The Year-Long Experiment Killing Foreign Aid Has Been a Disaster

I’ve dedicated a major part of my life and career to the cause of foreign aid, so it was heartbreaking to see it scorned and set back by the Trump administration. And yet, this heartbreak pales in comparison to the needless suffering, loss of life, and ended careers caused by the administration’s reckless and cruel dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and evisceration of foreign aid.

In addition to the callous politics at play, this episode is a cautionary example of how fragile political will can be. That’s why a more resilient moral argument is desperately needed to help rebuild America’s global leadership in protecting human dignity and building a safer and healthier world. As Christians, who have long held that compassion and justice for those in need are a foundational part of our faith, we are in a unique place to build such a moral argument. By doing so, we can help our nation understand that causes like USAID are more than budget expenditures or political footballs. They are the right and faithful things to do.

It was about a year ago that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, took to X, the social media platform he bought and renamed, and bragged to the world that he was using his time as a special advisor to President Donald Trump to destroy much of the United States’ ability to provide aid to people in other countries. Or as Musk put it, “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” This was particularly callous language, but it was hardly an idle boast. More than 80% of the agency’s programs were canceled, with the remaining programs absorbed by the State Department. The majority of USAID employees, most of whom were posted overseas, lost their jobs. To add insult to injury, White House budget director Russell Vought has reportedly used $15 million of unspent USAID funding for his security detail.

And as we’ve seen in the past year, these actions had terrible consequences. According to one model, the cuts to U.S. foreign assistance are leading to 88 children’s lives lost per hour, or nearly 800,000 over the year. Oxfam estimates that 23 million children stand to lose access to education, with 95 million losing access to basic health care.

Perhaps it’s not shocking that many Republican members went along with these terrible actions, echoing the administration’s rhetoric that much of USAID’s foreign assistance was “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values” or falsely characterizing foreign assistance spending as “wasteful.” 

As for why most Democrats didn’t put up more of a fight to save the agency, it may have been a cold calculation on the lack of passion among their voters for foreign assistance. A Pew Research Center survey from last year found that 52% of Americans chose “we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems at home” over “it’s best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs.”

READ MORE: Trump's Attack on USAID Is Evil

Here’s the difficult truth: We cannot go back in time to save USAID as it existed from 1961 until last year. Even if a new administration enters office in 2029 with a greater commitment to foreign assistance than Trump, it will take time to rebuild programs, hire staff, and award grants. For many grantees who had to lay off staff and shut down programs, restarting their work is hardly as simple as flipping a switch. It will take time.

But what we can start doing now is building a long-term, bipartisan constituency who will champion more durable political support for robust U.S. foreign assistance. And this is where our moral argument comes in. While there are very compelling national security and economic arguments for why our investment in aid is both cost-effective and in our self-interest, ultimately the moral argument will be most potent in rebuilding more resilient political will.

That moral argument might sound something like this: In our increasingly interdependent world, our love and concern for our neighbor can’t be confined to our borders. As Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously proclaimed, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Through effective foreign assistance, our nation has been able to project the best of American values, including a compassionate concern for the most vulnerable and the belief in the inherent dignity of every person. With less than 0.5% of our budget, we have helped reverse the AIDS pandemic in Africa, almost eradicated diseases like polio, responded to humanitarian emergencies around the world, spurred an agricultural revolution, and helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of the quicksand of extreme poverty. As we build a safer and healthier world through our foreign aid, we also generate goodwill and soft power.

For Christians, that moral argument should be even stronger. In so many ways, our investments in global health, food security, and anti-poverty programs are critical pro-life investments that save and protect millions of lives around the world.

Yet over the past year, conservative Christians who profess a pro-life ethic were largely silent and even supportive as these devastating cuts took place. For example, close Trump ally Rev. Franklin Graham, who runs the international relief charity Samaritan’s Purse, reassured his donors last year that the dismantling of USAID wouldn’t affect Samaritan’s Purse’s work. Outspoken conservative and self-described Christian nationalist Marjorie Taylor Greene partnered with another staunch Christian conservative, Rep. Chip Roy (R- Texas), on a bill that would go even further than Musk or Trump have gone and permanently abolish USAID.

Notably, neither of these professing Christians made a Christian argument for why the lifesaving aid programs were unneeded. They just argued that the cuts were “ending decades of wasteful and corrupt federal spending.” But as the National Association of Evangelicals says in its statement Compassion for a World in Need:

“Christians are not utopians; we recognize that some aid programs have been ineffective or co-opted to promote values not shared by many Americans. These programs should be reformed or discontinued. We also understand that human suffering will persist until Christ returns. But this reality should spur us to greater engagement and generosity, not less.”

Using moral arguments to boost foreign aid may sound lofty, but here’s the good news: We’ve done exactly this before. At the turn of the new millennium, people of faith (including Pope John Paul II and Bono) came together in a global campaign for a once-obscure topic—debt cancellation—and succeeded in securing more than $130 billion in debt relief for developing nations. A few years later, a U.S.-based multifaith campaign pressured the Bush administration and Congress to address the surging AIDS crisis in Africa and elsewhere. The result was bipartisan support for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR is credited with saving at least 25 million lives. I vividly remember how one of the staunchest critics of foreign aid, former Sen. Jesse Helms, had a seismic change of heart, not because of the economic and national security benefits of foreign aid, but out of a moral concern for a generation of children who were being orphaned across sub-Saharan Africa. Now, during the Trump administration’s second term bipartisan support has helped secure more than $20 billion more foreign assistance than the Trump administration requested.

Some of the programs whose funding fared best in the appropriations bill include humanitarian assistance, global health programs (including PEPFAR), and international food assistance. In fact, the Trump administration was set to zero out the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program entirely. But then, Congress pushed back, and it remains funded at the same level as last year. This marks a significant turnaround from 2025, when Trump obtained congressional support for a rescissions package that canceled $14 billion in foreign assistance funding that had already been appropriated.

The huge discrepancy between the Trump administration’s budget request for foreign assistance and the funding that Congress committed to his administration is a testament to members of Congress from both parties who believe in many of the U.S. foreign assistance programs and are not willing to allow the Trump administration to simply eviscerate them. The problem is that in the absence of further leadership and resistance from Congress, the administration could easily rescind or impound this funding, ignoring the will and authority of Congress.

READ MORE: What Lent Asks of Christians Rethinking Trump

Overall, we know that the faith community is going to be indispensable in advocating for the restoration, maintenance and, wherever possible, future growth and transformation of U.S. foreign assistance. Like with PEPFAR and the Jubilee 2000 campaign, that will work best when people of faith are working in broad, bipartisan coalitions that bring in diverse stakeholders of all political persuasions, united by shared belief in human dignity and care for people in the world’s most vulnerable situations.

It will be long-term, often painstaking work to cultivate congressional allies for foreign aid on both sides of the aisle, but the faith community has a role—both in lobbying our elected leaders and in creating strong constituencies that demand these leaders support effective aid. Difficult and slow as this work may be, we’ve seen these types of efforts work to spectacular, world-changing effect. Let’s remember the promise of what we can do when we do it together. 

In our increasingly interdependent world, our love and concern for our neighbor can’t be confined to our borders.