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foreign aid
Trump’s America First Agenda Threatens the Fight Against Global Poverty
As it retreats from multilateralism, the Trump administration is rejecting the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, which provide a blueprint to eradicate poverty and pursue inclusive and environmentally responsible economic development.
May 20, 2025
On March 4, 2025, Edward Heartney, a minister-counselor at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, remarked at the General Assembly that the Sustainable Development Goals “advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty” and interests.
This rejection of the SDGs aligns with President Donald Trump’s retreat from multilateralism and overall dissatisfaction with the U.N. For example, the Trump administration has moved to pull the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Paris agreement on climate action, and the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition, the administration has frozen foreign aid, initiated a global trade war, and failed to pay its U.N. dues as of May 2025.
How can we remodel institutions and programs to be less dependent on American funds while also ensuring the continual engagement of the United States as a leader?
Although intended to prioritize the United States, these developments threaten progress on the SDGs, with negative implications for the global fight against poverty.
What are the Sustainable Development Goals?
The SDGs are a collection of 17 goals set for achievement by 2030, subdivided into targets and indicators. They form the core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all U.N. member states in 2015. They provide a blueprint to eradicate poverty and pursue inclusive and environmentally responsible economic development under conditions of peace and partnership.
Contrary to Heartney’s claims on sovereignty, the 2030 Agenda is voluntary and non-binding. They are a framework, not a prescription. In fact, the SDGs have not received nearly enough policy and financial support as evidenced by their lack of progress. Although there has been progress in some areas, only 17% of SDG targets are on track to be achieved according to the 2024 SDG report.
How, though, does the America First agenda impact global poverty? While many linkages can be draw, SDGs 3, 5, and 13 provide some examples.
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being
SDG 3 covers a wide range of health issues. There are strong correlations between a country’s income status and its performance on some SDG 3 indicators. For example, 2019 data places the cause of death by communicable diseases and maternal, prenatal, and nutrition conditions in low-income countries at 47%, versus only 6% for high-income countries.
Poor health is not only a symptom of poverty. It can compound cycles of poverty through inhibiting disabilities, crippling medical expenditures, and premature death. Meanwhile, the significance of American support for good health across the developing world cannot be overstated, and actions such as freezing foreign aid and cutting the UNAIDS budget are projected to cause the deaths of more than 200,000 people from AIDS and tuberculosis alone by the end of 2025.
However, on the positive side, in South Africa—the country with the highest number of people with HIV-AIDS—the government has committed to provide support for HIV-AIDS treatment in 2025 from the National Treasury, aiming to become a more self-sufficient country.
SDG 5: Gender Equality
There are positive links between improving girls’ and women’s access to health services, education, and economic opportunities and the overall living standards of a country. Hence, SDG 5 aims to end discrimination against girls and women and empower them with equal means. However, the Trump administration’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy risks undermining work and advocacy for SDG 5. While this anti-DEI policy promotes merit-based systems and unity on its face, the administration is also using this campaign to target gender-related programs.
Additionally, by February 20, 2025, the freeze on humanitarian assistance resulted in more than 900,000 women per week being denied contraception around the world. Family planning activities were also not part of a limited waiver to the freeze, aligning with the administration’s overall anti-family planning policies. However, support for civil society organizations working on sexual and reproductive health and rights, and volunteerism, can help plug gaps. For example, 200 U.N. Volunteers recently worked with the WHO in the Republic of the Congo to raise awareness about HIV-AIDS and to challenge related stigma via a social media campaign.
SDG 13: Climate Action
The Trump administration’s rejection of the Paris agreement also aligns with support of an “overdue course correction on… climate ideology, which pervade the SDGs,” in the words of Heartney. The Paris agreement—the preeminent international treaty to combat climate change—is essential to SDG 13. Without the participation of the United States, which is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, the Paris agreement and SDG 13 are set to fail.
However, at this stage, climate action is not an “ideology” but a necessity, and the Green transition is not with its own economic opportunities that could advantage the United States.
Similar to the case of SDG 3, not only do low-income households experience the worst impacts of climate change, these impacts can compound poverty through property damage, income disruptions, displacement, and premature death. This further threatens progress on SDG 1.1 (extreme poverty), which has been one bright spot of success amid the ailing SDGs. For example, between 1990 and 2019, the prevalence of extreme poverty in developing Asia fell from 58% to 5%. Climate change, however, could push millions back into extreme poverty by 2030.
Fortunately, efforts like AMERICA IS ALL IN commit Americans to the Paris Agreement even as climate action is moving forward on other fronts. For example, Green bonds have seen rapid growth—rising from $40 billion in 2015 to more than $500 billion in 2023—with the United States being a top issuer in that period.
Looking Forward
In mid-July, New York will host the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), which will review five SDGs, including SDGs 3 and 5. The HLPF provides an opportunity to have important conversations about these issues, and to find solutions.
For example, although the SDGs need the participation of the United States, how can we remodel institutions and programs to be less dependent on American funds while also ensuring the continual engagement of the United States as a leader? The recently adopted Pact for the Future—while not without flaws—also offers an impetus for discussions on why multilateralism is retreating. Finally, it is important to continue leveraging the potential of SDG localization in light of insufficient national action and leadership.
When it comes to multilateral action, the Trump administration is about to prove that the United States is not, in fact, an indispensable nation.
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Trump Cuts to Foreign Aid Leave Food Destined for Desperate Millions Rotting in Storage
"The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid has been devastating and unacceptable," said one international aid group.
May 16, 2025
More than a million people in some of the world's most impoverished countries could be fed for three months and hundreds of thousands of children's lives could be saved if $98 million in ready-made meals and other rations were able to leave four warehouses run by the U.S. foreign aid agency dismantled by the Trump administration.
But instead, there is no end in sight to the food languishing in the facilities—or to the starvation of millions of people in Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, and other parts of the Global South facing high levels of hunger and malnutrition.
Some of the 66,000 tonnes of food, including grains, high-energy biscuits, and vegetable oil, are slated to expire as soon as July, when they will likely be turned into animal feed, incinerated, or otherwise destroyed, Reuters reported Thursday.
The warehouses are located in Houston, South Africa, Djibouti, and Dubai, and are run by the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. Many of the staff who help run the warehouses are scheduled to be fired on July 1 in the first of two rounds of cuts that will effect nearly all of USAID.
Contracts with suppliers, shipping companies, and contractors have been canceled since USAID was taken over by the Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with the White House saying the agency—with a relatively small budget of just $40 billion—was responsible for "significant waste."
Since DOGE, run by tech billionaire Elon Musk, targeted USAID in one of its first full-scale attacks on a federal entity, the agency is being run by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance has not yet approved a proposal to give the stranded food stocks to aid organizations for distribution, two former USAID staffers told Reuters.
That office is being led by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former DOGE employee who is overseeing the complete decommissioning of USAID, which has provided humanitarian assistance in conflict zones and the Global South for more than six decades.
Max Hoffman, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said the massive waste of life-saving food rations was the result of President Donald Trump and Musk deploying "some idiot 20 year old staggering around USAID turning things off without the faintest idea of the consequences."
Some of the rations were intended for Gaza, where half a million Palestinians are currently facing starvation and the rest of the population of 2.3 million people are suffering from acute levels of food insecurity due to Israel's total blockade on humanitarian aid which was reimposed in March after a brief cease-fire. Thousands of children have been hospitalized with acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year, but Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza has left health providers with extremely limited means to treat them.
The entire population of Gaza could be fed for a month and a half with the food rations that are on the verge of rotting in the four warehouses, Reuters reported.
Nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits in Dubai are among the stocks that will expire in July, a former USAID official told the outlet. They could feed at least 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month.
The food aid was also scheduled to go to Sudan, where famine has been confirmed in at least 10 areas as the country faces the third year of a civil war.
Action Against Hunger is one of many aid groups that have had to scale back operations after losing significant funding due to U.S. cuts; the group said last month that its suspension of work in the Democratic Republic of Congo had already directly led to the deaths of at least six children.
In addition to USAID's warehouses full of soon-to-be-expired food, the U.S.-based company Edesia, which makes the peanut-based Plumpy'Nut, told Reuters that USAID's cuts to transportation contracts had forced the company to open an additional warehouse. A $13 million stockpile of 5,000 tonnes of Plumpy'Nut, which is used to prevent severe malnutrition in children, is in the warehouse now—but could be used to feed more than 484,000 children.
"The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid has been devastating and unacceptable," said Oxfam America.
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Trump's New Plan for Deep Foreign Aid Cuts 'Will Plunge Millions' Into Hunger, Disease
"The Trump administration cannot legally enact these changes on its own—Congress must take a stand against these dangerous cuts to foreign aid and reject this proposal," said the president of Oxfam America.
Apr 15, 2025
A newly reported Trump administration plan to cut U.S. State Department funding in half next fiscal year and axe foreign assistance by nearly 75% drew dire warnings from humanitarian organizations that have seen firsthand the chaos sown by the administration's dismantling of life-saving aid operations.
"The administration's cuts, along with the proposed withdrawal of funding from key institutions like the United Nations, will plunge millions into hunger, disease, and increase other threats, making the world more dangerous and unstable for us all," Abby Maxman, the president and CEO of Oxfam America, said in a statement issued after multiple news outlets reported the details of the Trump administration's plan.
According to Reuters, the Trump administration is aiming to slash foreign assistance distributed by the State Department and USAID from $38.3 billion to $16.9 billion at a time of intensifying hunger, health, and climate crises worldwide.
The administration is also considering a proposal to shutter more than two dozen embassies and consulates—including some in Africa and Europe—and eliminate "almost all" funding for the United Nations.
An internal memo obtained by The New York Times proposes "cutting funding for humanitarian assistance and global health programs by more than 50% despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pledges that lifesaving assistance would be preserved."
"There should be global moral outrage that the decisions made by powerful people in other countries have led to child deaths in just a matter of weeks."
Maxman said Monday that the administration's push for aggressive funding cuts—which, by law, must be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress—would "cause further suffering and have life-or-death consequences for millions around the world who are already living through dire humanitarian crises."
"It outlines sweeping cuts that could include programs like urgent food, water, and healthcare, education, and other support for women, children, and communities," said Maxman. "The Trump administration cannot legally enact these changes on its own—Congress must take a stand against these dangerous cuts to foreign aid and reject this proposal."
Trump's sweeping and lawless attacks on foreign aid have already had deadly consequences. The Times, citing the humanitarian group Save the Children, reported last week that "at least five children and three adults with cholera died as they went in search of treatment in South Sudan after aid cuts by the Trump administration shuttered local health clinics during the country's worst cholera outbreak in decades."
"There should be global moral outrage that the decisions made by powerful people in other countries have led to child deaths in just a matter of weeks," Chris Nyamandi, Save the Children country director in South Sudan, said in a statement.
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