How Trump eviscerated US foreign aid in just one year

The president's decision to cut billions of dollars in aid has had severe consequences on the ground – not just in Africa but in developing nations around the world

- Nick Ferris

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 20 January 2025, ordered a 90-day pause in all United States foreign aid for the “assessment of programmatic efficiencies” and to ensure “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. They 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 fulfil America’s “moral obligation” to help poorer nations. It typically had a yearly budget of between $30bn and $40bn (£22.4bn and £30bn).

A clear picture of just how big a hit global aid took has not yet emerged, with data from 2025 continuing to trickle through. But ForeignAssistance.gov - the US aid tracking service - shows that the US made some $20bn in aid obligations over the first 11 months of 2025, compared to $82bn across the full year of 2024, while the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) found that humanitarian aid coming from the US in 2025 fell by more than 75 per cent compared to 2024.