Suparna Chaudhry
The Fall 2025 cover of Foreign Policy magazine with an illustration of a tattered flag with a globe waving from a makeshift stick flagpole/
In just nine months, the Trump administration has laid waste to the development landscape, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and slashing nearly the entire U.S. foreign aid budget. This has posed a problem for nongovernmental organizations working on development the world over, derailing decades of work to increase access to health, food, education, and better governance. The impact is disproportionately felt across the global south, where these cuts will inevitably erode institutional knowledge and disrupt development trajectories.
But while the U.S. government’s actions have posed the biggest and most unexpected challenge for these groups, the reality is that the heyday of NGO influence was already long over. NGO revenue streams have dried up—and not just from the United States. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom had already begun their aid retreat before U.S. President Donald Trump took office a second time. In 2020, the U.K. effectively closed its equivalent of USAID, the Department for International Development, by merging it with the Foreign Office. Foreign aid dropped by about $6 billion after the merger, a decline expected to hit $11 billion by 2027.
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