Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
BRUSSELS — The sudden freezing of U.S. foreign aid has become a clear forewarning of the United States' changing approach to global engagement and piles pressure on European governments to contain the fallout, officials and aid groups say.
But European governments cannot replace the sheer scale globally of the U.S. foreign aid, which has been summarily halted. They may not even be inclined to, as they contend with struggling economies, demands to redirect funds to defense and populations pressing them to spend more at home, not abroad.
The Trump administration's near-total freeze on American foreign assistance has unleashed chaos in the global aid community. The funding freeze, personnel purges and confusion at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have also buffeted European aid groups that work with the agency to provide health and relief services, including in hard-hit parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
"It seems like organized chaos right now, so it's quite difficult to know what will happen," said Michael Neuman, director of studies at Doctors Without Borders, known by its French abbreviation MSF. "Everybody is a bit, I think, stunned."
The signs that the United States is adopting a new more inward-looking role in the world have reinforced Europeans' convictions that they should brace for more uncertainty. The new administration announced the aid suspension in parallel with orders to pull the United States from global coordination on health and climate programs, as well as threats to embroil European allies in a trade war.
The European Union has cast this moment in international politics as an opportunity for the 27-nation bloc to step up and remind the world that it is a reliable partner during unreliable times.
It's also time to get more transactional and "put the European flag up more," foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told E.U. ambassadors this week.
"The signals from the United States withdrawing from multilateral organizations, and giving signals that they only look into America itself, I think it gives us an opportunity to play this role … to grow our geopolitical power," she said. That may not mean "filling the void" but strengthening E.U. interests and ties with other countries, she said.
Collectively, the E.U. is among the world's biggest donors of development aid, providing over $52 billion a year.
An E.U. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations, said the bloc could ramp up some operations, though it would focus on "where its strategic interests are concerned."
The United States supplies more foreign aid globally than any other country, budgeting about $60 billion in 2023. That includes some $40 billion worth of appropriations managed by USAID, which oversees programs in more than 100 countries and has long been seen as a tool of American soft power.
Foreign aid programs represent about 1 percent of the overall U.S. budget. The Trump administration has made USAID a target of the push to shrink the federal government and pledged to bring the U.S. foreign policy apparatus in line with the president's "America First" agenda.
Some nonprofits have called on E.U. countries to give more money after President Donald Trump's executive order paused aid for a 90-day review. Yet many say the trend on the continent had already been going in the opposite direction for months.
The European cuts have not been anywhere near as dramatic or sweeping as the U.S. suspension, aid officials said. Still, governments, notably in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, have tightened budgets and scaled back foreign aid as they face economic headwinds or shift funding elsewhere, including toward military spending in the wake of the Ukraine war.
"It's pretty hard to see how other governments, including from the E.U. or the U.K., would actually step up," said Neuman. "First, because the share of the U.S. government is so enormous, but also because the trajectories we see from European governments are not good."
While his organization, MSF, is not funded by USAID, it is tracking the impact on its partners in the public health sector. Neuman said many communities racked by fighting or hunger - including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Bangladesh and in northern Nigeria - depend almost entirely on overseas aid for basic needs.
In Ukraine, the freeze has stoked fears about the future of humanitarian efforts and U.S. military funding as the country fights Russian advances. Top USAID recipients in 2023 included Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Congo, Somalia and Yemen.
It's early to predict the impact, given the uncertainty about which U.S. aid streams might continue after the 90-day review, or in what form, aid groups said. The administration has promised to submit every dollar of foreign aid to a test of whether it makes America "stronger" and "more prosperous."
"In a way, what's happening in the U.S. is an extreme of what we see elsewhere," Neuman said. "The retraction of states, the rise of xenophobic policies, the walling borders" all fit into patterns of protectionism that also hit aid, he said.
Several aid officials said the head-spinning USAID changes have fueled distrust and could strain relationships with U.S. aid partners across the Atlantic. The USAID website went dark in recent days as Trump and his allies moved to wrest control of the agency, and as aid groups have scrambled to understand the scope of the plans.
In remarks Monday in El Salvador, Secretary of State Mark Rubio said aid from now on would be run directly from the State Department. "There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue, that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy," he said.
An official at a European aid group that receives USAID funds said the "sudden withdrawal of funding, with very little clarity on why or what or how," forced the group to put staff on leave and suspend health services, which it provides in parts of Africa and Asia.
Speaking the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, she said that the vacuum was "catastrophic" for people who depend on lifesaving treatments and for the workers who provide them. It was particularly the abruptness of it all, with no advance warning, and "everything changing every couple of hours."
"If the U.S. wanted to change how it delivers foreign aid, I think it should have been done with much more responsibility and forethought," she said. "It could have been done without just putting so many lives at risk."
Her organization doesn't know if it will have to terminate staff, and some groups worry they might not be reimbursed for costs incurred before the stop-work order came in late January.
"Now we're not even sure if we can trust the U.S. government to pay its bills, let alone trust if it comes back and says it wants to continue working," she added. "It's really leaving a sense of distrust, where we never felt that before with our U.S. counterparts at all."
Rachel Bonnifield, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said how much pressure European governments face will depend on whether Washington eventually unblocks urgent aid and funnels it through other U.S. channels instead of USAID.
"Even if all this aid or large chunks of it get turned on, I don't think we're going back to before times in terms of the relationship between recipients and the U.S. government," she said. "It's changed the understanding of what that aid is, how reliable it is."
Neuman, of MSF, said aid workers are "not naive." They know that "in developing international aid policy, states think about themselves." But, he added, "how long will this last before states realize that their security also depends on the well-being of other nations?"
(COMMENT, BELOW)