Introduction

On January 20th, 2025 President Trump issued the Executive order, Reevaluating And Realigning United States Foreign Aid, freezing foreign aid for a 90 day period. By March 10th Secretary Rubio announced that 83% of programs at USAID had been cancelled.

The impact upon USAID programmes and the wider international development sector have been widely discussed throughout the mainstream media and sector specific publications, however, as far as I’m aware, little has been known about the reaction of the general public towards the cuts.

Given the importance of maintaining engagement with the general public and their donations, one crucial question has been would the ‘Trump agenda’ spillover and negatively impact the attitudes of the public towards development issues, or would the public’s concern for those in need around the world be resilient?

In three parts we highlight findings from the recent research undertaken by UCL and the Development Engagement Lab and examines the attitudes and engagement of the US public following the U.S. government’s decision to cut foreign aid funding.

Part 1 – Changing attitudes over time

Part 2 – Claimed donation behaviour towards development issues

Part 3 – Attitudes towards Aid and development post Trumps re-election

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NOTES

Please note that all of the charts are dynamic meaning you can highlight information by hovering over a point with your cursor. For many charts you will see a legend that displays different characteristics of the survey responders – such as ‘Voting’ , Gender’ “Age’ etc.

By clicking on each of these the chart will display the breakdown of results by the chosen characteristic. This is especially important with Voting, as consistently this illustrates the polarization of views depending upon the voting preference of the respondent – Trump or Harris.

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Is the concern for global poverty falling?

• There has been a significant increase in the proportion of US adults saying they are concerned with global poverty levels . However, the increase reverses the downward move from October 2024 to January 2025
• Since June 2023 we’ve seen a marked increase in concern than the longer term average dating back to early 2020

Who can make a difference to reducing poverty

• Between surveying in January 2025 and March 2025 we see little change in the proportion of the US adult population saying they think they can make a difference to reducing poverty in poor countries, however if we look at the next chart where we split respondents by whether they voted for Trump or Harris, we see a significant increase in the proportion of Democrats saying they can make a difference, while the proportion of Republicans has declined slightly.

Do people think they can make a difference?

Is support for Aid changing over time?

• We see very little change, either for Democrats or Republications regarding whether they think the US should keep or increase current expenditure towards development Aid oversees
• Obviously the key observation is that the long term pattern is that Democrats are nearly twice as likely to answer ‘keep’ or ‘increase’ expenditure on Aid

Donation behaviour

Thinking about global poverty and development, have you donated money to an international NGO or charity working on the issue in the past 12 months?

Donation behaviour overtime

• Claimed donation behaviour towards NGO’s has increased by just one point from January 2025 to March 2025
• While there has been little movement in the short term trend, we can see below some very notable differences across the different factors. We can see higher claimed behaviour among:
  • Democrats over Republicans
  • Those living in the Northeast and West
  • Those with higher levels of education
  • Slight increase with Household income – note the higher proportion who answered ‘don’t know’ among lower affluence households

Note

If you’re interested in attitudes among US citizens towards development aid during the time of Covid then I recommend reading the paper below that has some interesting findings regarding the effect of financial worries upon donation behaviour

Donation behaviour by factor : March / April 2025

Support or Oppose the Aid cuts

Of its total 2024 budget of nearly $6.1 trillion, the U.S. government allocated 1.1 percent, or $66 billion, to foreign aid to poor countries. The U.S. government has recently completed a review of aid spending, cutting more than 80% of the aid budget.

To what extent do you support or oppose the U.S. Government’s cuts to the foreign aid budget?

• Overall we see a higher proportion either strongly supporting or somewhat supporting the cuts to the foreign aid budget, than oppose the cuts. This balance towards supporting the cuts is stronger among male respondents and the older 55+ age group. Of note is that the majority of 18-34’s neither supported nor opposed the cuts, which is quite a surprise!
• It seems that as the level of education attainment increases so does the proportion opposing the cuts, however there is no clear pattern regarding Household income nor the region in which respondents live.
• Where we see very significant polarization is with recent voting – with Harris voters very strongly opposing and Trump voters strongly supporting

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Did the cuts go too far?

Question – Which of the following best reflects your view about the recent government cuts to the foreign aid budget?

Excluding ‘don’t know

• For simplicity if we concentrate on the version that excludes ‘don’t know’ we see some that despite the chart previously we see a strong minority saying that the cuts went too far – with the exception of those who voted for Trump.
• It’s perhaps more telling where we see high proportions of respondents saying that the cuts did not go far enough – Trump supporters, older respondents and White respondents.

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Priority areas for ODA spending

Question – Thinking again about government spending on overseas aid in poor countries, please indicate what you think are the first, second, and third most important priorities?

• As expected priorities for ODA spending focus on ‘basic needs’ such as water and health, while migration flow and debt relief were the lowest priority.
• In the chart below where the ranking order has been split by Harris voters on the left and Trump voters on the right, we see some clear differences in priorities for ODA spending, notably:
  • Trump voters place less priority on Education, Welfare and Women’s equality
  • Trump voters place greater priority than Harris voters on Energy provision, Family planning and Agriculture

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Cut or not?

Question – In your opinion, which, if any, of the following types of aid should not be cut?

Focus on Humanitarian aid and support for NGO’s

• While there are some interesting differences for all of the areas listed, the chart above is of greatest interest as it focuses upon Humanitarian aid, such as emergency relief and NGO support. And while the support for not cutting Humanitarian aid is quite strong, the support for not cutting NGO funding appears weak.
• Even when we look at the values by the voting factor, we see Harris supporters only score a little over 10% while Trump voters are half again
• We don’t see clear differences across the other factors, however support not to cut Humanitarian aid increases strongly with age, is slightly stronger among female respondents and again we see stronger support for aid among those in the West and Northeast compared to the South and Midwest

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Who should fill the funding gap?

Question – In your opinion, which, if any, of the following do you think should increase funding to make up for U.S. aid cuts? Please tick up to three options.

• The chart identifies there is an expectation among a sizable percentage of respondents that ‘Development NGO’s and charities’ should fill the funding gaps left by the Trump aid cuts.
• The proportion mentioning Developing NGO’s declines among Trump voters , females and older respondents. Interesting Harris supporters place the highest score among businesses/corporates, at a rate of very nearly double that of Trump voters

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Attitudes towards the cuts

Question – To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Cuts to the foreign aid budget are misguided.

Excluding ‘don’t know

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Question – To what extent do you agree with the statement ‘Everyone knows there is waste in government that needs to be reduced, but cuts to the foreign aid budget are misguided’.

Excluding ‘don’t know

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Question – If the U.S. Supreme Court decides that some or all of the cuts to foreign aid are illegal, in your opinion, would President Trump be justified in defying the courts?

Excluding ‘don’t know

• For the charts in the ‘ Attitudes towards the cuts’ we see a pattern of results by the factors voting, age and education that replicate what we’ve seen previously

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Question – To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
Helping people in need is the right thing to do.

Excluding ‘don’t know

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How generous should the U.S. government be?

Thinking about the statement above in relation to overseas aid to poor countries, please indicate the extent to which you think that the U.S. government should give overseas aid, where a score of 0 means that it “should not give aid at all” and a score of 10 means that it “should give aid very generously”. Mean averages are shown.

• When it comes to how generous the U.S. Government should be towards overseas aid we see that Harris voters gave an average of 7.4 compared to 3.9 for Trump voters.
• While there is little difference between genders and income groups we see some interesting differences by region, and age

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The United States position in the world

Question – Which option do you believe is better for the long-term future of the United States?

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Question – Do you think cutting the aid budget means that the US will gain or lose economic power and influence to countries like China, or will there be no real difference?

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• Taking the three charts together we can see that while Harris voters believe the cuts will cause the U.S. to lose influence on the world stage, Trump voters tell us they think the cuts will make negligible difference to U.S. standing

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Understanding wider issues

The following chart compares a range of issues on four statements ‘I care about this’, I’m concerned about this, ‘This is important to me’ and ‘How prominent it is in the media’. The scores represent the frequency by which each was ranked 1st, 2nd or third – so the higher the number the more strongly held the statement.

We can see that while the topic of ‘Immigration, migration and refugees’ is very prominent it’s actually not a topic people care about or feel is important.

• This chart is an interesting comparison between issues responders have concern about, and the issues prominence within the media.
• We see that immigration, migration and refugees, while being of concern to many score far higher for media prominence.
• In contrast respondents scored inequality far higher than its media prominence while education, healthcare, clean water and hunger was scored highly as something important to responders but very low in media prominence. Interestingly there is growing evidence that this is also the case in the UK.

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Broader attitudes towards development and aid

• We see the greatest differences between respondents when we look at their voting – there are some slight differences by the other factors but voting really highlights the strong polarization between Republicans and Democrats.
• I thought it interesting that the differences between voting groups are strongest when the questions are negatively framed – addressing waste, corruption, effectiveness and lack of affordability.

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Global health issues

Below are two questions about the global health issues (e.g. access to hospitals and clinics, treating diseases, and providing vaccinations) in developing countries. Please indicate the extent to which each statement reflects the level of urgency, where 0 indicates “not at all urgent” and 10 indicates “extremely urgent”. Mean averages are shown .

• It’s interesting and somewhat surprising that this chart offers some consistency regarding of the responders characteristics. In all cases responders answered that they see global health issues in developing countries as more important now than they would have done had they been asked the same question 12 months ago.

Analysis and commentary were written in July 2025 by James Long

This work is only possible due to the fantastic team at the Development Engagement Lab

• Fieldwork was carried out by YouGov on behalf of UCL
• The survey was conducted between 28th March to 2nd April 2025
• The survey was carried out online.
• The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18+).
• Trend results were sourced from the Harvard Dataverse – DEL Trackers. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/

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