Donald Trump won. What does that mean for development?

Donald Trump’s imminent return to power is sending tremors through the international development world, which is bracing for a radical shift in U.S. overseas priorities over a sweeping range of issues from abortion, climate, health, and LGTBQI rights to reform of the international financial system and likely cuts in funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations. The Trump campaign has provided scant details on its specific plans on the development front but if the past is prologue, it’s safe to bet on a slew of jarring early administration initiatives, starting with the restoration of the Mexico City Policy, or global gag rule; the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement; and the U.S. exit from a number of international agencies, including the U.N. Human Rights Council; defunding other agencies such as the U.N. Population Fund and UN Women, and even possibly withdrawing from the World Health Organization and World Bank. Former Trump political appointees have underscored the need to align U.S. foreign aid with U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives, including by countering Chinese influence and promoting free-market reforms, pro-life policies, and religious freedom. The Biden administration “deformed” USAID by promoting a “divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism,” Max Primorac, a senior USAID official during the Trump administration, wrote in a paper published as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. In sharp contrast to the past, Trump will face fewer constraints on his White House’s ambition to impose draconian foreign aid cuts, having solidified his influence over the Republican Party, which is set to control the U.S. Senate and possibly the U.S. House of Representatives. “The difference between today and 2016 is that today, Trump understands a little bit more about how the government works,” said George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “This time around, you’re seeing Republicans, particularly in the House, that are unwilling to buck Trump.” The election threatens to upend the careers of civil servants in USAID, the State Department, and other U.S. agencies, who have been routinely vilified as “deep state” conspirators devoted to undermining the president’s agenda. Expect the new administration to move ahead with a plan it hatched in the first Trump term to vet the political bona fides of career officials and replace them with a broader stable of political appointees. Perhaps they may even revise a short-lived initiative to require American nationals seeking senior jobs in the international system to fill out a questionnaire to determine where their political loyalties lie. This shift will likely strengthen the evangelical Christian community, whose champions received critical posts in the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and USAID during Trump’s first term. “Former missionaries, veterans members of diasporas, and faith community stakeholders with overseas experience should be recruited to work at USAID,” Primorac wrote. What’s at stake The U.S. is the largest bilateral donor in the world. Last year, the country contributed $63 billion in official development assistance, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — a number that skyrocketed after President Joe Biden took office. When Trump was in power, he repeatedly pushed lawmakers to cut the country’s international affairs budget, with calls to slash USAID funding up to 31%. And though the U.S. Congress rejected those proposals, many think it could be a different situation with Trump in firmer control of the party. “The history of the last 80 years could dramatically change,” Ingram said. Ingram estimated that with Trump in power — alongside the Republicans who fervently support him — foreign aid could be cut by 10% to 15%. In part, that’s because the makeup of the Republican Party has changed with Trump’s rise. Less than 15% of today’s lawmakers were in office when the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation were created, two initiatives that were launched by former Republican President George W. Bush. In the time since, a much different strand of Republicanism has seeped into the world of foreign aid — and earlier this year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, pushed for stripping USAID of its funding entirely. "Imagine if this money went to Americans who, by the way, are paying for it, instead of foreign countries,” said Greene, speaking on the House floor in July. “Maybe we could solve some of the problems we have here at home.” Today, more than 110 conflicts are raging across the world, the highest number since World War II. Communities in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan are crumbling — but some former Trump officials have indicated humanitarian funding will likely be on the chopping block. Project 2025 details how expanding USAID’s humanitarian budget “distorts humanitarian responses, worsens corruption in the countries we support, and exacerbates the misery of those we intend to help.” “Humanitarian aid is sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes,” the document states. While Trump has disavowed the Project 2025 playbook, it was co-authored by dozens of key Trump officials and supporters, some of whom could very well wind up in a second administration. Changes on the world stage Trump is also poised to change the way the U.S. engages with the world’s conflicts. In the Middle East, it’s expected that Trump will ramp up support for Israel: In August, the former president criticized Biden’s calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and said he would “give Israel the support that it needs to win.” After Iran fired missiles into Israel last month, the incoming president said Israel should hit Iran’s nuclear sites first and “worry about the rest later.” To date, more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to the latest numbers from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA. Trump has also pledged to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, though he’s offered little in terms of specifics for how he would do that. He has long criticized U.S. support for Ukraine, and in the only presidential debate between him and Kamala Harris, he refused to say whether he wanted the besieged country to win the war. “In Europe, there is a lot of worry now about the United States becoming a less reliable ally in NATO, and also a less reliable partner to Ukraine,” said Jordan Tama, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at American University. “The U.S. has been tremendously important in providing support for Ukraine, and generally in providing a security umbrella for European countries and NATO partners. Trump does not value that — he’s made that clear.” The World Bank A common concern is that a Trump administration could pose a threat to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but what exactly it will do isn’t entirely clear. Even in Project 2025, recommendations are mixed. The document that could guide policy for the administration says that the U.S. Treasury Department plays an important role in the World Bank and IMF and should “force reforms and new policies.” At the same time, it says the U.S. should withdraw from and “terminate its financial contribution” to the World Bank and the IMF, recommending instead that the U.S. provide economic or humanitarian aid unilaterally to avoid “expensive middle-men” or entities with interests that don’t align with the U.S. But the U.S. provided the World Bank with a capital increase in Trump’s last term, a fact World Bank President Ajay Banga was quick to note when asked about the U.S. election ahead of the World Bank annual meetings. However, funding for the International Development Association, or IDA, the World Bank’s fund for the lowest-income countries, did dip a bit from what then-President Barack Obama had committed prior to leaving office. Trump’s election win raises more doubts about whether the bank can achieve its targets for a large IDA replenishment next month. Still, Banga has been diplomatic when asked about the former president. “My view of him, having dealt with him for years, is that at the end of the day, he understands the value if you could put it in the terms that makes sense for what he's trying to get done for his administration's policies,” Banga told Reuters recently. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva recently said that working with any U.S. administration is a “very positive” experience. "The U.S. is very pragmatic,” she said. “It brings a can-do attitude. It is demanding, and I like that.” The United Nations Trump has a complicated relationship with the U.N. He appeared to genuinely enjoy the pomp and spectacle of its annual summit of world leaders. Before his presidency, he once tried to convince the former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to give him the job of leading a multibillion-dollar renovation of the U.N. headquarters. But he has also withdrawn U.S. support for key U.N. institutions and issued annual budgets with draconian, across-the-board cuts in U.N. programs. His administration’s refusal to pay its entire peacekeeping bill has contributed to a serious U.N. liquidity crisis. Still, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres — who strived to cultivate a warm personal relationship with Trump during his first term — congratulated him on his electoral victory and voiced his “belief that the cooperation between the United States and the United Nations is an essential pillar of international relations.” “Guterres will hope he can rekindle the bromance with Trump, but he is now on the record as criticizing Israel innumerable times, and the Republicans will not let him off lightly for that,” Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert with the International Crisis Group, told Devex by email. “The litmus test of exactly how anti-UN the new administration will be is the WHO. Will Trump go back to his 2020 plan to withdraw, which Biden halted, or will he let bygones be bygones.” Still, Gowan said he believes Guterres and his team “are as prepared as they can be for what they expect to be a financial firestorm as Trump comes back. There are plans to try to piece together funds from other countries to keep the organization afloat through the next year at least.” Countries that heavily lobbied the Biden administration to embrace reforms at the U.N. aimed at addressing the needs of the global south in the runup to the U.N. Summit of the Future “are in for a rude awakening,” Gowan said. “The idea that a Republican White House and Congress will compromise on World Bank or IMF reform is for the birds,” he said. A U.S. proposal to enlarge the U.N. Security Council, he added, “is dead in the water.” Still, the new Trump administration may need to temper any desire to disengage from the U.N. altogether, creating a diplomatic vacuum that countries such as China, which has sought a greater role in the multilateral system, would welcome. There have been whispers around U.N. headquarters suggesting the new administration may not withdraw from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization this time around, according to Gowan. “I think the jury’s still out on the U.N. and how they are going to approach it,” Peter Yeo, the president of the Better World Campaign, a U.N. advocacy group, told Devex in a telephone interview. “The first Trump administration actively engaged with the U.N. and the secretary-general to advance their foreign policy priorities. The second Trump administration could be a more complex picture than we know as it relates to the U.N.,” he added. Reproductive health A new Trump administration will take a dramatically different position than the Biden administration on sexual reproductive health and rights — and it will likely happen quickly. Trump is expected to swiftly reenact the global gag rule, which prohibits U.S. family planning funding to organizations that provide abortion services or information. In his first term, he expanded that policy to apply to all U.S. global health funding and many expect that he would apply it to all U.S. foreign assistance, as was proposed in Project 2025. Trump will also likely eliminate funding for UNFPA, the U.N. agency focused on reproductive health services. Expect the U.S. to also rejoin the “Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family,” or GCD, which was originally signed in the waning months of Trump’s first term. The GCD is a nonbinding agreement that includes some commitments on health care with the assertion that there is no international right to abortion. The 32 initial signatories included Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya, Uganda, Hungary, and Saudi Arabia. The ideology that underpins the agreement is likely to manifest itself in administration policies, with a focus on family values as opposed to abortion. Valerie Huber, the architect of the GCD and former U.S. special representative for global women’s health in Trump’s first administration, recently told Devex that progressive global health organizations' insistence on abortion rights and other ideologically divisive issues has diverted resources and attention away from basic, uncontroversial health services in lower-income countries, where families, women, and children — born and unborn — are paying the price. “Why are we arguing about abortion when we should be much more concerned about making sure that there are clinics, skilled health workers, necessary medications, electricity, running water?” Huber said. Global health During his first presidency, the Trump administration formally notified the U.N. that the U.S. would withdraw from WHO. They said the WHO had “failed badly” at its mission and criticized it for mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic. It didn’t ultimately happen, as President Biden retracted the withdrawal as soon as he took office. But the threat of abandoning WHO now looms large over a second Trump presidency, and that has implications both for funding and for the global response to pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. The U.S. is WHO’s largest contributor, providing almost 16% of the organization’s budget, and the largest contributor to WHO’s Contingency Fund for Emergencies, which allows it to quickly respond to outbreaks and health emergencies. One WHO official, who wished to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to speak on the matter, described the general feeling within the agency as bleak. Fears extend toward the pandemic agreement negotiations, which are currently in session in Geneva. The U.S. is among those hoping to conclude the agreement by year’s end. “It would be a terrible missed opportunity if the INB [Intergovernmental Negotiating Body] is unable to reach consensus after three years of hard work. We cannot afford to let this opportunity slip away,” Pamela Hamamoto, U.S. chief negotiator for the pandemic accord, told negotiators on Monday. Hamamoto said the U.S. would like the agreement to be adopted under Article 21 of the WHO Constitution, which means it can enter into force without being ratified by countries. Many member states however want a legally binding instrument, and some cautioned against placing speed over substance in the negotiations. Nina Schwalbe, CEO of public health firm Spark Street Advisors and has closely followed the negotiations, told Devex that even if negotiators race to get the agreement done within the year, “there will be zero chance it will be ratified under a Trump administration with a now Republican majority Senate,” citing conservative pushback on a pandemic treaty. She called on the Biden administration to “be bold on all equity-related provisions, with the hope that — if not now — one day there will be a Senate ready to sign the treaty into law.” The U.S. is known to not be part of many international treaties, such as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the U.S. is the only country in the world not to have ratified. But the U.S. sitting out a future pandemic agreement could have particularly large ramifications. “A lot of the hope is residing in trying to get obligations around medical countermeasures and pandemic products [such as] drugs, vaccines, and tests,” explained Josh Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “And because the U.S. is such an important producer of those countermeasures, not having the U.S. be part of this larger ecosystem for pandemic countermeasures – if that were part of an agreement – would weaken the agreement.” Climate change Trump’s dismissal of climate change as a “hoax” set the tone for Trump’s first term, during which the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Agreement, rolled back key environmental protections, and prioritized fossil fuel development over renewable energy. David Nicholson, chief climate officer at Mercy Corps, warned that “Trump’s return to office could represent significant setbacks for global climate progress.” In a 2017 Rose Garden speech, Trump said, "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris." His stance on the Paris Agreement remains unchanged, with a campaign spokesperson confirming he would withdraw from it again if elected. This move would nullify U.S. emissions targets and could prompt other nations to backtrack on their commitments. Global north countries are expected to agree to a new climate finance goal at the 29th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties next week in Azerbaijan. Trump’s victory could spook the United Kingdom and the European Union — the two other biggest donors — from making ambitious financial commitments. Trump is also rumored to be considering withdrawal from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, a move that would require approval from the now Republican-controlled Senate. This could be catastrophic for its income — the U.S. contributes about one-fifth of the budget. Funding for climate adaptation programs was hit particularly hard during Trump’s first office while funding for renewable energy projects was less affected, Politico reported, citing an interview with USAID Chief Climate Officer Gillian Caldwell. The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which includes tax credits to cut U.S. emissions by up to 11% below the 2005 level, could face rollbacks. While experts debate whether Trump would attempt a full repeal of the IRA as some Trump allies and Republican states have benefited from the bill’s provisions, his campaign has signaled an intent to end electric vehicle tax credits and potentially scale back clean energy production incentives. Trump's energy strategy would likely continue favoring fossil fuel production. In his victory speech on Wednesday, he praised the country’s vast reserves of “liquid gold.” During his first term, he allowed drilling in protected areas and has indicated that he would look to do so again if reelected. It is important to note, however, that oil production actually surged to new highs under President Biden. “Donald Trump heading back to the White House won’t be a death knell to the clean energy transition that has rapidly picked up pace these last four years,” Dan Lashof, U.S. director for the World Resources Institute, said in a statement. “Both Republican-led and Democratic-led states are seeing the benefits of wind, solar, and battery manufacturing and deployment thanks to the billions of dollars of investments unleashed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Governors and representatives in Congress on both sides of the aisle have come to recognize that clean energy is a huge moneymaker and a job creator.” Food security and agriculture Trump’s first term was characterized by a tense relationship with science and scientists, in which critics of his administration said it prioritized agribusiness industry’s interests over those of consumers and small farmers. Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Agriculture — which funds billions of dollars each year in food and agriculture research that helps the world — made policy decisions that reversed an Obama-era rule banning the nerve-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos; attacked WHO guidelines on the use of antibiotics in healthy livestock; and generally tried to reorganize the USDA to favor agribusiness and sideline science. Given that agriculture is the biggest source of human-made greenhouse gas emissions — with the sector accounting for more than 10% of all U.S. emissions in 2022 — climate change can’t be addressed without transforming food systems. Project 2025 calls on the USDA to end all mentions or efforts to transform the U.S. food and agriculture system as they relate to climate change. Instead, it calls for the agency to narrow its mission and focus on “removing governmental barriers that hinder food production,” including any references to the climate impacts of agriculture. It also calls on the next administration to “remove the U.S. from any association with U.N. and other efforts to push sustainable-development schemes connected to food production.” Republican control of both houses of Congress would pave the way for passage of a version of the $1.5 trillion farm bill that would result in millions fewer people receiving foreign food aid. It could also place restrictions on Food for Peace, the U.S. flagship food assistance program that distributes U.S.-led commodities across the globe, which could hinder its ability to fund initiatives to boost food-insecure regions’ longer-term resiliency. Localization One policy, however, might prove surprisingly durable under Trump: The push to increase the amount of U.S. aid that is channeled to local organizations. This has been a flagship policy under the current administrator of USAID, Samantha Power, and the writers of Project 2025 have indicated that they broadly want to continue in the same direction, albeit with somewhat different motivations. While Democratic leaders at USAID have tended to focus on the moral case for putting local people in charge, Republican rhetoric has focused more on cost. “Local organizations have incredible capabilities,” said Max Primorac, lead author of the section on USAID in the report, during Devex World 2024. “You look at sub-Saharan Africa, the faith-based organizations, the churches are running most of the hospitals and the education institutes, so working through them, I think there's a lot of savings. They're cheaper.” It’s not clear how much might change in practice, though. There are two big reasons for that. First, USAID under Mark Green, its administrator during the first Trump term, had many of the same priorities as USAID under Power. The agency’s largest single project, the NextGen health supply chain contracts, were conceived under Green, and work on them has continued all the way through Power’s reign. They are still not ready, and the next Republican administrator will pick up a project that began two presidents ago. And second, USAID has proved remarkably resistant to any change implemented by any administrator. The agency is ringed around by congressional earmarks, and as a result of legislators’ reluctance to spend money on administration costs, it is dramatically understaffed. So while the Republican leaders might want to increase localization spending, they might find themselves no more able to than any of the leaders who have come before. David Ainsworth, Jesse Chase-Lubitz, Sara Jerving, Jenny Lei Ravelo, Tania Karas, Ayenat Mersie, Elissa Miolene, and Adva Saldinger contributed to this article.