Since the return of Donald Trump to the White House, he and his Republican allies have worked to destroy the U.S. government's overseas humanitarian aid programs.
This action flies in the face of the U.S. government's lengthy record of humanitarian assistance to people of other nations whose lives had been blighted by war, poverty, and illness. From the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-devastated Europe, to Senator George McGovern's Food for Peace project to feed the hungry, to massive international public health campaigns to eradicate global diseases, U.S. aid programs have played an important role in alleviating human suffering around the world.
Of course, these actions were not unique. Other wealthy nations also developed overseas humanitarian aid programs. In 2023, when the U.S. government allocated 0.24 percent of its gross national income to humanitarian aid, Britain allocated 0.58 percent and Norway allocated over 1 percent.
Behind the support for the U.S. international aid program lay two key factors-- a desire to reduce human misery and a desire to win friends for the United States in foreign lands.
But such concerns were ignored by the Trump administration. On January 20, 2025, the day of his return to the White House, Donald Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on U.S. foreign assistance. Three days later, the State Department issued a "stop work" order while the aid program received what it called a "comprehensive review."
Elon Musk, the arrogant, eccentric, and drug-addled multibillionaire, took the lead in this review process. Unleashing his DOGE minions on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which administered most of the federal government's humanitarian aid programs, Musk proclaimed that the agency was a "viper's nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America." USAID, he announced, "is a criminal organization. Time for it to die."
Trump apparently shared this warped perspective and, consequently, most of USAID's vital signs rapidly plummeted. In response to the president's orders, its staff was decimated, its website was shut down, and its budget was slashed. After USAID's shattered remains were transferred to the State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio cut 83 percent of its international humanitarian programs, reducing them from 6,200 to about 1,000.
As the distinguished historian Alfred McCoy reported this May, when USAID's "skilled specialists in famine prevention, public health, and governance stopped working, the pain was soon felt around the world, particularly among mothers and children." In Asia, the end of USAID's funding forced the World Food Program to cut by half the pathetic food rations it provided to a million Rohingya refugees residing in miserable camps in Bangladesh, with food support shrinking to $6 a month per person.
In Africa, as McCoy noted, departing USAID officials estimated that the aid cuts would likely produce a 30 percent spike in tuberculosis, a disease that kills over a million people worldwide every year, and that 200,000 more children would probably be paralyzed within a decade. In the Congo, 7.8 million war refugees were likely to lose food aid and 2.3 million more children were predicted to suffer from malnutrition. Thanks to cutbacks in USAID health programs, a half-million AIDS patients were projected to die in South Africa, while, in the Congo, an estimated 15,000 could die within a month. In West Africa, the end of USAID's Malaria Initiative virtually ensured that, within a year, there would be 18 million more malaria infections and 166,000 more likely deaths.
Malnutrition, as journalist Nicholas Kristof recently reported, already "leaves more than one-fifth of children worldwide stunted, countless millions cognitively impaired, and vast numbers . . . weak from anemia. Malnutrition is a factor in 45 percent of child deaths worldwide."
Nevertheless, in early June, the Trump administration and its Republican allies took further action toward dismantling U.S. overseas humanitarian aid programs. In response to a request by the President, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to claw back billions of dollars Congress had already appropriated for such aid. This included $500 million for activities related to infectious diseases and child maternal health, $400 million to address the global HIV epidemic, and $800 million for a program providing emergency shelter, water and sanitation, and family reunification for people forced to flee their countries.
Before the House vote, the president of Oxfam America, a leading humanitarian aid organization, appealed to the assembled legislators, arguing that the measure "would do irreversible harm" to millions of people. "We are already seeing women, children and families left without food, clean water and critical services after earlier aid cuts," she declared, "and aid organizations can barely keep up with rising needs." Nevertheless, despite unanimous Democratic opposition, the House Republican leadership pushed the bill through by a vote of 214 to 212.
Applauding GOP passage of the measure, Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, promised "more of this in the days to come." John Thune, the Republican Senate Majority Leader, pledged Senate action on the House bill this July.
As the United States, the world's wealthiest nation, is the largest financial contributor to the United Nations, the drastic reductions in U.S. humanitarian aid are already having a devastating impact on UN assistance programs that provide life-saving food, medicine, and shelter to the world's poorest, most desperate people. In mid-June, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that it was being forced to drastically scale back these programs due to "brutal funding cuts." The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief commented gloomily: "We have been forced into a triage of human survival."
Calling for aid "to help 114 million people facing life-threatening needs across the world," the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs said that "this isn't just an appeal for money-- it's a call for global responsibility, for human solidarity, for a commitment to end the suffering."
Thus far, there's no indication that the Trump administration has that commitment.
Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
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