The first signs of upheaval came when staff at USAid, stewards of much of America’s $60 billion foreign aid budget, stopped showing up for video meetings. At first, British officials assumed they were busy dealing with the arrival of their new president. Then reality set in: Trump had sacked almost all of them.
A few weeks later, British aid officials were the targets as Sir Keir Starmer announced that the government was slashing the UK’s overseas development budget by 40 per cent, about £6 billion, to pay for defence. The development minister, Anneliese Dodds, resigned, warning that the cuts would “remove food and health care from desperate people” and reduce the UK’s influence around the world.
The retreat of two of the largest foreign aid donors upended the development sector, but also prompted a broader debate about the roles western governments can and should play in helping people beyond their borders.
Instant impact: clinics and food stations close
The impact of Trump suspending all US aid on January 20, hours after his inauguration, was immediate. Lifesaving schemes were supposed to be exempt, but after thousands of USAid workers were laid off there was nobody to issue waivers to NGOs on humanitarian missions that had been relying on American support.
Supply chains seized up. In Africa, there were “many, many examples” of feeding centres running out of the high-calorie paste used to save the lives of starving toddlers, one former USAid official said. Elsewhere, American-funded clinics providing HIV medicines closed and vaccine trials were suspended. Disease surveillance was affected, including an effort to track an ebola outbreak that has spread to three cities in Uganda. In Sudan, hundreds of kitchens set up to feed displaced people were shut. Hundreds of thousands of women suddenly stopped receiving contraception.
In the long term, USAid’s own forecasts suggest that its closure may lead to as many as 18 million more cases of malaria a year, another 200,000 children paralysed by polio a year and 15 million children not receiving treatment for pneumonia and diarrhoea, which are among the biggest killers of the young.
Britain’s aid cuts will be made in phases, taking effect from 2027, but the effect is also expected to be profound. The UK’s £13 billion annual overseas aid budget includes £4 billion that is spent inside the country to look after asylum seekers. The amount actually spent beyond Britain’s shores may be reduced by two thirds, to only £3 billion a year.
The Washington-based Center for Global Development has pointed out that Britain has commitments worth £3 billion to climate mitigation alone. Fulfilling those may mean that support for health, nutrition and education vanishes entirely.
The Chinese model
Beyond the anguished headlines, a broader debate has begun over the West’s role in international development. For decades, the US and the UK have sought to export western ideals alongside sacks of grain and emergency medicines.
America is now expected to become far more transactional. Where once it might have paid to build a school in a fragile state on the condition that girls be allowed to attend, it may now demand mineral rights in return.
According to Bright Simons, a fellow at the ODI think tank based in Ghana, such deals would not be new. “Trump, Musk and Rubio are no innovators,” he said. “Their push to align all aid more explicitly with US foreign-policy goals looks very much like a belated scramble to emulate China.”
Olivia O’Sullivan, an analyst at Chatham House, thinks the UK will be forced to find new ways to achieve influence. Instead of bilateral aid, which goes directly to a recipient country, Britain may focus more on seeking strategic influence in the wider international system, she said. That could include lobbying Gulf states and other “middle powers” for resources, calling for reforms to financial systems and working with developing countries to develop their own growth strategies.
Aid as an investment
For some, the end of USAid is a triumph of “America First” thinking. Trump had branded the agency, established under John F Kennedy in the 1960s, a “left-wing scam” and accused it of squandering billions and spreading anti-American ideals. Elon Musk, who helped to oversee its closure, went further, describing it as “not an apple with a worm in it, but just a ball of worms”.
British and American officials admit that reforms were needed, USAid could be slow and bureaucratic, and developing countries often become dependent on it for basic services.
Some African leaders say change was overdue. Trump’s sudden retreat “sends a signal that the time has come for Africa to be more self-reliant”, John Mahama, Ghana’s former president, said. For Ken Opalo, a Kenyan academic at Georgetown University, the disarray engulfing healthcare schemes across the developing world has underscored the perils of depending on foreign benefactors. “No society should endure such humiliating tragedies, dictated by elections in distant capitals,” he said.
Other analysts, however, say the US has often provided emergency aid in states too fragile to help themselves and that no other country had the resources and expertise to build an anti-HIV programme like America’s Pepfar scheme, now estimated to have saved 26 million lives in 22 years.
Starmer has taken a less ideological approach to the UK’s aid cuts, presenting them as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of a need to increase defence spending. Downing Street is well aware, though, that polls show the decision was very popular. Sixty-five per cent of the public approve of it, and only 20 per cent oppose it.
Yet the Conservative former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell says the policy switch is shortsighted and that, in the longer term, increasing development spending is in Britain’s national interest. “Consider this,” he said. “Over the next few years the population of Africa will rise by 600 million. But economists say that only 150 million new jobs will be created. Where do we think the others will go? The answer is people will migrate — largely toward the Mediterranean or Europe. This is the result of failing to see how building stronger and safer communities seriously benefits the UK.”
Losing global influence
The fallout will extend beyond refugee tents and medicine for sick infants. American aid spending has played a crucial role in “security sector reform” in fragile states, analysts say, helping to counter terrorism and drug trafficking. In Syria, it has helped guard camps holding the dependants of Islamic State fighters. In the Sahel, USAid-funded initiatives that sought to prevent young men from being lured into Islamist militancy have been closed.
The UK has adopted a similar strategy, particularly in the Sahel, and supporters argue that in, the long term, investing in aid can prevent costly conflicts.
Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who chairs the international development committee, argues that aid can address instability before it spirals into violence. “Cutting aid to pay for increased defence will inevitably mean spending more money on responding to conflicts rather than investing in prevention — it should never be either or,” she said.
Other cuts might seem trivial in comparison to the closure of HIV clinics, but will be widely noticed. The American embassy in Beijing has stopped releasing pollution readings for the city. For years, the air quality index provided by the US — one of the few sources of reliable environmental data in China — had shown whether the Communist Party was meeting its promises and served as a subtle tool of soft power.
Similarly, advocates for British aid argue that it can buy influence and esteem. Before the Department for International Aid (Dfid) was merged with the Foreign Office in 2020, diplomats complained that their Dfid colleagues got better access to senior government figures in the countries they were working in. It was an issue the merger was designed to address: the hope was that development spending would burnish Britain’s reputation and possibly open trading opportunities.
But Elizabeth Campbell, of the ODI think tank in Washington, said Britain’s status was damaged when Dfid was axed and Boris Johnson cut the aid budget, in 2020, from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of gross national income. “The UK has been a model to other donors and programs,” she said. “It embedded colleagues in countries and communities and over time developed unmatched technical and other expertise. But as the UK’s levels of aid have declined over time, so has its reach and influence.”
Opportunity for China?
China may sense an opportunity. Already Africa’s largest creditor, it has extended billions in infrastructure loans in return for oil and mineral rights. Unlike USAid, it rarely funds medicines or clinical personnel — and it expects repayment.
Beijing’s record of peddling influence is chequered: its relations with Zimbabwe, which moved out of the orbit of western aid years ago, have been fraught. But China may still use this moment to contrast itself with West’s volatility, O’Sullivan said. “There certainly will be some figures in China who see an opportunity to underline a story they’ve often sought to tell about the US — that it’s a volatile or unreliable partner, not necessarily offering a pathway to prosperity.”
Mitchell said: “Who will benefit from these aid cuts? The answer is Russia and China. The spaces we vacate will be filled by our adversaries. History will judge this to be a strategic disaster of our own making.”
