The Trump administration insists it is preserving life-saving assistance as it dismantles USAID. The evidence to date is that it is failing in that task—significant award cancellations and payment delays mean that people are dying. The administration’s proposed budget (which includes a 62 percent cut to global health programs) suggests it will only compound that cost into the hundreds of thousands of lives or more.
But ignore that, and assume the White House really is committed to limiting the body count from aid cuts. The way to square the circle of declining support but sustained provision of lifesaving services is that recipient countries take up the slack. This was a central endeavour of the first Trump administration: the Journey to Self-Reliance. It is the somewhat patronizing cliché about teaching a person to fish rather than giving them a fish as ubiquitously applied to development assistance. The problem today is that the US government is simultaneously confiscating fish and fishing poles while backfilling the fishpond.
With regard to foreign assistance to increase local capacity, the administration has already close to universally terminated programs for strengthening health systems to deliver services. It has also slashed support for broader efforts to increase government efficiency and revenue-raising capacity, to say nothing of financing to build human capital through better education systems or physical capital through infrastructure that might promote economic growth.
To be sure there are other—indeed more important—ways that the US can support broad-based growth in developing countries than just foreign assistance. Not least, it can back the kind of export-led development that catapulted South Korea to high-income status. That was the idea behind the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which provided preferential access to manufactured exports from the continent, home to most of the world’s most aid-dependent countries. Sadly, the administration’s trade regime has placed many of the greatest beneficiaries of AGOA under the threat of tariffs that would utterly wipe out export opportunities to the United States.
If not exports of stuff, what about the movement of people? That is, after all central to all of investment, trade, and remittance flows. Indeed, for a number of low-income countries, US remittances from migrants to their families and friends back home are already a significant source of revenues, worth more than eight percent of The Gambia’s GNI, for example (see Table 1).
Table 1. Remittances from the US to (select) low-income countries
| Country | Remittance from US (USD millions) | Total GNI (USD billions, 2021) | Remittance as % of total GNI |
|---|
| The Gambia | 160 | 2 | 8.40 |
| Liberia | 222 | 3 | 6.92 |
| Somalia | 210 | 5 | 3.99 |
| Sierra Leone | 72 | 3 | 2.41 |
| Uganda | 177 | 41 | 0.43 |
| Guinea | 31 | 15 | 0.20 |
| Sudan | 41 | 27 | 0.15 |
| Ethiopia | 145 | 106 | 0.14 |
| Afghanistan | 12 | 15 | 0.08 |
Sources: Remittances, GNI. Data for 2021.
And yet, look at the number of the world’s poorest (low-income) countries threatened by the administration’s proposed travel ban—only 11 out of 27 are off the list (Table 2). It is very hard to earn money in the US to pay for remittances back home if you are never allowed into the country. That’s not even to mention the US House of Representatives’ proposed tax bill that adds a five percent tax on remittances.
Table 2. Status of low-income countries under the proposed US travel ban
| Low-income country | | | | | | Travel ban status |
|---|
| Afghanistan | | | | | | Full |
| Burkina Faso | | | | | | Warning |
| Burundi | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Central African Republic | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Chad | | | | | | Warning |
| Democratic Republic of Congo | | | | | | Warning |
| Eritrea | | | | | | Partial |
| Ethiopia | | | | | | Not Subject |
| The Gambia | | | | | | Warning |
| Guinea | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Guinea-Bissau | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Liberia | | | | | | Warning |
| Madagascar | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Malawi | | | | | | Warning |
| Mali | | | | | | Warning |
| Mozambique | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Niger | | | | | | Not Subject |
| North Korea | | | | | | Full |
| Rwanda | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Sierra Leone | | | | | | Partial |
| Somalia | | | | | | Full |
| South Sudan | | | | | | Partial |
| Sudan | | | | | | Full |
| Syria | | | | | | Full |
| Togo | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Uganda | | | | | | Not Subject |
| Yemen | | | | | | Full |
Notes:
- Full: prevent citizens from traveling to the US for any purpose
- Partial: limitations might specifically affect tourist, student, and immigrant visas
- Warning: 60-day period to address concerns regarding security and vetting processes
The administration’s budget request also proposes ending support for global peacekeeping, increasing the risk that the poorest countries will slide into civil war, at which point it is increasingly difficult to provide lifesaving assistance even with international support—especially when the US budget for humanitarian assistance is facing a potential 60 percent cut.
All of this is an ongoing tragedy for parents worldwide who are losing their children to malnutrition or malaria, and to families losing members to tuberculosis or HIV as the US withdraws support. And it’s a sign that the US is derailing journeys to self-reliance —a recipe for stagnation, instability and crisis, outbreaks of conflict, and further pandemics. But it is also a stark lesson to governments in developing countries about whom to trust. At this point it is increasingly clear that almost any other country is a more reliable international partner than the US (apart, perhaps, from Britain).
