By signing an executive order abruptly freezing US international aid budgets and putting an end to the USAID agency, President Donald Trump has provoked shock followed by a storm in humanitarian organisations, coupled with uncertainty about the future, by combining exemptions for certain programmes with contradictory orders and counter-orders that sow confusion.
The big question is why this decision and its disastrous consequences.
All the more so as this slump in official development assistance from the United States, the world’s biggest donor, was shortly preceded by significant cuts in a number of European countries. I confess to being surprised by the great silence of the institutions on this subject, as we saw at the 10th anniversary of the CNDSI (Conseil National du Développement et de la Solidarité Internationale) in Paris or in the programme of the next European Humanitarian Forum on 19 and 20 in Brussels.
How can we explain the great return of geopolitics that we are witnessing, and what new period are we entering blindly?
What are the consequences for humanitarian and development aid for populations and, much further afield, for nation states and the international community that represents them at the UN, itself shaken, unbalanced and divided?
Have we not entered a pre-war climate that is already manifesting itself in cyberspace, sanctions and the trade war, in the accelerated increase in defence budgets and armies, and in the strengthening of the resilience of populations in the face of rising perils?
The humanitarian consequences
To take the measure of the earthquake caused by the US administration on 24 January, when it wrote to its partners to immediately freeze its funding for 90 days for evaluation in 158 countries where USAID is present, it is useful to recall the figures.
In 2023, the year for which we have the official OECD figures, they show that global Official Development Assistance amounted to USD 233.3 billion, including USD 64.7 billion for the United States (see the link to Cyprien Fabre’s article DH 97). This amount includes 14.5 billion for humanitarian aid out of a total humanitarian budget of 43.6 billion that year.
The entire global humanitarian and development ecosystem was instantly shaken, leading to a cascade of programme interruptions or forced slowdowns.
The extent of the shock is clearer when you consider that the budgets of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) are each 40% funded by the United States. Allen Maima, head of public health at the UNHCR, says that 520,000 displaced persons in the DRC are at risk of death from infectious diseases because the 2025 health budget has been cut by 87% compared with 2024. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been forced to cut its budget and programmes by 20%, as have all the United Nations agencies, to varying degrees.
The Secretary General of the NGO Danish Refugee Council (DRC), Charlotte Slente, testifies that on 26 February she received more than 20 notices of termination of grants from USAID and the US State Department for 12 countries, amounting to USD 130 million! The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), for its part, said that it had never experienced such a cut in funding in its 79-year history.
Among the humanitarian NGOs in France, Manuel Patrouillard, Director General of Handicap International/Humanité et Inclusion (HI), said that out of a budget of 270 million euros in 2024, 36 million came from USAID and that they had been forced to stop 36 projects overnight.
The same applies to Première Urgence Internationale (PUI), where CEO Thierry Mauricet explains that American funding accounts for around 30% of an annual budget of €130 million. At Solidarités International, the proportion is around 36%, according to its Managing Director, Kevin Goldberg. The same applies to Action Contre la Faim, ACTED, Triangle Génération Humanitaire (TGH) and many other humanitarian NGOs.
But beyond these cuts, uncertainty still reigns, as projects that were granted waiver to continue have subsequently been cancelled and then renewed in contradictory ways.
NGOs recently received letters on 21 March telling them that they could resume the various ‘life-saving’ programmes, without knowing whether these would continue if necessary when they expired. As a result, some NGOs are considering ending these programmes on the scheduled date without planning to follow up, due to the lack of American commitment at this stage.
Finally, the US administration owes a great deal of money to its partners, who have advanced the funds needed to implement the aid, without being reimbursed since December. Around €200 million is owed to 6 French NGOs, and the amount increases every month.
While the US Supreme Court has ruled that this money must be repaid, no one knows when this will happen. As a result, NGOs owed USD 25 or 30 million could find themselves out of business if the money is not repaid by June! So there are also major concerns about the cash flow of these organisations.
The origins of the earthquake
The US administration set out its position in a twenty-page document entitled ‘Designing a New Architecture for US International Assistance’. It states that ‘the US international assistance apparatus is inefficient and fragmented’ and that it lacks ‘a unified and coordinated delivery system’.
It states that ‘As Secretary Rubio has made clear, all U.S. international assistance efforts should make America safer, stronger and more prosperous’.
According to the new US administration ‘The United States had an archaic system that needed to be dismantled’ and President Trump’s ‘decisive actions’ are an opportunity to ‘restructure the system and establish an architecture for international cooperation that respects the taxpayer and achieves measurable results, particularly through the private sector, and aligns with America’s strategic interests.
In fact, it’s a question of restructuring American aid in depth, and this seems to have been thought out in advance when we discover the very precise and detailed roadmap for its implementation. In particular, USAID is to change its name, following changes to its articles of association, to become the US Agency for International Humanitarian Assistance (IHA). Similarly, the Office of Humanitarian Assistance (OHA) will become the Office of Humanitarian Assistance.
This is clearly a vast plan aimed at redefining the objectives, priorities, partners and organisational and operational methods for implementing this policy.
But it is important to understand that this American earthquake in their humanitarian and development aid is part of a much broader and deeper perspective that can be summed up by Donald Trump’s political project of illiberalism. This aims to go beyond the limits of a liberal democracy deemed too slow, contradictory in its compromises and ill-adapted to the challenges of today’s world. A project that calls into question the separation of powers and the hierarchy of standards in the name of popular suffrage embodied by a leader who wields a great deal of power.
At this stage, I wondered whether Donald Trump’s America might not be the consequence of, or even the response to, the autocratic, even totalitarian, regimes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and others, or an American copy of a global trend that is also seeing a diversified global South assert itself and clash in heightened global competition.
In any case, this epochal change means that the humanitarian and development world must take it fully into account and position itself beyond what immediately affects it.
Donald Trump has confirmed and completed this change of era, in which the war in Ukraine has played a triggering role. In a more conflictual and unpredictable world that is disrupting the globalisation of trade, geopolitics is once again asserting itself as the ‘queen of battles’.
The world is changing
When Donald Trump distances himself from Europe and its defence, he is pursuing the American policy initiated by Barack Obama and continued by Joe Biden of refocusing the United States strategically on the Asia-Pacific region, in the face of China’s now global ambitions.
In so doing, he has brought us face to face with Russia and our disarmament in the possible absence of the American umbrella that has prevailed since the creation of NATO.
Public opinion in France is not mistaken when three out of four people support the rearmament of our defence according to a recent poll (1). Similarly, a study (2) shows that 50% of young people aged between 18 and 30 would be prepared to join the army in the event of a conflict threatening our country. This is what Brice Teinturier, CEO of Ipsos, says when he notes that ‘the strict separation between national and international issues is a thing of the past’.
This is borne out by the fact that the defence budget was €32 billion in 2017; it will be €50.5 billion in 2025, and €67 billion in 5 years’ time. But the pace is increasing in line with the risks, and the Minister of Defence, Sébastien Lecornu, is now working at the request of the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, on a budget of €100 billion, or 4% of Gross Domestic Product.
This trend is sweeping across Europe, and summits of Heads of State and Government, as well as Chiefs of Defence Staff, are being held in quick succession in Paris and London to address the threat posed by Ukraine, which could eventually affect the Baltic States and Poland, and consequently the whole of Europe.
Faced with the threat posed by Vladimir Putin, backed by China, and the abandonment of Donald Trump’s America, a relatively disarmed Europe seems to be rediscovering General de Gaulle’s vision of strategic independence based on the ultimate nuclear deterrent. In the general upheaval of the usual reference points, let us add that the same General de Gaulle was in favour of a Europe of nation states as a guarantee of its roots and strength, as Ukraine is proving by fighting for its freedom and independence.
Humanitarian conclusion
The change in times we are living through is similar to those we experienced with the fall of the Berlin Wall or the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, with the global consequences we are all familiar with.
The future will tell us how the interdependence of ruptures and recompositions will play out over time.
For the time being, although humanitarian aid must first of all cope with the dismantling of USAID, the change of era is profound and general, and it is in this new world that we must pursue our mission with, I believe, two convictions.
The first is that being a French or any other citizen is compatible with international aid in the name of humanism, solidarity, history and even a ‘certain idea’ of one’s country and its responsibilities in the world.
The second is that, whatever the world that lies ahead, solidarity between human beings and nations is still urgently needed to save lives and overcome poverty through sustainable development.
The real humanitarian challenge now is to know how we are going to help and develop with fewer resources in the face of greater needs. That’s the challenge we have to meet.
Alain Boinet.
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