The dismantling of U.S. foreign aid could be countered if the world’s wealthiest individuals gave even just a small share of their fortunes, Nobel Laureate Dr. Abhijit Banerjee said.
“If you take 1% of the wealth of the top 3,000 people in the world, that’s about $140 billion. That will certainly do a good job of replacing a lot of what has been lost,” Banerjee said at a briefing held by American Community Media on Sept. 9. “We’re really not talking about something that’s impossible to do, it’s a matter of having the will.”
The Trump administration took aggressive action to curtail many U.S. aid programs, stripping billions of dollars in aid from humanitarian projects fighting poverty, epidemics and other critical crises abroad. The newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk, vowed to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget to fight what the administration called “waste.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development, the primary agency responsible for foreign aid and development assistance, was dismantled this summer, causing $27 billion worth of grants and contracts to be terminated. Notable cuts include $57 million in tuberculosis research and $262 million for the United Nations HIV program, among many others. These and other aid cuts have fundamentally repositioned the U.S.’s approach to humanitarianism, leaving many developing countries in the midst of worsening disaster.
“There is a set of countries, Syria, South Sudan, Somalia and several others, where there is an ongoing humanitarian crisis, either driven by civil war, drought or a combination of the two. There are lots of young children who are really at the margins of starvation. The U.S. has, so far, not entirely canceled its food aid but a lot of that has been canceled,” Banerjee said.
U.S. aid had accounted for a significant share of many countries’ government budgets. Local nongovernmental organizations that were only able to operate through such funds are now shutting down, limiting the opportunity for assistance to be effectively dispersed in regions.
“Infrastructure for delivery is also shutting down. That’s a major disaster, because that’s where I think we will see actual lives being lost even in the short run,” Banerjee said.
The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), established by President George W. Bush in 2003, is also threatened by federal cuts. PEPFAR funds HIV treatment in low-income communities and has had bipartisan support in the U.S. for a long time.
Gavi, a global vaccine alliance, may also be at risk of getting cut as the current administration adopts an increasingly anti-vaccination stance, Banerjee said.
Banerjee won the Nobel Prize in 2019, alongside his wife Esther Duflo and colleague Michael Kremer, for creating randomized controlled trials to measure global aid initiatives. His work in alleviating global poverty informs his assessment of the current state of crisis, which he says actually decreased in the past 20 years before Trump’s cuts went into effect.
“The last 20 years were excellent years for the poorest people in the world,” Banerjee said. “Extreme poverty went down very substantially, and not just in countries like India and China, but everywhere. Maternal mortality went down very substantially, infant mortality halved and school participation of both boys and girls went up.”
Now, however, the U.S. has altered its contributions to the “world aid envelope” in a way that is difficult to replace without alternate funds, he said. With the U.S. insisting that many other Western countries increase their defense budgets, countries like the U.K. and France have also cut back on their aid. Banerjee said this led to a “knock-on effect,” in addition to Musk’s „wood chipper effect” on USAID.
“I think the question is whether other people will step up. Right now, we are seeing a couple of countries stepping up a little bit, but there are small donors to start with,” Banerjee said. “Norway and Spain are the two where they have actually increased their budgets, but it’s not going to be easy given the kind of clouds over the world economy because of the trade wars going on. It’s not clear that any government will be brave enough to step forward.”
As these cuts spur ramifications for global health and safety, the Trump administration says its efforts are successful in eliminating fraud and abuse that it claims were present in programs such as USAID. These statements, however, are largely unwarranted and have led to substantial misinformation campaigns in right-leaning media.
“I don’t believe what President Trump said. I have seen no evidence of it, and I think Mr. Musk tried very hard to find evidence for it,” Banerjee said.
The aftermath of aid being politicized will only exacerbate ongoing crises. Considering the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, Banerjee said the famine is not neglected because of financial issues but political ones. As a relatively small population, sufficient foreign aid could easily alleviate the famine rippling through the region, he said.
In spite of the sweeping setbacks prompted by Trump’s foreign agenda, it is not difficult to notice the relatively quiet global pushback. While there have been some protests against USAID firings and aid cuts, especially in Washington, D.C., Banerjee said the sheer power of right-wing rhetoric has left many quiet.
“In the U.S. there’s been this ideological basis for a lot of these things, a narrative that the poor are lazy, undeserving and that vaccines are poison. The right-wing ideological narrative is very powerful, and we see its effects when you see exactly what you are observing, which is that people aren’t complaining so much,” he said.
While recent actions by the U.S. have undoubtedly ushered in a new phase for the future of global aid, Banerjee emphasized that what is missing is political resolve. “We’re not talking about a huge amount of money. We’re talking about a huge amount of political will,” Banerjee said.
