Author: Professor David Gordon (Director of the Bristol Poverty Institute)
At midnight on Sunday 23rd February 2025, USAID (the world’s largest provider of international aid – circa $69 billion) was effectively shut down by the US Government on the direct orders of President Trump. Almost all direct hire staff were placed on administrative leave and notice was given that 1,600 permanent staff would be sacked. A six-week purge of USAID’s work, which ended on 10th March, resulted in 5,200 development programmes being eliminated out of a total of 6,200.
On the 25th February 2025, Kier Starmer announced that the UKAID budget (circa $19 billion) would be reduced in 2027 from 0.5% to 0.3% of Gross National Income (GNI) to fund an increase in Defence spending. On 28th February, Anneliese Dodds (International Development Minister) resigned arguing that these cuts would “remove food and healthcare from desperate people – deeply harming the UK’s reputation”.
The likely effects of these cuts are becoming clearer. On 4th March, Nicholas Enrich, (USAID Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health) wrote a 20 page memo on the ‘Risks to U.S. National Security and Public Health: Consequences of Pausing Global Health Funding for Lifesaving Humanitarian Assistance.’ He estimated that every year there would be an additional:
- 2-3 million child deaths due to a lack of immunisation against vaccine preventable diseases
- 1 million children per year will not receive treatment for severe Malnutrition
- 8 million pregnant women would not receive maternal health care
- 7 million children will not receive medical treatment for Pneumonia and Diarrhoea (the largest cause of death for children under 5)
- 3 million babies will not receive postnatal care in the two days after birth
- 71,000-166,000 deaths from Malaria and 12.5-17.9 million more cases
- 200,000 paralytic Polio cases
- 127,000 Monkeypox virus cases
- A 28-32% global increase in TB and Multi Drug Resistant TB cases
- Potentially, 28,000 more cases of Emerging Infectious Diseases, such as Ebola, Marburg, etc.
The huge cuts to USAID will inevitably result in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal targets not being met. On 4th March, the US told the United Nations General Assembly that;
“President Trump also set a clear and overdue course correction on gender and climate ideology, which pervade the SDGs….Put simply, globalist endeavours like Agenda 2030 and the SDGs lost at the ballot box. Therefore, the United States rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals,‘
We do not yet have robust estimates of the likely effects of the proposed cuts to UKAID. However, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact produced a report on the 26th February, detailing how UK aid is currently spent. The most concerning findings were that:
- The UK development budget has seen dramatic reductions since 2020
- A substantial share of UK development funding is currently spent within the UK (see Figures 13 & 14 below)
- Allocations to longstanding UK country partners have been significantly reduced
- The UK’s ability to respond to humanitarian crises has been reduced (see Figure 6 below for context)
- Apart from in-donor refugee costs, other government departments now spend less development funding
- The Sustainable Development Goals are significantly off-track
- International climate finance falls significantly short of developing country needs (see Figure 2 below)
- Rising conflict is placing heavy strain on the international humanitarian system
- Global finance is now flowing away from developing countries
Figures from the ICAI report on UK aid spending
Conclusions
The USA and UK are dramatically reducing their funding on international aid and abandoning the poorest and most vulnerable people. It was of course not always this way and so I will leave you with some quotes from previous US Presidents about the need to reduce poverty and increase human rights.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt (US President 1933-1945)
“Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt (US President 1933-1945)
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”
– Dwight Eisenhower (US President 1953 -1961)
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
— John F. Kennedy (US President 1961-1963)
My own personal view was nicely summarised by Eglantyne Jebb at the launch of Save the Children at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1919 in front of a hostile crowd many of whom considered her to be a traitor for wanting to help German and Austrian children so soon after the end of the World War;
“Surely it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them.”