The United States is turning its back on international cooperation at dizzying speed. Since coming into office on 20 January 2025, it has taken the new administration less than two months to wreak havoc on the international development community and its life-saving work.
The overnight gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and aid freezes to United Nations agencies is already causing entirely preventable suffering and will cost lives across the Global South. As over 60 UN experts recently deplored, these regressive decisions on overseas development assistance have serious real-world impacts for hundreds of millions of people, most of whom live in poverty.
The speed at which the US has cut international assistance is shocking, but this worrying trend can be seen elsewhere. Between 1990-2022 the share of European Commission aid going to ‘Least Developed Countries’ decreased from 52% to 19%, with the bloc instead prioritising investments “of strategic importance”, namely those that facilitate access to critical minerals. Germany cut €2.7 billion from its foreign development budget in 2023-2024. France, which had been regularly increasing its aid budget and had set an objective of reaching 0.7% of its gross national income in Official Development Assistance (ODA) by 2025, has postponed this target and instead diminished ODA by €742 million in 2024, and by a further cut of more than €2 billion in 2025. The United Kingdom recently announced cuts to its development budget from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3% (the lowest level in decades) in order to increase its defence budget – a sad reflection of our times.
Amid the chaos a new urgency has taken hold among those preparing for the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) – a UN summit in Seville (30 June-3 July), at which governments will agree how to finance sustainable development. With the US stepping away from its role as a global development leader, and other nations scaling back, the FfD4 comes at a critical moment. Without firm commitments to an alternative model based on new ways of financing development, the global fight against poverty risks being set back by decades.