Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office, the future of USAID has been in freefall. Now, it seems like we’re finally beginning to understand what the new administration is prioritizing when it comes to development spending — if anything at all.
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First, to the United States — the country that for two months has been the epicenter of aid cuts across the world. Late last month, the Trump administration seemed to cement its slashes to the U.S. Agency for International Development — and in a 281-page list shared with the U.S. Congress, .
But which USAID offices were most affected, and why does it matter? My colleague Raquel Alcega broke it all down, finding that the office heaviest hit by cuts was the Bureau for Planning, Learning and Resource Management. That team, which was put into place just over a year ago, focused on setting USAID policies and aligning its budgets —but now, The Global Development Lab, once a flagship hub for innovation, has lost over 84% of its own. And USAID field missions in Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, and West Africa Regional, and Nepal have seen nearly half their portfolios disappear.
“While it remains unclear exactly how these office-level cuts will shape the future U.S. aid architecture, the data points to potential shifts,” Raquel writes. “At the same time, global health and humanitarian response, while not unscathed, appear to retain stronger funding footholds — possibly foreshadowing future priorities.”
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Raquel hasn’t just been digging into USAID — she’s also been looking at the State Department, which sent a similar list of terminated awards to Congress at the end of March.
At the end of the Trump administration’s two-month slashing, the State Department was left with 430 surviving awards and 1,625 terminated ones — but the dataset provided to Capitol Hill that Raquel found it nearly impossible to draw meaningful conclusions.
For example: among the 430 “active” contracts, 108 of them . There is also no information on the amount of money provided by the U.S. government for each grant, instead only listing the “share of cost” — aka, the portion of the project paid for by those outside the U.S. — for each project.
Overall,. And sources across the sector are telling us that’s led to one thing: a lack of trust that ripples far beyond the spreadsheet’s pages.
Leaked US State Department data raises more questions than answers
How to read the USAID award terminations data
Let’s shift to Germany, where divisions on foreign aid spending were laid bare in a leaked document late last month.
The news was first reported by Politico, and soon after, my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz explained what was at stake: while Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party wants aid spending to constitute at least 0.7% of gross national income — the goal endorsed by the United Nations — the country’s conservative Christian Democratic Union.
Both proposals would be , though the SDP’s figure would be above that of 2024. While CDU hasn’t specified a specific number, the document mentions an “appropriate reduction of the ODA-rate” to below 0.7%.
At the same time, German lawmakers are debating whether the country's main development agency, BMZ, — a discussion that follows the United States doing essentially the same.
“We’ve seen it in other countries: whenever development policy has been folded into foreign affairs ministries, it has led to a decline in quality, reduced scope, and a significant loss of reputation and trust in partner countries,” a critic of that proposal, former development minister Gerd Müller, tells Devex. “— it is a distinct field that requires its own expertise, focus, and institutional weight.”
Germany’s coalition government still haggling over aid spending (Pro)
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Meanwhile, the United Kingdom has — and as of late last month, the country will no longer adjust development spending for changes in gross national income. For years, that’s how it allocated its aid spending, and the jury’s still out on whether this change is a good or a bad thing.
“While it will make the size of the aid budget much more predictable and reduce the management burden, aid advocates fear it amounts to a ‘stealth cut’ worth hundreds of millions of pounds per year,” Devex contributor Jessica Abrahams writes.
In many ways, : it allows countries to allocate spending based on what they can afford. But while budgets are typically set before the year begins, gross national income often isn’t known until after the year ends — leading the United Kingdom to shift its aid budget throughout the year depending on how the country’s economy was performing. — not a continuously changing one.
Development minister Jenny Chapman explained that in a recent letter to the International Development Committee’s Sarah Champion, stating that with this change, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office would “no longer be automatically exposed to the volatility of GNI fluctuations or [official development assistance] spending by other departments … increasing the predictability of our budgets and allowing us to plan with more certainty.”
Despite that, some remain worried, largely due to the aid community’s low trust in the government. In part, that’s because the news hasn’t come in a vacuum: on Feb. 25, the U.K. announced it would be gradually cutting its aid to 0.3% of gross national income by 2027 to fund an increase in defense spending. Gideon Rabinowitz, the director of policy and advocacy at Bond, a U.K. network of aid groups, says that if aid spending isn’t adjusted to gross national income, .
The UK has changed how it calculates the aid budget — so is that good? (Pro)
What will the 0.3% budget cover? (Pro)
When the U.K.’s aid cuts were announced, it sent (yet another set of) shock waves through the system: despite a manifesto promise to increase aid spending to 0.7% of the country’s gross national income, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it would pull back . Critics branded the move as a “day of shame” for Britain — and in the weeks that followed, U.K.-based charities were sent reeling.
“It’s literally going to be like life and death,” says Olivia Barker White, the founder of Kids Club Kampala, an organization focused on slums in the Ugandan capital. “I know it sounds really harsh but some of the kids that we support are probably going to die because they can't access antiretrovirals and they also can't access basic services.”
The cuts will be gradual, but . Play Action International, for example, has yet to recover from the U.K. government’s last round of aid cuts during the COVID-19 pandemic — and five years later, the organization is warning about what the latest news could mean.
“When the cuts came, they weren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet, and the betrayal of the very communities we serve,” Murielle Maupoint, the chief executive officer of Play Action International, tells Devex.
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