April 3, 2026
By Alexander Sanger
The Trump Administration today issued its budget proposal for the next fiscal year. It eliminates funding for family planning and other vital programs. Some background first:
Just when I thought that the Trump administration hit bottom in cruelty, depravity and disregard of the humanity beyond our borders, the administration recently had USAID destroy millions of dollars of contraceptives that had previously been bought by USAID for African countries. The contraceptives have been sitting in limbo in Belgium since the Trump administration in 2025 had dismantled the American foreign aid program. They were literally left to rot rather than be distributed to health systems and providers in Africa for whom they had been purchased. There will be forthcoming, I am sure, a report of the health impact of this callous act on women who have been denied family planning through increased and unwanted pregnancies, children spaced too close together and thus infant mortality, and pregnant women resorting to unsafe abortions.
Fos Feminista has issued a report, When Aid Becomes Empire: The Silent Recolonization of Global Health, which analyzes the detrimental effects of the America First Global Health Strategy (AFGHS) that has been issued by the Trump administration. https://fosfeminista.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Recolonising-Global-Health_V3.pdf
The new US foreign aid strategy is focused on 1) addressing and preventing future outbreaks and epidemics that affect American health and security; 2) developing bilateral agreements with nations rather than multilateral agreements with intermediary NGOs; and 3) exporting American technology to advance global health outcomes. In addition, the strategy envisions recipient countries giving favorable consideration to the US purchasing “key minerals and rare earth elements” within their countries. All the above in service of fighting “Islamic Extremism”. The AFGHS’s rationale prioritizes Africa, which it describes as “a continent of strategic importance to U.S. national interests,” citing amongst other advantages, its deposits of “key minerals and rare earth elements needed as inputs into advanced technologies that fuel critical military and commercial applications.” The competition with China for resources is clear.
The Fos report accurately uses the word “recolonization” to describe the new foreign aid program.
Foreign aid as practiced by many countries has been around a long time. Some historians even have discovered it employed in ancient Greece and Rome. Perhaps the most egregious example of foreign aid by colonial powers being used to pillage and pirate natural resources from colonies was Spain looting the New World of gold and silver – the 15thcentury equivalent of “key minerals and rare earth elements”.
One of the beneficial examples of foreign aid in our history was when France, before Liberité, Égalité and Fraternité, gave arms and advisors to the fledgling American Revolution in 1776 in order to bloody the nose of the British Empire. This example could be called de-colonizing.
Geo-political interests have been omnipresent in modern foreign aid. When our turn came in the Marshall Plan, our main goal was to stop the incursion of communism in Europe. And when foreign aid in the 50s and 60s and beyond became a regular part of the US budget, the goal similarly was to fight the spread of communism abroad.
President Kennedy said in a message on foreign aid: “Is a foreign aid program really necessary? Why should we not lay down this burden which our nation has now carried for some fifteen years? The answer is that there is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations—our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people … and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.
“To fail to meet those obligations now would be disastrous…. For widespread poverty and chaos lead to a collapse of existing political and social structures which would inevitably invite the advance of totalitarianism into every weak and unstable area. Thus our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled….”
The West is not alone in political uses of foreign aid. China props up North Korea to prevent the expansion of the West near their borders.
There are plenty of studies about the effectiveness, or not, of foreign aid, but the world has developed economically and healthwise since the advent of the Marshall Plan and US foreign aid, as well as foreign aid from other Western European powers. Multinational aid organizations with staff on the ground and effective accounting mechanisms have been developed over the decades to distribute aid effectively in cooperation with local authorities and institutions and to monitor effectiveness and prevent waste.
And one of the most effective aid programs has been in maternal and child health and family planning. Life expectancy has grown, birth rates have been reduced and child mortality drastically reduced. All this is due largely to family planning and maternal and child health funding for pregnancy prevention and for safe delivery services. Childhood vaccines have been an integral part of the success. The status of women has risen as a result.
All this is gone in the new US policy – no intermediate organizations (those hotbeds of Woke leftists!) and no family planning with maternal and child health and childhood vaccines not mentioned. What better way to attack Planned Parenthood and similar international organizations than eliminate them from funding. Also, no gender or DEI programs permitted. And the expanded Gag Rule is back. No discussion of abortion and more. No climate work. Faith-based organizations (i.e. Christian ones) are to be favored. There is, however, a focus on HIV/AIDS funding, from a prevention of epidemic viewpoint rather than humanitarian. Now we have US policies and products being a cornerstone of local health systems which will become markets for US innovation and product testing. Sounds like the Tuskegee experiments brought into the modern age. Products will have to comply with US standards, not those of the WHO – another multilateral organization tossed aside. This an excuse to ban mifepristone abroad which the Trump administration is maneuvering to get discredited by the FDA.
There are more questions than answers, especially about how this new system will work and whether governments can use their own funds for their own projects and priorities. But what is clear is that the Trump administration sees Africa as a takeover target, where the US comes in with much needed financing and structures the deal to give it voting control over the nation’s health and natural resource systems, no matter that it doesn’t have a clue how the country works. Some art of the deal.
The one thing we do know is that the new U.S. budget proposal has a vastly reduced amount for foreign aid from the United States. Unfortunately, other countries are following suit, including the UK.
The Administration’s new budget proposal unveiled today provides $18 Billion combined for targeted investments overseas and securing critical minerals. Humanitarian assistance is cut $2 Billion, Food for Peace is cut $1.2 Billion and Global Health is cut $4.3 Billion, leaving $5.1 Billion for Global Health. There are no disease specific accounts, leaving the administration the power to allocate “across HIV and other infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and polio to strengthen global health, security and protect Americans from disease.”
There is “no funding that supports abortion, unfettered access to birth control, and also eliminates funding for circumcision and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer services to better focus funds on life-saving assistance. The United States should not pay for the world’s birth control and therapy.”
Examples of programs eliminated:
“Promoting reproductive health education and access to birth control and other harmful programs
couched under ‘family planning’ in Ghana;
…
Promoting health equity and providing condoms and contraception in Kenya.”
So, birth control is out. This and destroying contraceptives are deliberate slaps at women. The anti-family planning agenda of the Trump administration is clear. This is a fight over who controls reproduction – the administration wants men to.
The fight is now in Congress which in the past has supported family planning programs.
The need for international family planning assistance remains. See: https://www.guttmacher.org/adding-it-up?utm_source=Guttmacher+Email+Alerts&utm_campaign=922864ee96-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_03_26_12_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-922864ee96-260655221
The battle is on.
Alexander Sanger 