Trump’s cuts to international funding for health and food programmes will come back to bite him

Just two months into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, the US’ new slash-and-burn approach to international aid, including to food aid, is having tragic consequences around the globe, wreaking havoc in countries that rely on the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to support their efforts to feed millions desperately in need, vaccinate children and fight life-threatening diseases.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) said the 40% drop in funding it faces in 2025 as a result of the US cuts “is having severe repercussions for food aid efforts globally, particularly emergency feeding programmes that feed the most vulnerable”. WFP’s operations in 2025 are focused on supporting just more than one-third of those in need, it says – 123 million of the world’s hungriest people. 

On Friday, 28 March 2025, WFP said that “58 million people risk losing life-saving assistance in the agency’s 28 most critical crisis response operations unless new funding is received urgently”. 

While WFP’s mostly crisis-driven food aid is eviscerated, other nutrition-assistance organisations that run long-term nutrition support programmes in scores of countries are also on the chopping block.

A group of global nutrition experts, writing in the journal Nature, have called the impact of massive cuts to international food aid “lethal”.

The writers, including Saskia Osendarp, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Micronutrient Forum, Lawrence Haddad, executive director of the Geneva, Switzerland-based Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), and Marie Ruel, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, along with colleagues from Ethiopia and Thailand, say “the sudden withdrawal of almost half of global funding for nutrition will have dire consequences for decades” and is “threatening to reverse decades of progress in reducing malnutrition”.

Osendarp also wrote, in a separate news release on the GAIN website on 26 March: “The real impact of this is likely to be generational because malnourished infants are likely to be malnourished adults and give birth to malnourished children.” Malnutrition also undermines brain development, leads to as much as a 45% reduction in lifetime earnings, and as a result sabotages countries’ development, growth and human capital.

The funding cuts amount to almost one half (44%) of the $1.6-billion in donor aid in 2022 that went towards global nutrition targets agreed at the World Health Assembly (the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, where the UN’s 194 member states convene every May to determine programme and financial policies, and approve budgets). 

The impact of this drastic reduction is likely to worsen severe acute malnutrition, the experts say – the most life-threatening form of undernutrition, which accounts for one-fifth of all deaths of children under five – and thousands of community-based programmes to fight it: “The abrupt withdrawal of donor support leaves millions of critically ill children without access to these life-saving programmes. It is already undermining the institutional capacity, expertise and data infrastructures required to deliver essential nutrition services.” 

USAID has until now also supported half of the world’s supply of “Plumpy’Nut”, a therapeutic, peanut-based “ready-to-use food” used to treat severe acute malnutrition in children.

The authors give examples of the immediate impacts that terminating USAID’s Advancing Nutrition funding is already having: In Sudan, almost 80% of emergency food kitchens have closed; in Ethiopia, supplies of nutrient-rich foods given as treatment to one million severely malnourished children every year will run out by May (in two months); and in Nigeria, Helen Keller International (a local beneficiary of USAID) has been forced to end a programme that provides nutrition services to 5.6 million children.

Altogether, the Nature article says, the cuts of almost all US funding for nutrition programmes, combined with on average 35% reductions in overall international aid from other Western donor countries such as the UK (cuts of 40%), France (37%) and the Netherlands (30%) – leads to projections that global donations for nutrition programmes are estimated to drop by 44% in 2025 compared with 2022.

The nearly 5,800 USAID multiyear funding awards (out of 6,200) that the Trump administration has just terminated are together worth $54-billion. This represents a 92% reduction in USAID funding. The agency itself has had its staff cut from about 6,000 to 869 people. 

Funding has also been cut for the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Rome-based UN agency that leads, among other programmes, surveillance for diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans, the New York Times reported, in its exposé on 26 March of a 281-page spreadsheet that USAID sent to the US Congress on 24 March. The spreadsheet lists which programmes USAID plans to abolish and which it plans to continue.

The US has spent decades building its reputation as a “compassionate ally”, the New York Times’s Stephanie Nolen wrote, that was willing and able to provide substantial support to countries that couldn’t afford to support the health and other aid programmes they needed. USAID has spent billions helping countries offer healthcare to their populations, and in some cases to establish their own capabilities, with proportions of aid funding diminishing as countries’ incomes and ability to pay their own way improves – notably in the cases of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. 

Both Gavi, for which the Trump administration has just announced it will terminate its $880-million funding (2022 to 2030), and the Global Fund have saved tens of millions of lives through their grants for vaccines, medications and medical programmes. Gavi has estimated that US cuts to their funding could result in 75 million children not receiving routine vaccinations in the next five years, and 1.2 million children dying as a result.

Immediately after the US cuts to aid were announced, UN secretary-general António Guterres said that “these cuts will make the world less healthy, less safe and less prosperous”. 

While the cuts are one component of Trump’s “America First” policy, Guterres said, “the reduction of America’s humanitarian role and influence will run counter to American interests globally”. DM

Adèle Sulcas is a freelance writer and senior adviser for Daily Maverick’s Food Justice project, focusing on food policy, food systems and intersections with climate and global health.