Congress steps up fight against Trump’s brutal aid cuts

The US Congress is seeking to significantly scale back Donald Trump’s brutal cuts to foreign aid, including providing funding for areas he sought to scrap completely.

When Trump took office in January, he froze all overseas assistance overnight before cancelling swathes of programmes. While money is trickling back into the system, this has already upended health services in lower-income countries across the last year, as clinics closed, drugs ran out and tens of thousands of health workers were forced to leave their posts.

A number of revised spending bills, which set out the funding available for this financial year if passed, would include providing $50 billion (£37bn) for global programmes including foreign assistance – roughly $20bn (£15bn) more than the funds in the President’s budget request, even if it would still constitute a cut on the previous year.

Within this, $9.4bn (£7bn) would be provided for global health programmes – a small cut that’s a long way from the $3.8bn (£3bn) requested by Trump which would have seen US aid for global health fall by two-thirds.

HIV services are by far the biggest winners from the agreement, in line to receive more than half of the funds.

The Independent has found the initial cuts deprived people living with HIV of their drugs, leading to deaths while prevention services have been hollowed out particularly for LGBT+ people.

The new bills would also provide $500m (£373m) for family planning and reproductive health, which Trump said he would stop sending any US money for. The freeze on these funds in 2025 led to countries running out of contraception and risking the lives of women and girls,.

Similarly, US funding for the global vaccine alliance Gavi, which buys jabs for more than half of the world’s children born each year, was set to be scrapped but the new bills before Congress would allocate $300m (£224m) for the group - about what it sent in 2024.

The UN’s aid agency UNAIDS, which has been facing questions over its future over funding cuts, would receive $45m (£34m) under these plans.

While both House of Representatives and Senate negotiators have agreed these funds, they still need to vote them through - and even after that, it remains to be seen whether Trump would sign the bill into law, or whether his administration will comply and spend the funds as agreed. The White House has made clear that it believes the president has the authority to disregard Congress in order to spend less money than has been approved.

To that end, language considered for a these bills and others that would be aimed at limiting Trump’s ability to circumvent Congress, has been omitted. The logic seemingly being that the president would possibly ignore it anyway – and at least he will be less likely to reduce spending agreed by Republicans and signed off himself.

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