Politics, not economics, driving foreign aid cuts, experts warn

Foreign aid budgets are being slashed not because of shrinking economies but due to political choices, development leaders warned at a Devex Impact House event this week — a shift they said is weakening the international multilateral system just as global crises intensify. “The decision to decline [official development assistance]. … It’s a political decision that is not determined by GDP contraction in donor countries. It’s politics,” said Jorge Moreira da Silva, executive director of UNOPS. He noted that previous drops in official development assistance were tied to recessions in donor countries, but today’s pullback reflects a deliberate recalibration of priorities. Moreira da Silva argued that aid advocates must adapt. “What we don’t invest in others, it will harm our own security and progress,” he told Devex Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar at the event on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly. “We have to be humble and brave … collaborate more, coordinate better, and deliver at scale.” Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, described an “inconvenient truth”: domestic politics are increasingly skeptical of foreign aid when poverty and migration pressures mount at home. “You’ve got to make the value proposition even clearer now to the domestic constituencies who are suffering from many of the things that we are going overseas to try and save,” she said. “How do you square away that I’m suffering here at home, and over there in some foreign land, you’re trying to save some other people?” Both leaders weighed in on United Nations reform, which is being driven in part by austerity. Moreira da Silva insisted the process should be seen as a chance to strengthen multilateralism, not just streamline it: “I don’t see this as getting leaner, but as getting fit … the only logo that matters is the U.N.” Ero was less convinced. “That train has left the station, right, in terms of reform. I think people are less interested in the reform as opposed to the outcome,” she said. “There are real question marks about the lack of a strategy,” she added, pointing to declining U.S. support and a 17% drop in aid from traditional donors, with much of Europe redirecting spending toward defense and Ukraine. She also warned that empathy, once a driver of public support for humanitarian action, is fading. She highlighted the “fundamental difference” between today and 30 years ago, when empathy and compassion drove change. It is not driving people in the same way as it drove people 20, 30 years ago,” she said. Conflicts such as Sudan, she added, risk being deprioritized as proxy wars rather than mobilizing global attention. Despite those challenges, Moreira da Silva pointed to lessons from UNOPS’ own recovery after a major scandal back in 2022 — when Devex revealed accusations of mismanagement of funds — as proof that credibility can be restored. “As an organization that faced the worst scandal in the U.N. system … I wouldn’t say that everything is fixed, but I would say you can see that we had all the partners back. We are getting more projects than we had in the past. We are delivering, we are partnering more, and that’s why I think that it’s possible to reform even when we face such a difficult circumstance at UNOPS,” he said. Both agreed that making the case to skeptical publics is now central to the future of aid. As Moreira da Silva put it, what governments fail to invest abroad, they will “pay much more with a refugee crisis, with insecurity, with instability.”