Executive Order Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid

On January 20, 2025, the Trump administration issued an order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”Footnote ⁷ The order called for a ninety-day pause and review of all U.S. foreign aid obligations and disbursements with an overall objective of restructuring the regime. It further directed “all department and agency heads with responsibility for United States foreign development assistance programs … [to] immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds … pending reviews of such programs for programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy, to be conducted within 90 days.”Footnote ⁸ On March 10, without waiting for the end of the ninety-day freeze, the Trump administration confirmed that 83 percent of programs would be abandoned and that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), created in 1961, would be closed.Footnote ⁹ On July 1, 2025, USAID officially closed, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring that the “misguided and fiscally irresponsible era is now over.”Footnote ¹⁰ Unlike the first Trump administration, the second administration has been more consequential for USAID.Footnote ¹¹

The reordering of the U.S. foreign aid regime has a critical impact on development aid globally and in Africa. While the impact of the U.S. foreign aid cuts varies across countries and their programs, the implications are particularly acute for least-developed African countries. Africa’s colonial encounter and balkanization produced poor, land-locked, and struggling countries.Footnote ¹² In the post-colonial era, many of these countries remain trapped in dependency on their colonial metropoles financially. Foreign aid is often weaponized as a tool of domination.Footnote ¹³ Viewed in its historical context, foreign aid reveals the continuities of imperialism—imbalanced relations between the periphery and the center, the domination effects of which far outweigh the promises of socioeconomic development.

Capitalist extraction of the natural resources of many African states has left them even more impoverished. Without excusing the agency of African elites, capitalist extractions in many African countries have left them unable to provide basic and critical social and economic infrastructures. Further, with climate crisis, social conflicts, coups, spiraling debt profiles and servicing, and a global pandemic, the condition of African countries and their capacity to provide, in sectors such as education, health care, agriculture, emergency food, and overall economic development, are even more vulnerable. Six months into the second Trump administration, official development assistance flowing from the United States has dried up.Footnote ¹⁴ In some African countries, U.S. foreign aid cuts have weakened an already overburdened health care services provision for diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV treatment medications, malaria prevention, and poverty, among others.Footnote ¹⁵ The ensuing disparities worsen the inequalities and threaten to reverse modest gains in many African countries’ socioeconomic development. With the restructured USAID now incorporated into the State Department, funds have been reallocated toward internally focused priorities, echoing the administration’s America First Policy.Footnote ¹⁶ While the U.S. cuts to foreign aid are especially consequential given the amounts involved, the United States is not the only country engaged in a more “realist” foreign policy approach to foreign aid. The United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Norway have gradually also cut back on their foreign aid budgets.Footnote ¹⁷

Competing Visions on What Foreign Aid Cuts Mean for Africa

In a structurally highly unequal world, the unbundling and redirection of the U.S. foreign aid regime has forced African countriesFootnote ¹⁸ to explore alternative strategies to sustain progress in critical areas such as infectious disease response, economic and developmental stability, and educational and institutional growth.Footnote ¹⁹ The closure of the USAID program has resuscitated debates about how we should envision Africa’s capacity to spur self-reliant socioeconomic development without deepening path dependency and crises in the most affected economies. The conditionality attached to aid will place vulnerable populations at risk and threatens to destabilize fragile regions by transforming humanitarian assistance into an instrument of political or economic coercion, with far-reaching implications for global security, ethics, and human rights.Footnote ²⁰

Two broad and polarizing narratives—of optimism and skepticism—reflect differing views regarding the impact that foreign aid had on Africa and hence on the consequences of the reduction of U.S. aid. For the optimists, who see this as a glass half full, foreign aid in Africa has long entrenched a path dependency that has also allowed neocolonialism to endure in the continent. There is no clear nexus between aid and growth; aid diverts fiscal discipline from governments in the Third World, encouraging more debt accumulation and corruption; aid that has been based on market reforms have not been successful; and where countries have adopted neoliberal principles, they did so based on factors unrelated to aid. Aid indeed has a dismal record when it comes to its ability to encourage socioeconomic development. As such, for them, the withdrawal of USAID in Africa could indeed portend a boost for endogenous, African-centered self-reliance programs.Footnote ²¹ At the continental level, according to the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, with the progressive decline in official development assistance and the risk of new outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola, Mpox, and others, the continent is already gearing up for alternative means of funding public health.Footnote ²² From this perspective, the aid cuts offer an opportunityFootnote ²³ for African states to retool the direction of their internally generated revenues toward self-sufficiency and less aid-dependent economies.Footnote ²⁴ For the skeptics, the cutbacks in foreign aid are inimical to the social, economic, and democratic development of African states.Footnote ²⁵ Specifically, the absence of U.S. foreign aid that usually goes toward food aid, global health, education, and women and girls, among others will exacerbate the conditions and leave them worse off.Footnote ²⁶ For them, reductions in U.S. assistance will erode the modest gains that have been made or are being recorded in various critical sectors, especially in health and education. To illustrate this perspective, Botswana offers a good example. The diamond-rich country whose HIV response is funded significantly by foreign aid from Washington has recently declared a public health emergency because of a shortage of essential medicines and medical equipment.Footnote ²⁷

For African countries, the dissipation of foreign aid also has consequences for their capacity to trade effectively. The capacity of a country to trade goes beyond the abundance of its natural resources. Value chains must be built around natural resources, such as physical infrastructure, energy, access to capital, and skills development, to be able to maximize a country’s ability to develop a competitive economy. Without foreign aid, governments will have to divert critical fiscal resources to address shortfalls in health, education, and other sectors that are pressing.

Yet, one must avoid the impetus to naturalize the gap that opened the door to foreign aid in Africa. The reliance on foreign aid from the United States and Europe by a number of African states has entrenched the dependency of these countries and caused structural distortions of the economies of Africa in critical sectors. In this narrative, we must not rule out the agency of African leaders and elites in relying on these neocolonial approaches even to the detriment of Africa’s self-reliance-based development. Consequently, the Trump administration’s cuts have a direct implication for the political economy of international trade in African states.

Reciprocal Tariffs for African Countries: Economic and Non-economic Ends?

By now, it is no longer in question that there is a deliberate effort by President Trump to remake the international global order.Footnote ²⁸ Aided by international economic law’s fetishizing of formalism, his use of tariffs illustrates the blind spot of hierarchies that are baked into the discipline’s regime. President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s effort at replacing some of the controversial “un-American” policies of the first Trump administration with his “pragmatic unilateralism” now seems a very distant past in the face of the current assault on rules-based order, diplomacy, and multilateralism.Footnote ²⁹ Yet at times, in comparison, beyond the volatile nature of Trumponomics, as opposed to Bidenomics’ more subtle approach, the cumulative effects of their international economic policies relating to trade may be difficult to disentangle.Footnote ³⁰ Whatever one makes of the rupture or continuity in the Biden and Trump administrations, one thing is sure: it is all about America’s quest for dominance in a contemporary international economic order where its dominance has waned significantly in favor of China.Footnote ³¹ Tariffs are being deployed as a vector of global domination.

Apart from foreign aid cuts, reciprocal tariffs are the other major policy change of the second Trump administration that has had a severe impact on African countries. If international economic law was already in a state of flux, the Trump administration’s chaotic tariffs have complicated the situation further, creating significant challenges in Africa’s international trade relations with the United States. The administration has weaponized high tariffs as a coercive measure to force the renegotiation of international trade agreements. This began immediately following President Trump’s swearing in, with his directing the government to investigate the causes of the United States’ large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, including their economic and national security implications and risks, and to review and identify any unfair trade practices by other countries. President Trump subsequently signed a memorandum that directed “the development of a comprehensive plan for restoring fairness in the U.S. trade relationships and countering non-reciprocal trading arrangements.”Footnote ³²

President Trump received the reports on April 1 and followed swiftly with an executive order that sent waves and chaos into an already weakened the international trading system. The next day, dubbed “Liberation Day,” the administration imposed “Reciprocal Tariffs.”Footnote ³³ Quite audaciously, the order claims that trade deficits, non-tariffs barriers, and unbalanced and non-reciprocal tariffs all contribute to the structural asymmetries that have driven the large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficit. Accordingly, the order introduced sweeping tariffs with no consideration given for whether the importing country is developed, developing, or least developed.Footnote ³⁴ The reciprocal tariffs order raised the specter of economic uncertainty to realms never experienced by the international trading system in recent times. By imposing a broad range of tariffs on global trading partners, President Trump reversed decades of trade rules. African countries would be heavily trapped and impacted by his mission to rewrite the terms of the international trading order.

Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, and Tunisia were included in the highly impacted category, and unpredictably Lesotho, a small landlocked kingdom in Southern Africa, was hit with a 50 percent reciprocal tariff, the highest among all those countries targeted.Footnote ³⁵ The Trump administration’s moves—framed as a response to other countries’ trade barriers and tariffs against U.S. goods—has particularly significant effects on African countries because of their underdeveloped status.

The high tariff rates imposed on the African countries lack logic and context. Madagascar, another tiny country that received a high reciprocal tariff rate (47 percent), offers a good illustration.Footnote ³⁶ The United States ranks as Madagascar’s second highest export market. In 2024, U.S. exports to Madagascar totaled $53.4 million, a 13.2 percent decrease ($8.1 million) from 2023, while imports from Madagascar rose by 1.7 percent ($12.0 million) to $733.2 million. The U.S. trade deficit with Madagascar increased by 3.1% to $679.8 million. The key exports from Madagascar to the United States, which include apparel, vanilla, titanium, cobalt, and nickel, together account for approximately 15 percent of the country’s total exports. President Trump’s tariffs demonstrate a lack of concern for their socioeconomic consequences for developing and least-developed countries in Africa.Footnote ³⁷ The tariffs are not only punitive; they may also decimate the economies of countries like Madagascar.

They are also not always about unfair trade or trade deficits. Quite explicitly, at times, the tariffs are designed to retaliate and serve the pursuit of some other source of aggrievement. South Africa presents an example of the non-trade related ends to which the United States has gone to meddle in the domestic politics of another sovereign. The bilateral relations between the two countries had become highly strained for two core reasons: South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza before the International Court of Justice; and false claims by President Trump that South Africa is committing white farmer genocide and land confiscation. By targeting non-trade-related issues, the Trump administration’s reciprocal tariffs are reminiscent of colonial rule strategies that disrupted and undermined the natural evolutionary course of Africa’s socioeconomic development.

The tariff measures that were introduced in April created considerable uncertainty, but the administration delayed their implementation for ninety days to give countries a chance to renegotiate trade terms, with the final deadline eventually extended to August 1.Footnote ³⁸ The hope was that by this deadline, the United States would have negotiated and secured new bilateral trade agreements that it considers more balanced with its major trading partners. However, contrary to the optimistic tone of the U.S. trade representative that ninety deals were possible in ninety days, the United States completed only eight trade negotiations by the deadline.Footnote ³⁹

On July 31, 2025, President Trump rolled out a new wave of tariffs.Footnote ⁴⁰ For African countries, while the adjusted tariffs are not as alarming as their Liberation Day predecessors, they nevertheless raise important concerns for the socioeconomic development of the countries most impacted, as well as the role of non-tariff barriers in the U.S. determination of tariff rates. The tariffs introduce a flat 15 percent rate on most African exports to the United States, replacing a patchwork of earlier rates. But the latest revision has three African countries—Algeria, Libya, and South Africa—at 30 percent, and one—Tunisia—at 25 percent. Some relief is provided for Lesotho, whose 50 percent rate was lowered to 15 percent. Subsequently, on September 5, President Trump signed an executive order listing a range of products that are exempted.Footnote ⁴¹

The uncertainty and market disruption could affect investor sentiment and therefore dent capital flows into the continent. To be sure, the seeming realignment of the tariffs should not be equated with any form of fairness. Despite the respite of a reduced tariff, Lesotho’s economy is already bleeding.Footnote ⁴² Tunisia’s new rate is expected to hit its craft sector especially hard as demand may fall due to the high tariff rate. The United States is the largest buyer of Tunisian handmade goods. The United States accounts for 7.5 percent of South Africa’s global exports and is its second-largest bilateral trading partner after China, importing goods such as cars, iron and steel products, wine, and citrus fruit. However, several sectors, accounting for 35 percent of exports to the United States, remain exempt from the tariffs. These include copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber products, certain critical minerals, stainless steel scrap, and energy products.Footnote ⁴³ Despite the exemptions, the South African Parliament notes that the 30 percent U.S. tariff will be a blow to economic growth, jobs, and trade certainty, especially in the country’s agriculture and automobile manufacturing industries.Footnote ⁴⁴ Further, the export economy in South Africa is feeling the pressure of the tariffs as demand declines due to the higher rates.Footnote ⁴⁵

The reciprocal tariffs on African countries by the Trump administration are unfair and misrepresent their trade imbalances with the United States. Imposing tariffs on African countries in the manner President Trump has gone about it is oppressive and dismissive of the virtue of trade negotiations—however flawed—and undermines the basis for all future bargains without regard for the consequences on the peoples of vulnerable countries in the continent of Africa and elsewhere. The series of Trump tariffs are symptomatic of a wider structural challenge in international economic law: international trading agreements—as the international investment regime exposes—have never been drafted from the lens of African or Global South interests. Rather, economists and policymakers in the Global North with the interest of the elites of the Global North are at the heart of the prescriptions.Footnote ⁴⁶

Implications for the African Growth and Opportunity Act

The Reciprocity Tariffs have also raised important questions about the future of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which expired as of September 30, 2025. While there is hope that the United States may extend AGOA by a year sometime before the end of 2025, the current reality is that it has lapsed.Footnote ⁴⁷ The expiration of AGOA portends loss in export competitiveness to the United States and significant market uncertainty and disruption for participating African countries, as well as for the economic and supply chains that have been created around AGOA. Importantly, the expiration of AGOA means that country-specific and sectoral tariffs would apply, in addition to the most-favored-nation rates that apply equally to all World Trade Organization members, instead of the current preferential treatment.

Since 2000, AGOA has been the centerpiece of U.S. efforts to build deeper economic relations with sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ⁴⁸ As of its expiration, thirty-two African countries were eligible for AGOA benefits.Footnote ⁴⁹ The law provided participating African countries with preferential access to U.S. markets to foster their economic growth. In Kenya, the apparel sector was the principal beneficiary, with over 90 percent of textile exports destined for the United States. The program supported approximately 58,000 direct jobs, primarily held by women in export processing zones. Without AGOA, these businesses face significant threats from rising tariffs and diminished competitiveness. South Africa, with one of Africa’s most diversified economies, used AGOA preferences to grow exports of agricultural produce, such as citrus and wine, as well as automobiles and industrial goods. Lesotho’s apparel industry benefited significantly from the preferential rates under AGOA. The loss of AGOA will dampen export earnings, constrain job creation, and disrupt supply chains that support the broader Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. In West Africa, Ghana and Nigeria leveraged AGOA to expand non-traditional exports. Ghana’s apparel exports and agricultural shipments, such as yams, pineapples, and cocoa derivatives, found a reliable market under the scheme. Nigeria, once reliant on oil exports under AGOA, made strides in growing its light manufacturing and agro-processing sectors.

The new tariffs override AGOA, placing these gains at risk. While President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs did not mention AGOA, the executive orders undermine and cast significant doubt on the extension of this trade framework beyond September 2025. Many African countries that hitherto relied on the free export of their products to the United States under AGOA are now confronted with a different reality. AGOA expiration puts an end to the U.S. policy of export-led growth, job creation, and industrialization, especially in labor-intensive industries for the participating African countries.Footnote ⁵⁰

That said, the expiry of AGOA may not entirely be bad news for participating African states. AGOA has been used as an instrument of economic coercion and punitive technique through different U.S. administrations, often leading to the de-listing of a particular erring country.Footnote ⁵¹ The ineligibility mechanism of AGOA draws our attention back to the precarity of the agreement. Put simply, eligibility is dependent on implementing the U.S.-prescribed political and economic policies. In this subjective evaluation of which country is included or excluded as a member of AGOA, U.S. foreign policy is the driver of the process. For example, countries such as Burkina Faso, Gabon, Guinea, and Niger are ineligible because the United States does not approve of their human rights regime, rule of law record, or politics.Footnote ⁵²

The Trump tariffs and the expiration of AGOA disrupt global value chain supply regimes and in turn reverse momentum in the building of resilient value chains across the continent. As global trade pathways shift and geopolitical tensions rise, Africa’s supply chains, which are already vulnerable, face an even more compromising regime. African countries, many of which have export-oriented growth strategies, will confront disruptions in global value chains and setbacks in their socioeconomic development gains because of the reciprocal tariffs. Even if AGOA is renewed, the reciprocal tariffs already have disrupted supply chains in Africa. This has resulted in rising import costs, congested supply routes, rising freight prices, and currency volatility. The global value chains regime in Africa cuts across the manufacturing and processing sectors. A global reduction in the demand for raw materials and inputs will have a cascading effect on the economic wellbeing of the concerned countries.

If AGOA is not extended, it would mark the end of a preferential trade relationship that has shaped Africa-U.S. economic engagement, particularly in sectors such as textiles and apparels, agriculture, and light manufacturing.Footnote ⁵³ Perhaps more worryingly for the future of U.S.-African economic relations, the Trump administration seems more intent on a transactional approach to negotiating bilateral trade agreements with African countries than focusing on the renewal or extension of AGOA. In a sense, this is hardly surprising given the tiny share of the U.S. market that AGOA countries represent. What seems evident is that specific bilateral deals will be pursued. Yet, poor and hurriedly negotiated bilateral trade agreements foreshadow a potential deepening of inequality given the asymmetrical bargaining power of the United States vis-à-vis any African country. For example, Kenya is already gearing up for the resumption of the negotiations over a bilateral trade agreement that started began in the Trump first administration but which now is more urgent in view of the end of AGOA.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this regard, already emerging from the pressure that the tariffs are having on the African economies, Kenya has now turned to hiring a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. to assist with advocacy for support in trade, security, and diplomacy.Footnote ⁵⁵ The South African government has also recently secured access to export fish products to the U.S. market from January 2026.Footnote ⁵⁶

Tariffs may then be used as bargaining chips to extract concessions, such as market access for U.S. companies, adoption of U.S. standards in technology and energy, relaxation of environmental regulations in targeted sectors, and reforms of national industrialization and socioeconomic policies. Similarly, African supply chains will be further exposed as the United States negotiates bilateral trade agreements with African states that pits corporate America’s interests against those of African states.

African states have always negotiated in the shadow of precarity and power imbalance in their trade relations with the United States. As Walter Rodney warns, “Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within any group and between groups…. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines maneuverability in bargaining …. When one society finds itself forced to relinquish power entirely to another society, that in itself is a form of underdevelopment.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The United States, in its geopolitical struggle for dominance is laying down the foundations for the continuation of the process of domination—one that never stopped even after physical decolonization.Footnote ⁵⁸ The new order that America seeks to create, even with an extended AGOA, deepens lingering neocolonial economic relations and places Africa in a structurally weaker position within the global economy, perhaps eternally consigned to being the exporter of primary products.

In Lieu of Conclusion

President Trump’s decisive attack on foreign aid and USAID, leading to the restructuring of the latter and the closure of ongoing and future development aid work across the world, has left many vulnerable regions of the world in potential crisis. With some of the funds hitherto allocated to development aid in vulnerable Global South countries reallocated to national economic projects or redirected to support programs that deepen U.S. foreign policy objectives of America First abroad, one thing is clear: economic nationalism, power-based relations, and opposition to the rules-based order is back. Calculated, unfair, and transactional politics is the name of the game for President Trump’s return to office so far. Whether it is in relation to a developed, developing, or least-developed country, in its first six months back in office, the Trump administration has unapologetically proven that it does not care whose ox is gored. The “Reciprocal Tariff Policy” has further disrupted and entrenched the uncertainty in the multilateral trading system that was already confronted with crisis about its own existence, especially the World Trade Organization, and the resulting fragmentation in international trade has further exacerbated the socio-economic and fragile status of developing countries, especially those from the African continent.

International economic law constructs, reproduces, and legitimizes hierarchical orders.Footnote ⁵⁹ The hierarchical structures of trade relations between the United States and African countries that has been reinforced by the second Trump administration is not new. The United States has not hid the fact that it is rebuilding the foundations of a new global economic order.Footnote ⁶⁰ The goal here is to retool the international economic order so that it is, in the words of the U.S. Trade Representative, “fair, balanced and oriented toward serving concrete national interests rather than vague aspirations of multilateral institutions.”Footnote ⁶¹ This is largely untrue. Make no mistake, the falling apart of U.S. trade policy should not be equated with the birth of a new global trading system. In reality, it denotes in practice a foreign policy that signals the closure of “the American market from the rest of the world.”Footnote ⁶² While President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs do not affect all countries in the same way, external constraints, such as increased tariffs, weigh unevenly and with greater intensity on African countries.

Finally, it is an important note of caution that scholars of international development and international economic law must not fall into the trap of fetishizing the formality—legal or illegal—of the executive orders discussed in this essay. Whether legal or not, the executive orders have already wreaked havoc in the global economic order. Overtly focusing on their legality misses the mark. Countries in Africa and elsewhere have all responded to these orders. Reversing them in the U.S. courts may offer some reprieve on the technical aspects. Yet, the temporality of the executive orders has already triggered a reorganization of the flow of trade and the balance of powers even more. As a result, for Global South countries, the question is not so much whether the Trump administration is ushering in a new Footnote ⁶³ international economic order; rather, it is a fierce entrenchment of the systemic inequities at the underbelly of our multilateral trading system that unfortunately have been attenuated.

Thus, the second Trump administration’s politics of resentment and vengeance must not be viewed in isolation. The irrationality, arbitrariness, violence, and destructiveness that such politics visit upon developing countries in Africa locks in a path-dependent relationship that continues to subjugate the success of the economies of these developing countries to the needs, whims, and caprices of the metropole. It is a systemic form of violence that worsens the state of the subaltern. Looking back on first six months of Trump administration, it portends a bleak future for the many who are vulnerable in America and the rest of the world.