Among the 26 executive orders issued by Donald Trump on the first day of his return to the White House – targeting everything from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes to the renaming of US landmarks – there was one that had immediate, devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
“Reevaluating And Realigning United States Foreign Aid’” signed on January 20, 2025, ordered a 90-day pause in all United States foreign aid for the “assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency” with United States foreign policy.
With Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) a key driving force in those early days of the Trump presidency, the weeks that followed saw more than 80 per cent of US overseas aid programmes terminated. It also saw the formal closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID): the overseas aid agency founded by JFK in 1961 to push US soft power abroad and fulfill America’s “moral obligation” to help poorer nations. It typically had a yearly budget of between $30 billion and $40 billion (£22bn and £40bn).
A clear picture of just how big a hit global aid took remains unclear, with data from 2025 continuing to trickle through. But ForeignAssistance.gov – the US aid tracking service – shows that the US made some $20bn (£15bn) in aid obligations over the first 11 months of 2025, compared to $82bn (£61bn) across the full year of 2024, while the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has tracked that humanitarian aid coming from the US in 2025 fell by more than 75 per cent compared to 2024.
The US historically only spent around 0.2 per cent of its GDP on foreign aid – but the sheer size of the country’s economy means that the country has long been the biggest aid donor globally. Savings will certainly have been made on aid in the US budget, but critics argue that Trump’s key legislation, the “Big Beautiful Bill”, includes tax cuts for the rich, so ordinary US taxpayers may be hard-pushed to feel any significant impact of those savings on their daily lives.
The same cannot be said, however, for the citizens of developing countries across the world that have for decades been supported by, and in a lot of cases become dependent on US aid in order to provide public services like health and education, and address humanitarian disasters.
Countries including Sudan, Ethiopia, Liberia, and Somalia have all in recent years received more than 30 per cent of the overseas aid that they receive from the US. Across the course of the past year, The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project has covered these nations, and Africa has a whole, these countries as aid cuts have taken hold.
We have reported on the ground from countries including Uganda, Zimbabwe and Senegal how cuts have devastated HIV services, putting millions of people’s lives at risk.
We uncovered how countries across Africa have been running out of crucial contraception, and also reported on how efforts to tackle other diseases like malaria have also been seriously impacted.
Groundbreaking new medicines like the HIV vaccine are now set to have less of an impact than they might otherwise have done, while we have seen how public health and infection prevention initiatives have all but collapsed in many instances.
Less US money for humanitarian disasters – in countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria – have left communities reeling, with funding for areas including sanitation, shelter, and malnutrition all drying up.
We have seen, too, how climate change adaptation efforts have been put at risk, and how the response to extreme weather events such as typhoons have been impacted since the US cut.
Also on the climate front, we reported from a village in Ethiopia that suffered catastrophic flooding followed by the exodus of nearly all humanitarian actors, and reported from the slums of Nairobi, where communities are being squeezed by the climate crisis and aid cuts. We have also explored how wildlife conservation has been crippled by US cuts.
We have seen how the ripple of effects of the US turning away from foreign assistance have spread far and wide, through reporting from key intergovernmental events including the UN General Assembly and the Cop30 climate conference in Brazil, where we saw how the absence of the US was arguably the key stumbling block to the talks’ disappointing outcome.
The United States has also recently said it will contribute only $2bn in United Nations humanitarian assistance – a small fraction of its traditional funding scope. The reduced commitment is in sharp contrast to the assistance of up to $17bn the US has provided in recent years, about $8bn to $10bn of which were voluntary contributions, US officials say.
Such moves have also encouraged others to follow suit. The UK, Germany and France are slashing their aid budgets to spend more on defence. Oxfam says that this marks the biggest aid cut by G7 nations since 1960, with spending 26 per cent lower in 2026 than it was in 2024.
A new kind of American aid
While he might have campaigned on an “America First” ticket, interventions in Iran and Venezuela show that Trump is not afraid to intervene where he believes he has to. The paradox here extends to US foreign assistance: While Trump might have closed down USAID, he is keen on turning foreign assistance to what he sees as America’s advantage.
Rather than the key focus being for aid programmes to work for the public good of the recipient country (and therefore help keep the US safer), the US government is now seeking to align programmes more directly with its policy agenda. New “health compacts” for countries like Kenya and Nigeria are being controversially offered in exchange for the things like potential health data and mining rights.
Rather than focusing foreign assistance on the poorest countries that might otherwise struggle to attract investment, Trump has also shown that he is willing to provide US public money to wealthier countries if it suits him, as exemplified by the $20bn (£15bn) currency-swap with Javier Milei’s Argentina. Similarly, the Trump administration recently announced that it would reauthorise the US development finance institute, the Development Finance Corporation, with a massive $145bn (£108bn) boost to its portfolio investment cap, which will allow much more US public money to be invested in infrastructure projects around the world, including in many middle-income countries.
A new Congressional proposal for the US to provide some $50bn (£37bn) in foreign assistance for this financial year, announced this month, has offered a glimmer of hope for many in the humanitarian and development space who are still struggling to balance their books after the US cuts. According to Erin Collinson, from the Center for Global Development, the adjusted spending bill show that lawmakers on Capitol Hill “still see value in US international assistance and in US participation in the multilateral system”.
However, the spending proposal still needs to be voted through Congress, and signed into law by Trump, whose original budget request for the sector was around $20bn (£15bn) lower. It is unclear whether Trump would actually sign off such changes, even if they have the support of Republicans in Congress. Plus, with major parts of the US aid system weakened beyond recognition, and serious questions about the State Department now having the capacity to deliver, many doubt – even if the bill is approved – that it will do much to undo the upheaval of the past year.
“We have run out of words to describe the depths of suffering we have witnessed after President Trump took a sledgehammer to US humanitarian assistance and the entire global aid system, says Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America. “We are seeing years of progress unravel, and more children suffer and die preventable deaths because of these cuts”.
This article was produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
Source: independent.co.uk