With a divided nation heading to the polls in November, our shared expectations of a new direction are palpable. But one change that may surprise most Americans is the potential for wholesale disruption to U.S. foreign aid, including billions in humanitarian funding, that could affect millions of lives around the world.
As the world’s largest single emergency funder, the U.S. government, working through agencies like USAID and the State Department, sets the global standard for disaster response, including relief from floods, hurricanes, and famine, and poverty worldwide. Changes to the policies governing U.S. aid could have enormous implications for AJWS and more than 500 partner organizations we support across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
That is the outcome foretold by Project 2025, the playbook of goals for a new Republican administration. And these changes to global funding for emergency assistance, including essentials like food, shelter and medical care, would actually be tied to an ideological restriction on reproductive healthcare.
In 1985, under President Reagan, the U.S. adopted a global gag rule, prohibiting foreign organizations from receiving U.S. health assistance if they provide abortion-related services — even if abortion is legal in their country and even if the services are funded by other entities. It has been put on the books by the last four Republican presidents and rescinded by the last three Democratic presidents.
While the policy grew under President Trump in 2017 to include all health-related aid, the version outlined in Project 2025 would be expanded even further, subjecting all humanitarian assistance to this restriction. That means help for everything from childhood vaccinations to malaria medication to programs that curb land erosion and expand literacy would end if the organizations offering that life-saving aid also provide any form of reproductive health support.
“It’s hard to quantify the damage such a change would cause worldwide,” says Julieta Mendez, AJWS’s Associate Vice President for Programs. “Funding from USAID alleviates dire poverty in countless ways, including through nutrition, home construction, clean water, sanitation, and medical care, and the demand has only grown with the warming of the planet. Imposing ideological constraints on this help will take an overnight toll on human life.”
AJWS addresses disasters through grassroots solutions devised by existing grantees. Because of the massive restrictions described in Project 2025, it is too early to understand exactly how this election outcome would affect them. But during the Trump administration, many AJWS partners, even those who were not in violation of the global gag rule, were frightened enough to reject U.S. help and forced to cut services as a result, resulting in significant harm to the communities they serve.
With billions and billions of U.S. foreign assistance dollars at risk of being blunted and wasted, the outcome of the election has the potential to generate new humanitarian crises in places that once saw the U.S. as a leader and a partner.
The 2024 election will undoubtedly bring change to the United States. Beyond our borders, it may also imperil progress toward safety, sustainability, and our core humanity.
