Our December 2024 survey data reveals what divides Americans on this issue.
In his first administration, Donald Trump pledged to decrease foreign aid by one-third. But bipartisan pushback from Congress stymied that plan. Three weeks into his second administration, Trump has already implemented a 90-day suspension on foreign aid and placed staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development – the independent U.S. government agency providing humanitarian aid – on leave worldwide.
How do Americans really feel about foreign aid? The U.S. has been a primary foreign aid provider since the end of World War II, and many research studies demonstrate the importance of this “soft power.” Trump’s plans to radically change a bulwark of U.S. diplomacy was met with shock across the world, as reductions in U.S. aid would undermine support for allies such as Ukraine, and derail humanitarian initiatives across the globe. Many foreign policy experts have explained why foreign aid is not simply a handout to those abroad but serves U.S. security and economic interests. Cutting aid may provide further advantages to Russia and China during a pivotal period of shifting global influence.
Yet in U.S. public opinion surveys, many Americans have long expressed a desire to decrease foreign aid. One explanation is that Americans vastly overestimate how much the U.S. government actually spends on foreign aid. A Brookings Institution review of opinion polls, for instance, found that Americans thought the federal government spent, on average, 25% of the national budget on foreign aid, and would prefer this number to be closer to 10%.
But these estimates of foreign aid are well off the mark. In 2023, in fact, U.S. foreign aid accounted for only about 1% of the budget. If a universal misunderstanding of the actual cost were the primary reason to support decreased funding of foreign aid, both parties would feel the pressure, and both parties could clear up the confusion.
A closer look at how Americans see foreign aid
An alternative explanation for why so many Americans wish to decrease foreign aid funding is that Trump and other Republican politicians have repeatedly railed against foreign aid at a time when Republican voters express less interest in engaging with international affairs. If rhetoric is creating a wave of support for cost-cutting, we would expect to see a significant partisan gap emerging.
To observe the significant divides in who supports funding for foreign aid, in December 2024, the Foreign Policy in a Diverse Society project fielded a public opinion survey to approximately 3,000 Americans via NORC’s Americspeak platform. For context, we noted in advance that “The U.S. Government allocates money for a variety of products and services for the public good – everything from military aircraft, construction and highway maintenance equipment, buildings, and livestock, research, education, and training to foreign aid.” Then we asked participants to consider three broad categories: spending on domestic programs, spending on national defense, and spending on programs in foreign countries (foreign aid). And we included a final question to gauge whether participants thought funding in these categories should increase, decrease, or be left the same as it is now.
On foreign aid, 52% of survey participants responded that the U.S. government should decrease its funding (see figure). The survey data reveal that some individuals were more likely than others to provide this answer: men more so than women, older respondents more so than younger, White and Asian Americans more so than other racial and ethnic groups, and those who did not complete college more than those who did. However, the differences among these survey cohorts were relatively small (albeit statistically significant).
The largest and most significant difference we found was between Democrats (33% favored decreasing U.S. aid funding) and Republicans (73%). The stark divide may also explain why this time, unlike in Trump’s first administration, so few Republicans in Congress are speaking out against the defunding of foreign aid. If so, our survey supports different expectations as Trump and Elon Musk widen their cost-cutting crusade.
Domestic programs and national defense comprise the largest expenses in the federal budget. Yet, in the same survey, only 10% of respondents supported decreasing spending on domestic programs (3% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans) and 19% supported decreasing spending on national defense (28% of Democrats and 1% of Republicans). Thus, future spending cuts will, of necessity, go against the Republican base’s stated preferences.
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