UK foreign aid cuts set to be deeper than Trump’s slashing of US funds

Britain is on course to slash its overseas aid budget further and faster than the Trump administration, according to new analysis.

While Washington has spent the past year locked in a political fight over the future of foreign assistance, lawmakers in the US Congress ultimately resisted some of the White House’s most dramatic reductions. Westminster, by contrast, has seen less resistance to cuts that will significantly shrink Britain’s global footprint.

According to the analysis by the Center for Global Development think tank, the UK is expected to cut Official Development Assistance (ODA) by around 27 per cent in 2026-27 compared with 2024-25, while US development spending will fall by about 23 per cent across the same time period after Congress softened some of the deeper reductions proposed by President Donald Trump, which included dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

"In the US, the Trump administration has made dramatic changes to the US aid architecture and curbed international aid spending; but Congress has demonstrated a willingness to push back on the deepest of cuts, projecting continued support for international assistance in its latest spending deal, said Ian Mitchell, co-director of the Europe programme at the Center for Global Development. "In the UK, however, parliamentarians have so far offered very little resistance to plans to implement very steep cuts."

The analysis is imperfect as the two countries measure aid differently and operate on different fiscal calendars, but the contrast is striking given the governing Labour Party’s historical support for Britain's international development spending.

To make the comparison fair, the researchers removed parts of US spending such as military support for allies, including Egypt, Israel and Taiwan and excluded UK aid used domestically to house asylum seekers, saying that including those costs would not significantly change the overall trend.

Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at Bond, the UK network of aid organisations, said of the analysis: "The pace and scale of the UK’s retreat from its international development commitments are already having devastating consequences for millions of people around the world, particularly on the most marginalised groups, including women and children.”

He added that the reductions represented “the steepest decline in budgets” of any G7 country between 2024 and 202 and risked undermining Britain’s credibility overseas.

It comes after the UK government's decision to lower aid spending from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of gross national income (GNI) – in a move justified as helping fund higher defence spending in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The last time that aid was at or below 0.3 per cent of GNI was in 1999, when there were far fewer conflicts worldwide and roughly 600 million people faced chronic hunger – compared with about 735 million today.

Mr Rabinowitz said the UK aid budget is a “smart and strategic investment” that helps prevent “future pandemics, supports fragile states to build peace and strengthens our climate security." He urged the government to "urgently recommit to an ambitious international development agenda" during this time of increasing global instability.

This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project