When the US sneezes, the world catches a cold.
So after six weeks of slashes to 5,200 aid programs under the US Agency for International Development (USAID), disaster simmers for millions across the Global South. A juggernaut responsible for 42% of last year’s global foreign humanitarian aid has been cut at US President Donald Trump’s behest, re-elected past expectations to promises of political reprisals and mass deportations.
Anti-trans rhetoric is enshrined by executive order. Immigration officials abduct Palestine solidarity activists off the streets. Now, Trump’s tide of right-wing populism topples USAID. The Philippines, long intertwined with the US, feels the aftershocks worth billions of pesos that wound marginalized Philippine communities, laying bare the need to disentangle ourselves from a century of American dependence.
The freeze and wider tranches of policy that the aid severance signals threaten lives everywhere. While Filipino LGBTQ+ health clinics are forced to cut back services ranging from free HIV testing kits to pre-exposure prophylaxis, no less than billionaire vizier Elon Musk’s relentless red-tagging of USAID trickles home versus outlets like Rappler and Vera Files.
These attacks demonstrate a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom in US foreign policy: that aid dollars form cornerstones to the exercise of American power. Facilitating military installations, commercial ventures, and development deals, foreign aid historically reaped massive dividends for US corporations and the state, according to economist Harry Magdoff.
For such reasons, USAID was established in 1961, not only to fight Cold War opponents and communism but also to secure sprawling portions of the world market for the American military and industrial sectors.
USAID in the Philippines, supposedly committed to sectors from the LGBTQ+ to the Bangsamoro, came with bitter strings attached. While a plethora of health and education programs serving millions in Mindanao marshaled services from family planning to reintegrating out-of-school youth, the agency also consulted Philippine military commanders in the region for infrastructure projects of “strategic importance.”
But aid premised on truly humanitarian premises cannot rest on dueling politicians and corporate boards who privatize key services and kowtow to foreign dictates. Anything else seems unimaginable, but remember: The labor that creates aid originates in the factories, hearths, and farmlands where basic sectors labor to feed and clothe the world.
Capacitating toilers, tillers, and aid workers to take up the tasks of aid requires strengthening national industry against state abandonment in agriculture, utilities, and transport. National policy must fund their vital work and basic communities instead of appeasing bureaucrats and tycoons.
Beyond that, true humanitarian aid necessitates struggle. In the face of persistent police harassment and red-tagging, community pantries during the pandemic served students connecting to classes, farmers scrounging for sales, and the LGBTQ+ hoping for healthcare.
Ultimately, students and ordinary citizens must aid sectors’ own strikes, demonstrations, and land struggles to resist corporate power and populist hatred. Workers, peasants, and students poured aid into the successful Nexperia strike, while volunteers in 2020 opened kitchens and medical camps as Indian farmers joined unions in strikes that forced populist Prime Minister Narendra Modi to repeal controversial agricultural deregulation laws.
Curing the right-wing contagion behind the aid freeze starts with grassroots care and resistance. When sectors dissent and link arms across generations and borders, a future without USAID—and rogue superpowers whose whims will millions of lives into existence or ruin—would become possible. ●
First published in the March 31, 2025, print edition of the Collegian.
