Looking Back and Moving Forward: What DFC’s 2025 Portfolio Reveals About What Comes Next

In the wake of its recent reauthorization, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) boasts expanded authorities and ambition. But recently released data underscores that FY2025 was a year of transition for the agency—with a large drop in new commitments after years of growth. Even with greater potential investment opportunities on the horizon, DFC will have work to do to build a pipeline of projects. We dug into DFC’s updated active projects list (as we wait for a more comprehensive data drop) to see what we could glean about changes in DFC’s portfolio in FY2025, which spanned the tail end of the Biden administration and the beginning of the Trump administration, and pose some questions about the agency’s future.

Will political risk insurance and direct equity investments comprise a growing share of DFC deals?

While DFC celebrated nearly $12 billion in commitments in FY2024—a new highwater mark—the agency’s latest data indicates just over $3.5 billion in new commitments in FY2025, buoyed in part by a large debt swap deal in Ecuador.

With many fewer deals inked, political risk insurance (PRI) competed for the largest share of DFC’s commitment by exposure. As we’ve noted previously, few other DFIs have a comparable offering, and PRI has been used to help facilitate a number of complex debt swaps.

Direct equity investments continue to comprise just a sliver of DFC’s commitments due, in part, to illogical budget scoring treatment. DFC is in the process of setting up a revolving fund that will enable the agency to retain returns from these deals, which should, over time, relieve some budget pressure.

What will new country income classifications mean for DFC’s commitments?

In recent years, we’ve remarked that lower-middle-income countries seemed to be DFC’s sweet spot. FY25 netted more commitments (by project and value) in upper-middle-income countries—though much of that growth stems from increased investment in Ukraine.

Under DFC’s reauthorization, the agency will rely on new income categories; you can toggle to see our estimate of how that would translate. In short, it obfuscates any distinction between investments in countries below the World Bank International Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s Graduation Discussion Income Threshold, which, as of July 2025, sits at $7,855 GNI per capita. And DFC’s revised statute will enable investment in far more high-income countries—which had previously been quite limited—subject to certain requirements and restrictions, so that’s certainly a category to watch moving forward.

Can we get a better measure of development impact?

DFC’s Impact Quotient (IQ) is used to assess the anticipated development impact of projects. The IQ framework was developed during the first Trump administration and has been revised since. While well-intentioned, we find the publicly available IQ score tiers—which reflect broad categories without supporting details or documentation—not to be very meaningful. Reauthorization paved the way for a revamp. We hope any new measurement tool will offer greater differentiation paired with additional narrative description. Strategic and developmental certainly aren’t mutually exclusive objectives, but they also aren’t synonymous. In addition, we’d be keen to see DFC move closer toward its goal of using IQ’s successor framework to track projects throughout their lifecycle—encouraging accountability (and perhaps helping to ground) the ex-ante scores.

On a separate, but related note, the IQ tiers for the FY25 projects (and some from FY24) are compiled based on public information summary PDFs. We manually entered the data for those we could easily track down and for which sufficient information was available. This shouldn’t be necessary. Both the URL and the IQ tier should be included in the database to start. DFC should also more regularly update its full downloadable dataset, which includes additional fields but currently only covers transactions through the end of FY2024.

Will DFC’s new map look much like its old map?

As noted above, DFC’s reauthorization opens the door to investment across much of the globe. Of late, we’ve seen particular energy focused on investing in Ukraine—including the launch of a high-profile US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. DFC also announced a new regional managing director based in Jakarta, highlighting the growth potential for DFC in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, the Western Hemisphere has been a key hub for DFC since the start.

Will DFC’s deals in finance and investment rise again?

With few new commitments, it would be unwise to draw big conclusions from a breakdown of projects by sector. But while DFC has typically gone big in finance and investment deals, numbers appear to be down—though we’re missing details from several redacted projects in Ukraine. Given the administration’s interest in securing critical mineral supply chains and advancing energy security, we’ll be interested to see whether we witness faster growth in related sectors in the coming quarters.

On the heels of a tumultuous year, DFC entered the second quarter of FY2026 with Senate-confirmed leadership and reauthorization secured. We’re eager to see what’s on the horizon and hope that development impact serves as the agency’s prime directive as it works to advance US national interests by catalyzing private investment around the world. And kudos to DFC for regularly publishing data, though we hope to see much more in the future.