Another victim of Trump’s aid cuts? His own development legacy

During his first term in office, U.S. President Donald Trump was hardly a champion for U.S. foreign assistance programs. His administration repeatedly proposed major cuts to aid spending, withdrew the U.S. government from international organizations and agreements, and used aid cuts to extract concessions from other governments. But the first Trump White House also did not banish the U.S. Agency for International Development from its foreign policy toolkit. Rather, on a number of fronts — from international religious freedom, to women’s economic empowerment, to trade — Trump’s team channeled its international priorities through the bilateral aid agency. Trump’s second term has been a different story, showcasing an “America First” agenda that has been unrestrained by past precedent or institutional norms. The administration’s decision to freeze, cut, and eliminate USAID has been among the most vivid examples. While members and allies of Trump’s current administration say they did so because of the agency’s supposedly “woke” progressive agenda, they are also throwing the fate of Trump’s own foreign aid legacy achievements into doubt. USAID itself is a case in point. It was during Trump’s first term that his political appointees oversaw the largest reorganization in the agency’s history — a multiyear process that involved extensive consultation with Congress and aimed to help countries build self-reliance. Now all of that work has been wiped off the map by Trump’s decision to dismantle USAID and fold its remnants into the State Department. Contradictions between Trump’s first and second terms are also sprinkled throughout the legal filings that USAID-funded organizations have submitted to document the damages they have incurred due to the administration’s aid cuts. One legal complaint states that Trump’s decision to cancel USAID programs is harming U.S. government efforts to assist persecuted Christian minorities — a key priority under the international religious freedom agenda that was central to Trump’s first administration. “Human rights defenders who are working to track violence against Christian communities are now at risk of being killed because Democracy International’s program can no longer help them relocate and provide them with food, shelter, and subsistence,” reads the filing submitted by eight organizations that are suing Trump over his cuts to U.S. foreign aid. In another suit — challenging the administration’s decision to eliminate the Inter-American Foundation, a U.S. government agency that funds community-led development in Latin America and the Caribbean — the plaintiffs allege that the White House failed to consider that ending these programs could lead to increased migration in the Western Hemisphere, calling their decision “arbitrary and capricious.” To some observers, the whiplash is a sign that decisions about U.S. foreign aid policy in Trump’s second term are being made in the absence of clear analysis and an informed assessment of their consequences. Instead, they see rash decisions by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, operatives, who have taken aim at programs deemed outside the U.S. government’s interest — even when they seem to align with Trump’s own stated goals. “It is a foreign policy run on Red Bull and vodka. You have no idea what these guys are going to come up with next,” one longtime foreign assistance expert told Devex. Peace out Even laws that President Trump signed during his first administration have not been spared by the aggressive cuts pursued during his second. In 2017, Trump signed the Women, Peace, and Security Act, elevating a bipartisan effort to center women’s roles in conflict resolution. “Women’s participation has, to date, been the single greatest indicator of what creates more durable peace agreements within a society,” said Jennifer Freeman, a peacebuilding expert who spent over a decade helping to build the scientific basis for the women, peace, and security agenda. Women in conflict-affected societies tend to be more aware of the links between conflict and social issues such as access to food or housing. Women are often more willing to work across communal and societal divides to ensure those concerns are addressed, said Freeman, who is now CEO of the Vancouver-based nonprofit PeaceGeeks. “When they get to a peace agreement, they bring those issues to the fore,” Freeman said. ”They don’t allow it just to be a conversation about divvying up power.” Yet on April 29, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted on X that he had “ENDED” the department’s women, peace, and security efforts, calling them “yet another woke/divisive/social justice/Biden initiative.” “GOOD RIDDANCE WPS!” he concluded. The implications of Hegseth’s social media proclamation are not entirely clear — other parts of the U.S. government that do not fall under his authority also have women, peace, and security mandates. The State Department, for example, provides diplomatic engagement and funding support to advance WPS priorities. But if the Trump administration no longer plans to prioritize women’s involvement in peacebuilding, the costs will have less to do with social justice and equality than with the effectiveness of peace agreements, Freeman said. “When you exclude women and when you cut that gendered understanding … you’re missing the value [of] those networks and that access and that understanding of societal divides,” she said. Labor pains In 2020, Trump signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. USMCA was meant to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA — which Trump had repeatedly called “the worst trade deal ever made.” USMCA was, in contrast, “the most important trade deal [the U.S. had] ever made, by far,” Trump said at the time. USMCA included millions of dollars for programs to support Mexican workers. The hope was that by raising wages for call center workers in Mexico, American companies would be less dependent on cheaper labor from abroad — and at the same time, Mexican workers would benefit from higher standards of living and be less likely to migrate to the United States. To that end, the USMCA funneled $180 million in grants to Mexico through the Department of Labor over four years. The money was meant to support workers, reduce human trafficking, child labor, and forced labor, and support the reform of the Mexican labor justice system. Two of those programs were run by the Solidarity Center, a U.S. nonprofit that supports workers’ rights. And for years, through Trump’s first term and Biden’s term, the organization had been helping more than 40,000 workers in Mexico fight for fair wages, organize themselves in workers’ unions, and engage in collective bargaining. “These projects were directly related to U.S. manufacturing sectors where it’s extremely important to American workers that labor standards be raised in Mexico, so that Americans are not competing on an uneven playing field,” the organization’s head, Shawna Bader-Blau, told Devex. Now, all of those programs — including those run by the Solidarity Center — have been canceled, according to a lawsuit filed by that organization and others in March. Programs have also been canceled across the Department of Labor’s assistance portfolio, slicing away programs supporting workers’ rights across the world. “@USDOL just saved taxpayers $30M by eliminating ‘America Last’ programs in foreign countries like Indonesia, Colombia, Guatemala, Chile and Brazil,” tweeted Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, referring to several Solidarity Center programs. “Under @POTUS, the American Worker ALWAYS comes First.” In the name of the daughter In Trump’s first term, his daughter Ivanka Trump served as a senior adviser and was the driving force behind a number of efforts focused on global women’s economic empowerment, many of which have now been defunded. In February 2019, the White House launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative, or W-GDP — touted as a whole-of-government effort to further women’s economic empowerment. It aimed to reach 50 million women by 2025 through its work in three key areas: supporting workforce development and skills training; helping women entrepreneurs with access to markets, capital, and networks; and working to change laws, regulations, and norms that limit women’s ability to fully participate in the economy. The national security presidential memorandum that created it stated: “It is the policy of the United States to enhance the opportunity for women to meaningfully participate in, contribute to, and benefit from economic opportunities as individuals, workers, consumers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors, so that they enjoy the same access, rights, and opportunities as men to participate in, contribute to, control, and benefit from economic activity.” At the time, Ivanka Trump extolled the benefits that accrue for economic growth and stability when women thrive. She also worked closely with then-World Bank President Jim Kim to create a fund at the World Bank, which came to be known as the “The Ivanka Fund,” to support women’s economic empowerment. That effort — the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative — continues its work to close financing gaps for women entrepreneurs. Ivanka Trump is not an active part of her father’s second administration, and the women’s empowerment issues she championed appear to have slipped off the agenda. For example, W-GDP’s efforts were carried out in part by a USAID fund that supported projects focused on land rights, tech workforce training, and facilitating access to value chains for women entrepreneurs. Those efforts were sustained through the Biden administration, but fell victim to Trump’s gutting of USAID this year. Ivanka Trump also helped push legislation to support these priorities, and in January 2019, President Trump signed the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment, or WEEE, Act into law. It directed USAID to work to improve access to finance, reduce gender disparities, eliminate gender-based violence, support women’s property and land rights, and improve education, among other things. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio has assured lawmakers that the State Department will continue to support women’s economic empowerment, some of the components of this work that were created during the first Trump administration have been hollowed out or eliminated by the second. That has happened amidst a changing political context. Policy efforts such as the WEEE Act — which directed the USAID administrator to ensure that the work of the agency and its strategies were “shaped by a gender analysis” and that gender equality and female empowerment should be integrated throughout the agency's programs and processes — were typically bipartisan. Now, the word “gender” has become a liability within the federal government, where many Republicans associate it with progressive ideology. So long to prosper Finally, the Trump administration has said that it wants its engagement with Africa to focus on “trade, not aid” with an emphasis on infrastructure and creating market opportunities for American companies. While that echoes Trump’s first-term Africa policy, the administration has shuttered an initiative it launched to advance those goals and imposed tariffs that are taking a toll on African economies. Prosper Africa was launched in a December 2018 speech by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton. It was aimed at doubling trade and investment between the U.S. and Africa. While the initiative struggled to get off the ground in its early years, and some have questioned its ability to deliver, it was revamped and enlarged during the Biden administration. Each U.S. embassy in Africa had a Prosper Africa “deal team” whose job it was to link U.S. firms to trade and investment opportunities and help African companies access U.S. markets. As of December 2024, Prosper Africa reported having helped close 1,852 deals across 49 countries worth $86 billion during the previous four years. Now, with USAID’s dismantling, Prosper Africa’s operations have been suspended, and its staff have been let go. The future of U.S. foreign aid is still in flux. Next week marks the State Department’s self-imposed reorganization deadline, which could reveal more about the fate of long-held international priorities. Congress is also preparing to weigh in on the future shape of U.S. foreign assistance. But the scope and scale of cuts — even to areas Trump once supported — shows just how much the playing field has changed in a few months.