Foreign aid has long served as a strategic tool for the United States—promoting stability, opening markets, and building goodwill in fragile regions. But sweeping cuts and funding freezes have thrown that legacy into question.
Advocates warn that the disruptions are ceding influence to adversaries like China and extremist groups. Kelly Ryan of Jesuit Refugee Service USA and Elizabeth Hoffman of the ONE Campaign argue that foreign aid should be viewed not as charity, but as an investment in national security, economic partnerships, and American values.
Ryan is president of Jesuit Refugee Service USA, and Hoffman is executive director for North America at the ONE Campaign. Ryan oversees programs operating in 58 countries, serving nearly a million people each year. “Our model is accompaniment,” she explains. “We don’t just parachute in. We remain with the community as part of the community, working equally with them.” Her organization’s 9,000-person workforce includes a third who are refugees themselves.
The ONE Campaign, originally founded by Bono, focuses on global health and economic development in Africa. “We’re most well known for perhaps PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS—and really championing that program and pushing it across the finish line,” says Hoffman. Today, the organization’s mission is broader, but the focus on health and stability remains central.
Ryan and Hoffman are raising alarms about the sudden foreign aid cuts by the Trump administration. Hoffman recalls, “When we first heard about the foreign aid review, we were not immediately concerned.” The concern came later that week, she says, “when the Administration indicated that while they were doing this review, they would be pausing almost all of the existing programming.”
The freeze disrupted even critical shipments of food and medicine. “Programs that I think definitely most Americans would consider lifesaving—food assistance, medicines—things like that were put on stop, even though they'd already been paid for,” Hoffman says. “Medicines [were] being locked in cabinets, food being held at port.”
Ryan is especially concerned about the damage to operations on the ground. “The process has been chaotic, from the inside and from the outside,” she says. “It has been extraordinarily inefficient and confusing to us, the people working in the field, but also to the countries in which we're operating, as well as, of course, to the beneficiaries.”
Her organization lost funding for programs that supplied wheelchairs, assisted the dying and chronically ill, and supported persecuted religious minorities in Iraq. But the decision-making process, she says, was opaque and arbitrary. “The DOGE people used artificial intelligence to go through and do keyword searches… Programs that every American would think were sensible were just cut because of some uses of language in them.”
Worse, Ryan notes, “programs were stopped, like our own, and then restarted,” incurring unnecessary costs. “The government owes us half a million dollars for paying out required labor law costs for our program in Colombia,” she claims. “If they kept the program going, they wouldn’t have had any of those costs–it’s very wasteful to taxpayers.”
Both leaders reject the notion that this is a partisan issue. “I worked in the U.S. House of Representatives for Republicans for about a decade,” Hoffman says. “I worked for George W. Bush—not in the Administration, but in his post-presidency at his Institute… I’m a lifelong Republican.”
“These programs reflect traditional Republican values about human dignity, about individual freedom and liberty,” she adds. “They can be strategic national security objectives,” she says, specifically because “we prevent conflicts.” PEPFAR, for example, was never just humanitarian: “It was a program to promote stability in Africa and to reduce the probability of violent outbreaks.”
Ryan also views foreign aid funds as a strategy. “Those that save lives, those that give hope, those that expand our sphere of influence and block other influences that are very dangerous are really important to do.” She warns that cuts are noticed—and exploited—by adversaries. She says China, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda go to poor neighborhoods where US aid is withdrawn. “They buy people breakfast and lunch,” she says. “We can either be on the sidelines… or we can be a partner for really good development.”
She also notes that the American public often misunderstands how much the country actually spends on foreign aid. “Americans believe that foreign assistance is 20 to 25% of the federal budget… but it is less than 1%. And if you look at just refugees, it’s 0.12% of 1%.”
In Ryan’s view, “Development and humanitarian assistance pay off enormously,” by “creating peace and stability and advancing human dignity.”
The future of US aid programs remains uncertain. “We have to recover from what has happened,” Ryan says. “86% cuts is extreme. And it would be hard for us to provide programs… if that’s the case.” She is hopeful the Trump Administration will shift course: “I hope President Trump has a plan,” she says. In her view, foreign aid “is something where we can be a world leader,” even while protections can be put in place to “make sure none of it is inconsistent with the Administration’s values.”
Hoffman adds that public support for aid programs is strong. “We did a national poll… I think it was 74% of Texans supported [U.S. efforts to eradicate HIV/AIDS], and 75% of Californians.” She says that, if Texas and California can find common ground, “we’re really onto something.”
There are economic stakes as well. “Africa is the fastest-growing continent in the world,” Hoffman says. It is in our economic interest to provide assistance “so we have trading partners, so we have people that… want to watch our movies… and buy our goods.”
According to Ryan, an element of foreign assistance is altruistic. But, she says, “there’s an element of it that is absolutely beneficial to us–it’s not an ‘either-or,’ It’s a ‘both-and.’”
