USAID’s own efforts to assess its programs’ impact leave a lot to be desired. Most of the agency’s impact evaluation reports are not high or even acceptable quality by the agency’s own standards of rigor.
The aforementioned internal review from 2020 revealed that most USAID-conducted impact evaluations of programs didn’t include one or more key quality elements like sample size, research/evaluation hypotheses, missing data, and other key components to understanding whether the results of an evaluation should be accepted as valid or not.
46 percent of the reports either didn’t have a comparison or control group, or didn’t provide enough statistics on a control group to be accurate.
Only 3 percent met USAID’s highest standards of quality. A bad impact evaluation is a waste of money, and it can even lead to funding going to ineffective programs.
USAID also seemingly keeps paying out contracts to projects that don’t even work at a most basic level. A 2019 study by USAID’s inspector general of 81 USAID grants found that over 40 percent of programs achieved only half of expectations, which meant they self-reported that they didn’t achieve much of what they’d been paid to do by the grant.
The inspector general’s report outlined major concerns with even the awards that did achieve results. For example, one program reported achieving 110 percent of expected results for preventing and managing malnutrition in West Africa. But this was only because they were measuring radio outreach — people who heard about the program on the radio — as a “success”: Most people were not actually receiving malnutrition services, which was the real goal.
According to a USAID spokesperson, the agency has begun “addressing many of the gaps and shortcomings identified” in the 2019 report, as well as some of the recommendations from the 2020 report, including updating its impact evaluation guidance and requiring cost analysis in impact evaluations.
Additionally, USAID is not using outside evidence in the way it could be. While USAID has standards and processes for conducting evaluations, it has fewer processes to ensure evidence from elsewhere is being used, experts told me.
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Jekesai Njikizana/AFP via Getty Images
For example, let’s say a university study finds strong evidence that a certain approach to reducing childhood malnutrition is cost-effective. USAID could do more to consider this approach, even if it’s not research it conducted itself.
USAID doesn’t have a monopoly on finding evidence for program effectiveness. There are research institutions, think tanks, and policy organizations in the countries in which USAID works. Having a more systematic way to compile, outsource, and use the evaluations of entities that are already working in relevant areas would help make sure that program and funding decisions at USAID are supported by the best available evidence, said Healy.
USAID is potentially missing out on funding many effective organizations
Zooming out a bit, a systemic problem that likely contributes to USAID’s ineffectiveness is the way it doles out grants.
Unfortunately, the way USAID’s grant structures are set up now means there’s not much incentive for contractors to produce results. The most common form of USAID grants are what’s known as cost-plus grants, which basically means a contractor draws up a list of their expected costs and USAID pays them — regardless of whether they achieve results.
An alternative form of grant, fixed-amount grants, pay contractors when they achieve predetermined milestones and results. These are better, but they’re not yet widely deployed in government grantmaking. USAID deems fixed-amount awards most appropriate when the work has milestones that can be priced with reasonable certainty. USAID might not use them when a project lacks this information, and they also require ceding some direct government oversight of grants.
The other problem with the USAID grants process is that it’s so complicated to navigate that legacy government contractors who know how to write grant applications have a major edge, experts told me. (To be sure, these problems exist across international granting organizations, and both small organizations and USAID administrators have acknowledged the high barriers to entry and importance of greater inclusion.)
Eliya Zulu, executive director of the African Institute for Development Policy, a research and policy organization based in Kenya and Malawi, described the process of putting together a successful USAID bid for his organization as a “huge nightmare.” The process included overtime work, over 150 support documents, and staffing that smaller organizations simply don’t have. A lot of legacy organizations have business development units focused on such tasks, he said, while a worthy but smaller organization might not have the same support.
This leads to a situation where the vast majority of USAID money is going to only 75 organizations, and only 6 percent of grants are given to organizations based in USAID-recipient countries. While legacy contractors aren’t inherently ineffective, the complicated process means smaller organizations, especially those based in the Global South, are often left out of awards, when even a small grant could make a big difference.
This means thousands of innovative Global South-led and -based organizations — groups which may be more effective because they understand local context better and interact with local policy actors to make sure effective programs continue after USAID leaves — are not receiving funding because of bureaucratic issues.
USAID recognizes that this way of doing business is a problem. During USAID’s annual small business conference last year, USAID administrator Samantha Power stated how the limited number of contractors “holds back healthy competition, limits our exposure to new approaches, robs small businesses of the chance to gain valuable experience, and doesn’t make the best possible use of valuable taxpayer dollars.”
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The most effective aid, said Zulu, will be evidence-backed and in equitable partnership with governments and organizations that ensure it’s focused on the needs of the people it is going to — and that’s not what’s happening now.
Signs of a shift
The shift that needs to happen at USAID is so simple it seems silly to say out loud: The agency should fund things that are proven to work, and stop funding things that are proven not to work. But saying it is one thing. Doing it is another.
One thing USAID could do is focus on the evidence for different sectors about effective uses of money, said Ruth Levine, CEO of IDinsight, a global development data analytics and advisory organization. “Really importantly, what we have learned about things that absolutely do not work, don’t do those again.” (Disclosure: I worked at IDinsight from 2017 to 2020.)
A good start would be revisiting its process of awarding grants.
Experts told me a way to improve USAID’s record is to give out more fixed-amount awards. These pay contractors when they reach pre-negotiated milestones, meaning they’re more likely to pay for outcomes and results than other types of grant.
Fixed-amount awards currently account for only about 8 percent of USAID’s grants, but could and hopefully will be expanded — in March, a senior official announced plans for more fixed-amount awards and work with more contractors from the Global South. There’s also a lot of flexibility in how they’re implemented. They could potentially, for example, have components that pay for results, but also account for startup costs for a newer organization.
Walter Kerr, the director of Unlock Aid, a global development innovation coalition, noted that in addition to incentivizing based on outcomes and results, these awards are a “great way to mitigate against concerns that some members of Congress have around fraud, waste, and abuse because you only pay for what you get.”
There’s also awarding more money to smaller organizations and those based in the Global South. There have been green shoots here: The New Partnerships Initiative, USAID’s plan to diversify its partners, has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to “new and underutilized partners” since it began in 2019. Meanwhile, in an exchange at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting in May, Power reiterated USAID’s goals to reduce administrative burden in granting and send 25 percent of foreign assistance to local organizations.
Related to such a reform could be a reorientation toward doling out more direct grants to governments instead of middlemen. Governments have more mechanisms in place than an outside contractor for identifying their problems, finding the people who need help, and continuing programs after USAID leaves. The government actually provides services; it can often procure, for example, health equipment more cost-effectively than USAID buying it.
But less than 4 percent of US foreign aid is channeled through governments. Compare that with a country like Japan, which channels nearly half of its foreign aid this way. In the few cases where bilateral government aid has been tried by the US, it has been effective.
The US has existing grant mechanisms it could expand to increase direct bilateral aid, including the Economic Support Fund, which is used to provide money directly to countries of strategic significance. Experts told me, however, that reforming aid to go directly to governments would be a heavier and longer-term lift than, for example, more fixed-amount awards or support for local NGOs.
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Hoshang Hashimi/AFP via Getty Images
Beyond the mechanics of grant-making, USAID could look to the example of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, & Development Office, which has an empowered chief economist and an office that conducts independent reviews of evidence for large spending decisions, and then presents recommendations to senior policymakers. USAID has already shown signs of moving in this direction, such as Power’s announcement last year to start an expanded chief economist office and a behavioral science unit.
And there’s work already happening within the agency that USAID can foreground and scale up. The Development Innovation Ventures office (DIV), for instance, has been a promising testing ground for funding effective programs. DIV invests in potentially high-impact projects, looks for evidence of impact, and pays for results. It has funded new, Global South-based partners, and has funded interventions that have proven to be highly cost-effective at preventing childhood diarrhea, reducing road deaths and injuries, and more.
DIV accounts for only about 0.1 percent of USAID’s budget, said Healy, who was a leader of DIV, but that belies the potential impact of adopting some of its approaches. “The real opportunity for DIV,” Healy told me, “is influencing the 99.9 percent of USAID’s other spending.”
These moves are promising signals of a shift away from business as usual and an embrace of more evidence-based approaches. Which is good, because the time for change is long overdue. USAID has for years identified its own need for reform, but little change has happened. Evidence has told us so much more about how to help the world’s neediest. It’s time for that attitude to sweep through the halls of American diplomacy.
Biden gets the blowback. But bad local decisions have helped drive prices of housing, energy, and everything else higher.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that inflation has so heavily weighed down the Biden administration. The buck famously stops at the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk, and when a buck doesn’t buy what it used to, that’s a problem for the president.
But many of the worst bottlenecks making the pandemic economic recovery so painful were put in place by political actors much lower down the food chain, from governors to city councilors to everyday citizens.
Two years of soaring prices once thought to be fleeting effects of the initial Covid-19 shock have reached their most painful point yet. The most recent consumer price report shows an increase of slightly over 9 percent from June 2021, the biggest yearly increase in four decades. The cost surge has been driven primarily by a lack of housing and an energy crisis that has notably rippled into food prices, along with lingering Covid-related supply chain problems.
The Federal Reserve’s 0.75 percent interest rate increase this week is its latest attempt to control inflation overall, but in many of the sectors hit worst by rising costs, delays, and shortages, the federal government has a relatively small role to play in getting supply to catch up to demand.
In our federalized system, it may make more sense to blame your state and local government or even your neighbors, not President Biden, for out-of-control costs in housing and energy or supply chain pain in our logistics infrastructure. That’s because most of the time, the US tasks lower levels of government with responsibility for infrastructure and land use — and the decisions made at those levels in the past are contributing to rising prices today.
State and local jurisdictions, not the Fed or the feds, determine how much housing is built and where, when to permit cheap clean energy sources and vital energy transmission lines, and whether to expand ports and logistics infrastructure. Across the country, local legislators, executives, and public authorities have declined to spend more to improve economic capacity, or placed additional hurdles in the way of badly needed new development.
Here are three big parts of the economy undergoing inflation stress that local officials have made worse, and what it would take to reverse course.
- Energy and transportation
In the US and globally, energy has been perhaps the single most painful contributor to inflation. Surging energy costs hit Americans not only at the gas pump, but in nearly every other part of their budgets. Oil-based fertilizers have grown scarce, making food more expensive, while rising fuel costs hit transportation for basically every consumer good, and energy-intensive heavy industries pass on higher input costs to consumers.
The problem ultimately stems from disruptions in various fossil fuel commodity markets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent diplomatic backlash cut off supplies of oil and natural gas from one of the world’s largest producers. Those markets were already tight before the war because producers thought it would take longer for economies to reopen after the initial Covid-19 shutdown and ramped down production.
As a result, countries less dependent on fossil fuels, like France, with its extensive nuclear energy infrastructure, have seen much less dramatic overall inflation. Americans have felt the energy price pain mostly at the gas pump, which is not surprising since, among its peer countries, it has the lowest rate of electric vehicle adoption and the lowest rate of public transit usage.
The Biden administration has tried to visibly fight the cost of fossil fuels by releasing stockpiles from the strategic petroleum reserve, and has framed legislation to promote electric vehicles and move away from fossil fuels as inflation-fighting measures. But the ultimate decision-making authority over US energy lies with states and localities.
The power authorities that oversee much of the energy market are creations of state governments, and decisions like whether and where to build new transmission lines and electric vehicle charging stations lie with municipalities.
As a result, local actors have stymied the transition away from fossil fuels, leaving the country more exposed to sudden shocks in prices, said Samantha Gross, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security and Climate Initiative and author of a report on local obstacles to renewable energy.
She pointed to endless delays on projects like the Grain Belt Express, a transmission line that would bring dirt-cheap Kansas wind energy across the plains to the Midwest and connect to the East Coast grid. Missouri legislators, among others, have been almost implacably hostile to the project. Local officials have deferred to local landowners, declining to approve the Express and instead pursuing legislation that would raise eminent domain compensation costs for building it and give lower-level county officials more discretion to cancel the project.
It’s not just red-state officials who have delayed electrification and kept the country dependent on fossil fuels, even as the cost of those fuels spikes. Maine voters shot down a 2021 referendum to build transmission lines to hook New England up to Canada’s ample existing supply of renewable hydroelectric power, leaving the region more dependent on fossil fuel generation. Opposition was led by local conservationists and hunters who objected to cutting down forests to make way for the lines. They found themselves strange bedfellows with incumbent fossil energy interests, who bankrolled efforts to kill the project.
Local opposition and procedural delay mean “you get projects that make sense financially and from an environmental perspective, that even already have private investment, are still really, really hard to get sited and built,” Gross said. As a result, she said, “We’re going to end up with a slower and more expensive energy transition than we need, and that’s a drag on the economy on a continuing basis for years, decades maybe.”
- Housing
One of the largest drivers of national inflation has been housing costs. Shelter accounts for about one-third of the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, one of the most important measures of inflation. This spring, housing costs accelerated the fastest they have in more than 30 years, even as the Federal Reserve had been raising interest rates for months, which should slow down demand for homes.
Local officials ultimately have much more control over housing production than the Fed or Biden. Home building is constrained by three main factors: national credit conditions, supply chains, and local land use policy, explained Paul Williams, a housing economics expert and founder of the Center for Public Enterprise, a new think tank focused on public investment. Of those three factors, only one — land use policy — is truly within the remit of elected officials, and local leaders have almost all of the power. The local level is simply “where policy happens,” said Williams.
Through zoning regulations that dictate how much housing can be built and where, local governments determine how much the housing market can respond to new demand with corresponding supply. The majority of land in some of the most prosperous and rapidly growing cities, like Seattle or North Carolina’s Research Triangle, has been zoned exclusively for single-family homes, restricting housing supply even as demand in those areas rises.
Pre-pandemic, the hottest housing markets in coastal metros like the Bay Area and New York City were among the most restricted by zoning, sending house prices skyrocketing. When Covid hit and many of the well-paid professionals who had previously been tied to jobs in San Francisco or Manhattan shifted en masse to remote work, the price pressure that had been concentrated in a few nodes spread throughout the entire country. Simultaneously, a strong labor market led to a burst of long-delayed household formation by millennials who are finally able to move out of shared apartments or parents’ basements and might be starting their own families.
Local governments have only recently and haltingly begun to reverse course to encourage housing production. California, home to much of the country’s most in-demand residential real estate, passed landmark zoning reform bills last year, but some of its largest markets like Los Angeles have blown deadlines to develop plans to actually allocate more land for housing, and implementation has barely begun. In New York, meanwhile, a promising effort to include similar apartment legalization and transit-oriented development schemes in the state budget was torpedoed in the face of opposition from suburban politicians like Democratic gubernatorial primary candidate Tom Suozzi.
While there are some federal tools for addressing housing costs at Biden’s disposal, such as the newly revived Obama-era fair housing rule, they don’t radically move the needle on supply. Ultimately, these tools can work by offering carrots and sticks to local governments, who remain the final decision-makers.
The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, can only cool the market by raising interest rates to make the job market worse. That could have the effect of scattering young households, forcing people to move back in with parents or roommates, and further discouraging housing production. The most direct route to lowering housing costs, most people’s biggest expense, runs through state houses, city halls, and zoning board meetings.
- Logistics infrastructure
Along with a housing crisis and energy price spikes, supply chain chaos has been one of the defining aspects of the post-Covid inflationary moment. The Biden administration has been working to solve this: It passed an infrastructure bill that will funnel lots of money into projects like port expansion and has launched a supply chain disruption task force to tackle backups of physical goods.
But as in the cases of housing and energy, many of these efforts fall apart because of local land-use fights, said K.N. Gunalan, former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
As Gunalan observed, “incentives at the local level don’t always align with national incentives.” He pointed to the recent decision by California authorities to abandon a decades-old plan to expand Highway 710, the main trucking corridor leading out of the country’s busiest port in Los Angeles and toward the intermodal transfer stations that move imported goods along to the rest of the country.
Local opponents have slowed down new logistics facilities in deep-red Utah as well, where a coalition has fought against an “inland” port that would take pressure off overloaded West Coast hubs.
The Highway 710 expansion would have imposed heavy costs on local communities, which would lose land and suffer worse air quality. But the absence of any alternative plan to get stuff out of the Los Angeles ports will lock in current congestion.
Local fragmentation creates national inflation
When all politics is local, as the cliche goes, stakeholders can only see local costs and not national benefits, so it’s a lot easier to say “no” than “yes.”
American deference to local jurisdictions on crucial land use and permitting questions has become a kind of meta-bottleneck, one that makes it impossible to straighten out the actual bottlenecks driving inflation. Local opponents of new infrastructure investments may have good reason to object to big projects. But right now, local quality-of-life concerns are not in balance with the need for new investment in housing and infrastructure, so stakeholders double down on procedural delays or throw up their hands and avoid the problem altogether.
If America is going to accommodate growth without crippling inflation — let alone avoid the worst losses from climate change — new housing, port expansions, power transmission lines, and other projects to build the nation’s infrastructure all have to go somewhere. That somewhere will often be in the middle of existing communities and across local jurisdictional lines.
These efforts require a level of coordination and prioritization policymakers haven’t practiced in decades. The American system of government splits responsibility for some of the most crucial parts of the economy across countless small fiefdoms and levels of government, which often have competing interests. Breaking the local economic logjams that are sending prices higher will require elevating and expediting the planning process for projects that could make a difference.
Alex Yablon writes about economics and public policy. He is a fellow with the Jain Family Institute.
More than 2,000 species worldwide are considered lost. Could finding them avert extinctions?
AUSTIN, Texas — The room looked like something inside a haunted house. Rows and rows of metal storage shelves held thousands of glass jars filled with snakes and lizards and frogs, each labeled with a catalog number, like a library of the dead.
I was here at the University of Texas at Austin’s herpetology collection on the first day of July to see one particular animal: the Blanco blind salamander.
This creature is not exactly what you would call charismatic. Measuring a few inches long, the salamander has no eyes and translucent skin, with a trapezoidal head and external gills that look like feathery antlers. And after sitting in a jar of alcohol for several decades, the specimen looked like a bit of amphibian jerky.
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Matthew Busch for Vox
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Matthew Busch for Vox
Yet the Blanco blind salamander, a species native to Texas, is one of the collection’s most prized species.
Not only is this animal rare, but it’s also missing. No one has seen the Blanco blind salamander in the wild for more than 70 years. No one knows whether it still exists. The specimen in UT Austin’s collection is the only known representative of the species, Eurycea robusta, on the planet.
The Blanco blind salamander is one of more than 2,000 kinds of animals, plants, and fungi worldwide that scientists call “lost species.” Unlike the more widely known categories of endangered and threatened — which describe wildlife at risk of extinction — the category “lost” refers to species that scientists haven’t seen for at least a decade or, by other definitions, more than 50 years.
The list, compiled by the environmental group Re:wild, which has a whole program dedicated to lost species, includes a number of odd organisms that tend to lack the popularity of, say, pandas and tigers. There’s a golden mole from South Africa, for example, that has been missing since 1936, and a trapdoor spider from Portugal (last seen in the early 1900s). There’s even a lost mushroom — the Big Puma Fungus — which no one has seen in the temperate forests of South America for three decades.
Lost is a bad state to be in. These species are often at risk of extinction, and governments have trouble protecting what they don’t know exists. Case in point: Earlier this year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided not to classify the Blanco blind salamander as threatened or endangered, justifying its decision, in part, by claiming that it might already be extinct.
Finding lost species is not only a strategy to avert extinction, but it can also yield benefits for human communities. Every species has lessons to teach us about how ecosystems work and how they sustain us. Failing to find and study them is “tantamount to burning all the books in a library that you haven’t read yet,” said Andy Gluesenkamp, director of conservation at the San Antonio Zoo’s Center for Research and Conservation.
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Scott Stephen Ball for Vox
Which brings us back to that drab-looking salamander in Austin. Gluesenkamp, an eccentric, Ace-Ventura-type amphibian lover, is leading an expedition to find one in the wild — and I traveled to Texas to join him. Our hunt took me inside the Earth (literally) and into one of its strangest ecosystems, where, I learned, it’s very easy for things to get lost.
A hidden world deep below one of America’s largest cities
The last time anyone saw a Blanco blind salamander in the wild was in 1951. A gravel company operating just north of San Marcos, Texas, dug up a spring in the dry bed of the Blanco River. Some water oozed out and in it were several pale-white salamanders.
As the story goes, workers put four of the amphibians in a plastic bucket. A heron later flew by and ate two. One got lost. And the last individual was identified as a new species and eventually made its way to a jar at UT Austin.
No one has seen one of these salamanders alive since.
One possible reason is that it has already gone extinct (more than 40 percent of known amphibians are currently threatened with extinction worldwide). Another is that it’s just incredibly hard to spot, said Gluesenkamp, a talkative scientist who formerly served as the state herpetologist in Texas. “It’s got this reputation for being unfindable,” he said.
Just consider where the Blanco blind salamander lives: deep underground in the Edwards Aquifer, one of the least accessible places on Earth. The aquifer is a complex underground structure made of caverns and porous rock that stretches more than 4,000 square miles across south-central Texas. It boasts a remarkable amount of life, including crustaceans, a handful of eyeless salamanders, and blind fish (one of which is also a lost species). It’s also a vital resource for the region, providing drinking water for nearly 2 million Texans.
The only way for people to enter the aquifer is through caves. Lucky for me, spelunking is Gluesenkamp’s specialty.
One morning in early July, I met Gluesenkamp about 45 minutes north of San Antonio near Honey Creek Cave, perhaps the longest known cave in Texas, which forms a natural opening to the Edwards Aquifer. The bed of his black Toyota Tacoma was filled with wetsuits, masks, and waterproof headlamps. We were going cave snorkeling.
It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. We swam through dark caverns in clear water under a ceiling of stalactites. In just over an hour, we saw a few blind salamanders (though not the missing ones), a red crawfish, and large colonies of long-legged arachnids that moved like shadows across the wall.
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Scott Stephen Ball for Vox
While it might sound icky that salamanders live in the water we drink, they tend to signal that it’s clean, Gluesenkamp told me. Their skin is semi-permeable, which makes them sensitive to pollution, such as runoff from farms or septic systems. “They depend on the same water that we do,” he said.
Cave snorkeling is tough work. Limestone rock releases carbon dioxide and the cave’s structure can restrict airflow, making it hard to breathe. Within minutes of exploring the cave, I felt myself gasping for air — not a great feeling when you’re deep inside the Earth, breathing through a snorkel.
Spelunking is also not the best method for trying to find a Blanco blind salamander, Gluesenkamp said. There aren’t many of these natural openings near San Marcos, where the lost species likely lives, Gluesenkamp said. And it’s possible that the salamanders live in pockets of water even deeper underground.
Fortunately, there are ways to bypass caves entirely.
Catching animals as they waterslide out of the ground
The Edwards Aquifer doesn’t have many entrances that humans can squeeze into, but it does have plenty of exits — cracks and holes in the ground where water sometimes gushes out.
That’s one thing that makes San Antonio and Austin bearable in the sweltering summer: In some parts of the aquifer, the water is under so much pressure that it shoots to the surface, forming artesian cold springs (which are enjoyed by bathers).
This geological wonder makes searching for aquifer animals a lot easier. Springs and wells often blast critters to the surface, where scientists like Ben Schwartz and Ben Hutchins can capture them in nets.
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Scott Stephen Ball for Vox
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Scott Stephen Ball for Vox
I met them early one morning at Texas State University to see how this works. The day before, Schwartz and Hutchins, aquifer biologists, had placed a mesh net over an artesian well on campus. When I arrived it was full of tiny crustaceans. These organisms were all eyeless and transparent, with long, gangly legs and antennae. (Those appendages help them navigate and find food in the dark, Hutchins explained.)
Hutchins and Schwartz, also known as “The Bens,” aren’t looking for lost species, but they’ve found dozens of new ones — all of them small crustaceans. That’s one big draw to the study of invertebrates, they said, which might otherwise seem dull. “We can find [new species] any old day,” Hutchins told me.
Their work contributes to a much bigger scientific mission of understanding what does and does not exist in Earth’s many ecosystems. Documenting life anywhere, Hutchins told me, creates the foundation from which researchers can ask biology’s biggest questions, such as how different animals evolve and why some environments have more diversity than others.
Hunting for lost species is part of that same endeavor. Right now, we know close to nothing about the Blanco blind salamander, such as where it lives and what it contributes to the aquifer. Finding and studying this species could help answer all kinds of questions about this unique ecosystem and life in extreme environments.
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Scott Stephen Ball for Vox
If only Gluesenkamp could find one. Scientists have yet to capture the salamander in nets near springs or wells, possibly because these water sources aren’t in the right spots. The salamander is also rare, Gluesenkamp said, which means you’d have to sample huge amounts of water for an individual to appear, like looking for a hair tie in a warehouse of Olympic-sized pools by grabbing buckets of water.
But he has one other idea.
If you can’t find an animal, look for the clues it leaves behind
It was close to 100 degrees when Gluesenkamp and I arrived at our destination: a rusty metal pipe in the middle of a ranch on the outskirts of San Marcos.
“This is the portal,” said Gluesenkamp, who was wearing a floppy camo sunhat.
He meant that somewhat literally: The pipe is a 360-foot well that connects to the Edwards Aquifer. As he tapped the side of it, the well produced an echo that sounded like a toy laser gun firing in quick succession.
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Scott Stephen Ball for Vox
I was here to see Gluesenkamp’s most promising idea for finding the Blanco blind salamander in the wild: a sampling method called eDNA.
All animals, including us, are constantly releasing DNA into the environment, such as when they sneeze or shed dead skin and hair. This is how detectives might find a suspect from a crime scene; they’ll collect DNA and cross-reference it with a criminal database.
It’s also how scientists can find missing species. Environmental DNA, or eDNA, is an increasingly common technique for detecting bits of an animal’s genome in small samples of air, soil, or water. After collecting DNA, scientists search for a match in databases containing the DNA of known species.
Scientists have used eDNA to detect invasive species in rivers and ancient human remains in dirt. They’ve also used it to argue that the Loch Ness Monster likely doesn’t exist.
Now, Gluesenkamp, a real-life species detective, is using this approach to search for the Blanco blind salamander. This pipe is one of several dozen wells across Texas that he’s hoping to test over the next 15 months, with financial support from Re:wild.
Wearing blue surgical gloves to prevent contamination, he carefully lowered a plastic tube into the well to collect water, which he then forced through a small, circular filter designed to capture DNA. He’ll soon send that filter to a company in the UK for analysis.
The idea is pretty simple: If the missing salamander lives anywhere near this well, some of its DNA should be floating around in the water. Gluesenkamp isn’t looking for the salamander so much as he’s searching for the clues it leaves behind, which are theoretically more abundant.
“It’s a very efficient approach,” Gluesenkamp said. It’s also less intrusive than traditional sampling methods, he added. All you need is a little bit of water. (Most wells in Texas are privately owned, he said, and it’s easier to convince land owners to let you collect a small amount of water than to install and frequently check nets or traps.)
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Scott Stephen Ball for Vox
But there’s a catch. Scientists don’t actually have any DNA for the Blanco blind salamander — it deteriorated decades ago when the only known specimen was first preserved. Instead, Gluesenkamp will be looking for genes associated with the broader group of species to which the Blanco blind salamander belongs. If the analysis reveals DNA that’s similar to blind cave salamanders (but doesn’t quite match any other known species), that would signal that the Blanco blind salamander exists, he said.
DNA evidence on its own isn’t enough to prove, without a doubt, that an animal has been rediscovered, according to Re:wild. You need physical evidence. So if and when Gluesenkamp gets a hit through eDNA in a particular well or spring, he’ll lay traps to try and capture a physical specimen. Only then would he be able to say with certainty that Eurycea robusta has been found.
What happens when a species is rediscovered?
Lost animals are rediscovered all the time. In the last few months, for example, someone in Vermont found an orchid that hadn’t been seen for more than a century and scientists announced they discovered a type of crayfish in Alabama that was presumed extinct.
Why do we care? Because finding them can prove valuable.
In 2017, after a park ranger in Guatemala spotted a lost species of salamander on the edge of a reserve, Re:wild and other environmental groups helped expand the park’s boundaries to protect the species (which is critically endangered). Two years later, researchers rediscovered a rare rabbit-size deer in Vietnam, and have since developed a program to conserve it, including removing hunting snares in the forest.
The impact of finding the Blanco blind salamander would be a bit more complicated. It could prompt the US Fish and Wildlife Service to review the species again, Gluesenkamp said, which could, in turn, cause them to classify the salamander as federally threatened. (That might not mean much because the salamander shares habitat with other threatened species — so, in a sense, it’s already under protection.)
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Eric Gay/AP
More than anything, finding the Blanco blind salamander would be a reason to be hopeful. The species is not only an indicator of water quality, but it’s also likely the top predator in the aquifer. “They’re the great white sharks of their ecosystem,” Gluesenkamp said. Knowing they’re alive and well would mean the aquifer — on which so many people and other species depend — is more or less healthy.
These animals are also just metal and a reminder that we share our planet with some seriously cool critters. Blanco blind salamanders might not have eyes, but they do have motion-sensing organs that help them find food. They have no pigment in their skin. And they’re experts at conserving energy, spending most of their time in complete stillness. “If you’re into salamanders, it’s the coolest of the bunch,” said Gluesenkamp.
It would be a shame to write off this species without an exhaustive search, Gluesenkamp said. While the planet is, indeed, losing dozens or even hundreds of animals to extinction each year, many of which science has yet to even document, sometimes, animals aren’t gone — they’re just missing.
Mandy Nguyen contributed reporting to this article.