It has been a year of aid cuts – major reductions in development funding from the US, Germany, France, and the UK mark the biggest contraction in aid spending in decades. By some projections, aid spending by the top donors in the world will decline by $67 billion (£50bn) from 2023 to 2026, a drop of almost a third.
This is driven primarily by Donald Trump’s administration shuttering the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and cancelling 80 per cent of its foreign aid programmes. Its sudden and chaotic decision to cut USAID has been coupled with an increasingly uninterested, if not adversarial, approach to multilateral cooperation in general – skipping G20 meetings and calling the language of the Sustainable Development Goals (the global, UN-set targets for addressing poverty) “adverse” to American interests.
Cuts and disruption at this scale will have human consequences. By some projections, 100,000 deaths so far, and potentially millions in future. But as my colleague Jerome Puri and I outline in the report “Rethinking UK aid policy in an era of global funding cuts,” they will also have security and geopolitical implications that we should not ignore.
The international organisations through which much aid spending is channelled – particularly UN agencies –– work on global challenges which affect UK security too. This includes controlling infectious diseases, pandemic monitoring and preparedness, and biosecurity.
An analysis by the World Health Organisation (WHO) of its 108 country offices’ work through March–April 2025 found that 70 per cent reported disruptions linked to aid cuts since the start of 2025, particularly for systems needed to monitor, prepare for and respond to outbreaks of preventable diseases. Analysis by Germany’s Kiel Institute has found there is evidence of significant returns for aid donors who invest in health in poorer countries, particularly in controlling and managing infectious diseases which if left unmanaged would result in wider crises. Preventing pandemics is more cost-effective than responding to them.
The UK government cut Britain’s aid budget earlier this year not for the ideological reasons of the Trump administration, but because it wanted to find tactical cuts to provide more funding to defence. Parliament’s Defence Select Committee has rightly said it is critical and urgent that the UK improve its readiness to fight a war to defend itself. But one of the biggest risks to UK security in the past five years was the Covid-19 pandemic, meaning the structures for controlling and addressing risks to global health are critical to our security too.
The government has sought to preserve – even as it cuts spending – part of its contributions to major global health funds. But it has nonetheless cut funding for some initiatives, including those focused on critical but less attention-grabbing issues, such as combatting anti-microbial resistance – and it will be affected by the wider reduction in resources for international health institutions.
This year’s cuts in aid spending are also likely to particularly hit countries most affected by conflict – recent trends in spending suggest what aid remains may well be channelled to more stable countries where impact is easier to measure, or reserved for short-term emergency responses.
Countries like Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and Palestine have all already been hit by the UK’s cuts to aid it spends directly in specific countries. The difficult work of preventing conflict in the first place, or trying to reduce the likelihood it spirals out of control into wider regional wars is likely to lose out from wider cuts too. Uncontrolled conflict creates fertile ground for illicit finance, organised crime, and refugee flows. And, most refugees fleeing conflict head for more stable neighbouring countries, many of which – Kenya, Bangladesh, and Jordan, for example – have been hosting massive refugee camps for years. Reduced UN capacity and funding will make it harder for these countries to manage these situations – without sufficient international support, these governments may face domestic pressure to restrict rights or push refugees back, in ways that could affect regional security too.
Aid and defence spending are often described as opposed “soft” and “hard” power tools, but it might be better to see investment in global public goods such as health security or climate action not as soft power – but as practical and direct investments in collective security.
Ensuring some resources are concentrated on neglected conflicts also has wider benefits, in guarding against those conflicts spiralling out of control in ways which can have long-run effects on regional stability and irregular migration.
There are few easy choices for this government, and there are critical calls on Britain’s resources. The era of expansive development spending and goals for multilateral cooperation is likely over, and the renewed threat to European security is real. But the scale of recent global aid cuts mean that, even if the UK cannot spend more, it needs a clearer plan for how to deal with what will likely be significant weakening and restructuring of international organisations.
There is a risk that aid cuts of this scale will result in uncoordinated reductions in staffing and work, and competition between international agencies for dwindling resources. This will exacerbate longstanding problems – it is well-acknowledged there is too much duplication and inefficiency in the UN system, and the current aid crisis is the right time to try to get on a grip on this.
The UK has an opportunity to work with others to come up with a more strategic response, including its proposed global conference on aid and development and its hosting of the G20 in 2027 – where it will follow a likely difficult and turbulent year of the US hosting the grouping. The challenge now is whether the UK can work with others to think strategically about the restructuring of global cooperation, or simply be forced to react to the security consequences of its decline.
Olivia O’Sullivan is the director of Chatham House’s UK in the World programme
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
