How a Second Trump Term Will Redefine Foreign Aid

In April 2018, I was invited by the American ambassador to a meeting at the embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. The ambassador had assembled a group of nongovernmental organization (NGO) leaders in the field of disinformation to meet with a senior Trump administration official from the State Department. He asked us to describe the main narratives of Kremlin disinformation. As the director of a large international democracy organization, I highlighted Russia’s manipulation of gender and LGBTQ issues to sway Georgians away from the perceived “cultural decadence” of the European Union. The official’s frustration was palpable. His response, tinged with irritation, was telling: “Is that all you people can talk about? The gays?”

A year before, several international organizations partnered with Georgian parliamentarians on a gender equality assessment, supported by several government donors. This collaboration led to an internal conflict. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) wanted to scrub the original report, as it covered abortion, notably legal in Georgia, while the Swedish government and other stakeholders wanted the complete assessment. As a result, at the time of its release, two distinct reports had to be printed, one with references to abortion and one without.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump emerged victorious from last week’s New Hampshire primary and is likely to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. His closing statement in New Hampshire praised Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who embraces the oxymoronic term “illiberal democracy” while suppressing independent media, civil society, and courts. He has repeatedly emphasized the glory of strongmen like Orban. His foreign policy has been clear: stopping support for Ukraine, NATO, and our European allies.

But while there has been plenty of analysis of Trump’s America First impact on foreign policy and security, less covered is how it will also completely redefine foreign aid as well as the liberal democracy agenda. My experience with the first Trump administration as a senior leader in democracy organizations receiving funding from USAID provides some insight into the foreign-aid agenda of a second, but likely only scratches the surface of what is to come.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, established in 2022, offers a detailed roadmap for revamping USAID under Trump—one that will undermine, eliminate, and censor the critical work of thousands of people and organizations committed to building more just societies. The Heritage Foundation has been staffing and providing a pipeline of ideas to Republican administrations since President Ronald Reagan. Project 2025 is a plan to shape the next Republican administration, and its funders have close ties to Trump. The project’s objective is to replace “deep state” employees with conservative thought leaders to carry out an executive-driven agenda.

In the overview, the project articulates its goal to end what it calls USAID’s “divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” A key component of the illiberal playbook is to attack gender and marginalized communities, an early warning sign of democratic backsliding. Illiberal strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, exploit traditional hierarchies to divide society and create pecking orders of power. Russia refused to sign, and Turkey withdrew from, the Istanbul Convention, a commitment to protect women from domestic violence. The Narendra Modi administration in India filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court against criminalizing marital rape, arguing it would destabilize marriage. Hungary and Poland lobbied to ban the term “gender equality” in international agreements and implemented anti-LGBTQ policies, including local municipalities adopting “LGBT-free” zones as part of a government-supported “Family Charter” in Poland.

As a first step, Trump’s USAID will “dismantle” all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which Project 2025 calls “discriminatory.” This mandate includes firing the chief diversity officer and all advisors and committees. In 2016, the Obama administration issued a DEI presidential memorandum to ensure USAID, among other agencies, had a diverse and representative workforce. Trump scaled back these efforts. On Jan. 20, 2021, Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that demanded that government agencies devise strategies to tackle DEI issues. Pursuant to this, USAID Administrator Samantha Power signed USAID’s DEI strategy on her first day in May 2021. Project 2025 would reverse this strategy, requiring USAID to “cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda,” which entails support for organizations overseas that work on these issues.

According to Project 2025, Trump’s new USAID will also eliminate the word “gender” full stop, arguing that “Democrat Administrations have nearly erased what females are.” This is bizarre, as I have decades of experience receiving USAID funding for numerous programs to advance women in political life and support women’s organizations. Working for democracy organizations across Asia and the former Soviet Union, I saw USAID provide critical support to expand women’s wings of political parties; recruit women election officials, observers, and administrators; train women’s advocacy and rights organizations; and build women’s committees in parliaments.

The Heritage Foundation report also accuses USAID of “outright bias against men,” an equally strange claim; in fact, gender realignment was needed and implemented. A Trump USAID will fire more than 180 gender advisors and points of contact, who work alongside USAID colleagues “to integrate gender and advance gender equality objectives in USAID’s work worldwide,” and scrub the words “gender,” “gender equality,” and “gender equity” from all documents. This would require a massive purge of decades of USAID materials and websites.

USAID has spent years incorporating gender into all aspects of its programming to ensure the agency addresses the needs of women, including unique development obstacles they face. Removing a gender lens would take us back in time to programming that often harmed women, inadvertently, by failing to analyze the varying effects of programming based on gender and power dynamics in different environments. To erase all of USAID’s tools, learning, and research on how to ensure best practice would have dangerous consequences. For example, when I worked for USAID in Cambodia in the 1990s, the agency supported micro-lending for small community projects, in which most of the loans went to women. This resulted in increased domestic violence, as men were angry about the financial imbalance in the home. Today, USAID has gender analysis and research on risk factors to mitigate against such outcomes.

Relatedly, a Trump USAID will make anti-choice “core” to its mission, removing all “references to ‘abortion,’ ‘reproductive health,’ and ‘sexual and reproductive rights.’” Project 2025’s blueprint singles out specific organizations and U.N. agencies to target and defund. Further, the president himself would have the ability to oversee programming directly: “Current law in the Foreign Assistance Act gives the President broad authority to set ‘such terms and conditions as he may determine’ on foreign assistance, which legally empowers the next conservative President to expand this pro-life policy.” Previous administrations have restricted funding to organizations that provide abortions (the “Mexico City Policy”), which resulted in an increase in maternal and child mortality and unsafe abortions—exactly what the policy claimed to want to prevent. In sub-Saharan Africa, data shows the policy increased abortions by defunding clinics that provided family-planning services. The first Trump administration expanded restrictions further, impacting speech and service delivery around the world.

A Trump USAID would not only stop funding local partner organizations that support gender, LGBTQ, and rights agendas but redirect that money to religious organizations. In fact, it would mandate training and indoctrination for all USAID staff on the link between religion and development. USAID would also ensure conservative oversight of all grantmaking to ensure against “progressive policies” and a “radical agenda.” USAID already engages with faith-based partnerships, alongside secular NGOs, but Project 2025 would like to shift the balance, creating a “New Partnership Initiative” that would help prioritize religious groups.

A stated “key outcome of the transformation of USAID” under Trump will be a complete revamp of the Bureau for Democracy, Development, and Innovation, shifting its focus to trade, the private sector, and religious communities, and purging staff. Importantly, all directors of each center—not just the assistant administrator—will have political leadership, not career experts. In addition, Trump’s USAID will rewrite all policy “as soon as possible” to ensure a conservative agenda.

During the first Trump administration, I felt the impact in my work overseas. I worked closely with the LGBTQ community in Georgia, which faced horrific obstacles—ostracization, violence, homelessness—and which was targeted relentlessly by Kremlin information operations. USAID has long been a defender of human rights and funded projects on these issues. There was a shift under Trump, though I applaud individual USAID employees for creatively trying to find workarounds and continue support—like slight renaming of initiatives or cleverly filing them under more favorable, broader categories like “human rights.” They no doubt prevented damaging cuts to our important work.

I am far more worried about the impact of a second administration. Back then, there was no concrete, detailed roadmap like Project 2025 and no massive replacement of foreign aid professionals with conservative political operatives. Under a second administration, under Schedule F, Trump has planned a sweeping political takeover of our civil service, stripping civil servants of protection, forcing them to implement his political policy agenda, and giving the president unilateral power to fire employees at will.

The organization I now work for, the German Marshall Fund, supports hundreds of civil society organizations across the Balkans, Black Sea region, Ukraine, and Central Europe—thanks to more than a decade of USAID support. USAID has encouraged our goals of promoting democracy; bolstering the rights of women, LGBTQ, and other marginalized communities; and deterring illiberalism through independent media, watchdog organizations, and information integrity efforts. We do this through grantmaking, capacity-building and technical assistance, leadership programs, and policy dialogues.

With democracy in global decline and illiberal strongmen on the rise, we need these efforts more than ever. Backsliding elsewhere affects democracy everywhere. America benefits from strong, free, liberal societies—it is in our national interest and key to our global security and order. While few voters go to the polls with foreign aid on their minds, the consequences for millions of people worldwide are on the ballot this November.