The Cost of Cutting Aid Too Fast

On his first day back in office on January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that put nearly all of the US foreign aid on hold. By March 28, 2025, USAID, the main vehicle for US global health spending, had been largely dismantled and all of its remaining work had been shifted to the State Department. The numbers are stark: US foreign aid spending, which had reached a high of $73.5 billion in 2024, plunged to $47.3 billion in 2025, a level not seen in over two decades of such spending. Such a drastic drop in foreign aid spending is not a budget cut. It is a collapse that harms the world’s most vulnerable communities.

I spent a summer in Tigra, India, volunteering at a school to teach children computer science. Small, relatively impoverished communities like Tigra are exactly the type of places where aid is most needed for the well-being of its residents and development. The school I volunteered at, for example, could not have functioned without governmental aid. The kids I worked with demonstrated incredible potential, but without governmental aid providing them a platform to thrive, their potential might have otherwise gone unnoticed. 

Tigra is one of many villages in the world that embodies what is lost when governments turn their backs on helping the most needy people who haven’t done anything wrong to be in their situation. Children at schools like Tigra’s have no other option to partake in modern education when their aid is cut, making their futures the most tragic victims of slashing aid.

It thus amounts to nothing less than a betrayal of the world’s poor when Washington snips the lifeline it has so notably given to impoverished communities beyond Tigra.

The sudden cut in aid has been disastrous for the health of many people in those places, and it has cost some of them their lives. Health workers and NGO leaders in Nepal, Kenya, and Colombia spoke to researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health about the impact of the aid freeze, and their findings were stark. Programs that provided HIV treatment to patients collapsed. Pregnant women were turned away from clinics where they once received prenatal care. Adolescent girls and young women were denied access to reproductive health services that had been provided to them for years. Many health workers had their salaries cut or delayed, and in some countries had their contracts not renewed, leading to feelings of despair and a sense of being betrayed by the very people and organizations that they had worked for years to help.

The long list of US-funded health programs, from vaccines to HIV and other life-saving medications, to emergency food and relief aid, has been tracking for decades and saving millions of lives in Africa alone. Reversing that progress was always a danger of haphazardly cutting off aid. The programs that will be first to go are likely to be those serving the greatest numbers of women and girls, as well as migrant and HIV-positive populations and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

I understand how many Americans believe our country first needs to fix problems here at home before doling out foreign aid. Supporting programs here at home such as infrastructure, health care, and paying down our national debt would have a far greater impact in supporting the lives and efforts of American citizens during these trying times. Yet foreign aid makes up only about 1% of the federal budget – a small price to pay for all the programs and initiatives the US has put in place to help support development and health programs around the world.

Furthermore, many foreign policy analysts consider development aid and humanitarian assistance to be a vital part of the US’s foreign policy goals. The aim is to build a positive relationship with countries that are considered to be useful to the US in matters of trade, security, and other interests. In India, a country crucial to the global balance of power between China and the US, American aid to villages like Tigra only leaves positive impressions on their people. Cutting aid to a country like India is especially a self-inflicted wound on US foreign policy goals, as local residents—and crucially, voters—will remember the times when Washington abandoned its support in their schools, hospitals, and homes.  

If the administration was determined to cut foreign aid, then they should have gone about it in a much more thoughtful and responsible manner. A slow and efficient transition of programs that could have retained critical core health and education programs while trying to eliminate waste would have been more than acceptable to foreign aid critics. But a rapid collapse of US foreign aid to near zero and its accompanying tearing apart of USAID was a catastrophic failure that threatens the lives and futures of millions of people.

When I return to Tigra one day in the future, I hope to see full classrooms and healthy neighbors. This sudden reversal of aid jeopardizes that future and the children like the ones I’ve volunteered with who look up to our country as a pillar of their future. 

Siyona Jindal is a senior at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York interested in the intersection of social justice, foreign policy, and Indian political development.