March 1, 2025: President Trump on the first day in office issued a raft of Executive Orders including “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid” which called for a “90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.”
Since the January 20 Executive Order, the new American administration has taken the additional and extreme step of dismantaling USAID, the central agency for delivering American foreign aid globally. USAID with close to 10,000 staff in 60 countries spent over $40 billion in aid in 2023. Only a few hundred staff now remain and decisions made during the 90-day pause and assessment has now resulted in over 92% of all of USAID-funded projects cancelled. This has caused massive disruption across the entire development sector and in all corners of the globe as the United States is the largest government donor for international development assistance. A substantial amount of USAID funding goes towards strengthening democracy and democratic institutions.
In a separate but related development, the Trump administration also denied access to congressionally appropriated funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The US Congress appropriated $315 million to NED in 2024. Since the account has been frozen, NED is unable to award grants and pay for staff and other expenses. NED is a core funder for many Chinese, Hong Konger, Tibetan and Uyghur organizations working on countering Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party disinformation and strengthening democracy, human rights and religious freedom in China. NED works in more than 100 countries and has close to 2000 grantee partners.
According to a recent Pew Research Center data, “the $71.9 billion in foreign aid that the government spent in fiscal 2023 works out to 1.2% of that year’s total federal outlays, which were more than $6.1 trillion.”
