Suspension of foreign aid costs lives but does not upset voters.
On the day he took office, President Trump declared that U.S. foreign aid is “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” and ordered a 90-day suspension of its delivery pending review of all programs.
In February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency put nearly all 4,700 U.S. Agency for International Development on paid administrative leave and then terminated 1,600 of them. These staff cuts have made it impossible for USAID to distribute humanitarian aid around the world.
As a result, 60,000 tons of food valued at $98 million that could have fed 3.5 million people for a month sits in warehouses, some of it in danger of spoiling. According to one tracking model, 300,000 preventable deaths have occurred as result of the suspension of humanitarian aid, 200,000 of them children, many of whom died from malnutrition, diarrhea and pneumonia.
Many of the deaths resulted from freezing funds for a single program, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. Since its creation under Republican President George W. Bush in 2003, treatment provided by PEPAR has saved the lives of an estimated 26 million people in 55 countries and allowed 7.8 million babies to be born HIV free.
According to the relief organization Oxfam, if funding ends, 23 million children could lose access to education, 95 million people would not receive basic healthcare and 3 million people per year would die of preventable causes.
Undeterred by the human cost of his policies, Trump has moved to make the cuts permanent. Last month, he sent a “recission package” to Congress, asking it to withdraw $9.4 billion of allocated funds, $8.3 billion of them ear-marked for USAID. The president also announced his intention to permanently dissolve USAID.
The White House is using rescission to head off court cases challenging the president’s authority to make the cuts through executive orders.
Because Republicans control both houses and have so far complied with the president’s demands, most of the package will probably become law. If it does, budget hawks have indicated they would like to see more rescission requests.
Despite the pain and suffering these cuts to humanitarian aid will cause, they seem unlikely to become election issues. A recent survey by the Pew Charitable Trust found that 83 percent of Americans favor “providing medicine and medical supplies to developing countries” and 78 percent support sending them food and clothing.
However, the survey also found that 52 percent of respondents believe that “we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.”
While not lacking compassion for people suffering abroad, most Americans want their tax dollars spent in the U.S. They presume that the money saved from cutting foreign aid programs will be spent on domestic ones or given to them directly through lower taxes. However, most of the cost-savings will go toward increasing defense spending by 13 percent and providing tax cuts aimed at benefiting the wealthiest Americans.
In fact, the money taken from foreign aid won’t come close to paying for the president’s “big, beautiful" budget reconciliation bill. Foreign aid made up just 1.7 percent of the federal budget in 2023.
To cover the shortfall, Trump proposes significant reductions in domestic spending as well. He plans to eliminate 46 programs, many of them providing health and human services and economic assistance to the poor.
As a result of proposed cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Program, an estimated 10.3 million people will lose health care, and 3.5 million will be denied SNAP benefits.
The combined cuts to foreign and domestic aid programs, however, will not balance the proposed budget. The rest of the money will have to be borrowed, adding about $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
When it comes to selling these massive cuts to foreign and domestic aid, Trump and his advisors are skilled at exploiting what Heather McGhee, author of “The Sum of Us,” calls the “zero-sum hierarchy,” the belief that gains made by one group must come at the expense of another.
Those who declare that they don’t want their tax dollars to subsidize people in other countries, illegal immigrants or “lazy” Americans (i.e., the poor) assume that savings from cuts to foreign and domestic aid will benefit them directly.
According to the Tax Policy Center, however, 60 percent of the proposed tax cuts will go to people earning $460,000 or more with the average household receiving just $2,900.
While middle class families will benefit in the short run, that gain could be eliminated if the increase in national debt leads to inflation and higher interest rates, which reduce purchasing power.
Supporters of foreign aid have done a poor job of defending it, relying on the abstract argument that assistance is an instrument of soft power that can persuade foreign governments to support U.S. interests. That conclusion may be accurate, but is hard to demonstrate in a straightforward cost-benefit analysis.
A better case can be made by comparing what the U.S. takes from the rest of the world compared to what it gives back. Although it has just 5 percent of the world’s population, 2020 estimates show the country consumes 25 percent of the Earth’s resources.
Resource extraction by multinational corporations often provides little or no benefit to local people and may even harm them. The oil industry in the Niger delta is a case in point.
This uneven distribution of global wealth should create a moral imperative for foreign humanitarian aid. Moral imperatives, however, carry little weight compared to self interest in appeals to voters.
That political calculation suggests that the foreign aid freeze will become permanent, leaving private charity to take on the impossible task of covering the shortfall.
As Saint Augustine noted long ago, however, “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat ."
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Foreign aid cuts will have devastating effects but few political consequences )
Also on site :
- Duke of Edinburgh makes flying visit to Wolverhampton school
- As Starmer and Macron discuss small boats, how many migrants cross the Channel – and how many are stopped?
- Princess Kate Moment That Turned William's Head Goes Viral