27 February 2025
For those of us who view our world as a place where everyone should have access to equal rights, access to our human needs and opportunity to achieve our ambitions the events of recent weeks must herald a step back for humanity. One of the privileges for those of us fortunate enough to live in a free society is to respond to the needs of those less fortunate in our country and in the wider world. The actions of President Trump’s administration, supposedly to reduce waste and fraud by government agencies and overseen by the billionaire Elon Musk began with a transparently political purge of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) resulting in the stoppage of 90% of USAID’s international aid programmes, more than US$54billion in aid funding. This has effectively closed the largest provider of aid on the planet. In addition funding by the US State Department to more than 4,100 programmes, including humanitarian landmine and unexploded ordnance clearance work, has been stopped. The majority of these programmes are implemented by charities and non-profit agencies, including many UK-based organisations which have been forced to terminate or suspend staff worldwide. In addition DOGE, the seemingly informal department run by Musk on Presidential authority, stopped payment of all outstanding invoices and bills, with obvious hardship and worse for staff and suppliers in many countries. The US courts ordered that the funds be released to pay those invoices, but with most of USAID staff suspended or terminated. the process will be slow and payments will arrive too late to save some small suppliers, especially in the poorest countries. President Trump and his cabinet have seemingly ignored all appeals from aid organisations and moved ahead with the cuts. Trump himself described USAID as ‘unexplainable’ and Elon Musk referred to the agency as ‘criminal’ I have worked on and directed USAID funded programmes for over thirty years of my life and I can attest that neither description bears any relationship to the reality of the agency. As with all government agencies, there have been times when I have disagreed with its policies and priorities, it is not a free agent because it expends US government funds, but overall I have always respected the expertise of its staff and, with their funding and support, saved and sustained many thousands of lives, in war, natural disasters and famine – just in my own working experience.
Just when we were beginning to come to terms with that blow to aid response, believing that things couldn’t get worse, our own Prime Minister dealt another body blow to the vulnerable of our world – he announced that in order to spend more on defence he was cutting our overseas aid budget from 0.5%GDI (Gross Domestic Income) to 0.3% GDI – this after promising in opposition to return the contribution to the 0.7% GDI which is the target for developed countries.
It is very difficult to find any logic in this decision, which is certainly not widely supported even within the government. It has been apparent for many years that the UK military has been badly administered, and stealing this chunk from the aid budget will do little to improve matters. There are major policy issues that need to be addressed, not least the fact that our army has become less well-equipped and struggles to keep experienced soldiers while our arms industry profits hugely – that’s a contradiction that needs addressing and which may provide some of the solutions to defence funding. But that’s not the only reason why the Prime Minister’s sudden decision borders on nonsensical.
Global security is linked to many factors, one of the most important being inequality of opportunity – populations damaged by war, hunger, pandemic and, increasingly, global warming offer few opportunities for families to escape from those traps or to improve their opportunities locally. The world does little enough to respond to that unfair reality – that accident of birth condemns millions of people to lives of misery – that is fact. Thus it is hardly surprising that young people who want to better their lives set out to the places where they feel they can use their skills and enthusiasm to better their lives and support their families. That natural ambition results in what we in Europe, and many politicians and commentators, refer to as the ‘migration crisis’ and often ‘illegal migration’ and yet what those, mostly young, people are doing is what we would do ourselves if faced with no hope of betterment.
Faced with what most knowledgeable people consider to be a global crisis the direct, and sometimes only, responders, especially during the past fifty years have been humanitarian and UN agencies funded directly or indirectly by governmental donors; the most important of which have been USAID, the European Union and UK’s ODA (formally DFID). This month’s decisions by Trump and Starmer have, in my view, the real potential to result in a global needs crisis and a major, perhaps catastrophic, increase in population migration.
Rae McGrath
Patron
Carlisle One World Centre
(The above are my own opinions and do not necessarily represent the position of COWC)