Europe’s commissioner for equality, preparedness and crisis management, delighted in an opportunity to dunk on Elon Musk earlier this year after the tech billionaire mused on his own social media platform, X: “Money can’t buy happiness.”
Hadja Lahbib wrote: “Elon, you’re right: money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy food, water, and medicine for starving children. That’s why the EU is proud to be the world’s #1 humanitarian donor. Over 1.9 billion euros ($2.2 billion) this year alone. Time to reverse USAID cuts!”
Then came the figures. EU institutions’ cash aid rose in 2025, but the increase was overwhelmingly directed toward Ukraine. On the OECD’s standard measure, their official development assistance fell 13.8 percent, while funding reaching the world’s poorest countries and sub-Saharan Africa dropped by more than a fifth.
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When Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office after winning re-election in November 2024, he gave Europe two versions of the same order: stop relying on America, and pay more yourself.
When the demand concerned Europe’s own defense, governments winced and fretted. Then they found the money.
When it concerned the hole left in the global development aid budget after Trump abruptly canceled most USAID projects, European governments again winced and fretted. Then they proceeded to cut aid too.
Your Request For Assistance Has Been Denied
Last year was not a good year for countries in dire need of aid and development funding. The OECD’s preliminary data for 2025 showed that official development assistance (ODA) fell 23.1 percent—the largest annual contraction in the history of aid reporting.
The United States drove three-quarters of that drop after slashing its ODA by 56.9 percent, but Europe was hardly standing heroically on the dock as Washington sailed away. Germany cut ODA by 17.4 percent, France by 10.9 percent and the United Kingdom by 10.8 percent.
There were some much bigger cuts among other European countries, too. Czechia fell 28 percent, Ireland 22.5 percent, Belgium 21.4 percent, Portugal 19.3 percent and Poland 19 percent.
Taken together, EU countries that are also members of the Development Assistance Committee—an international aid body operating under the OECD that aims to uphold official aid standards—spent an average of 0.42 percent of their gross national income on development assistance in 2025. The official U.N. target is 0.7 percent.
And it’s not going to get better any time soon, according to the latest projections.
Future Requests Will Also Be Denied
If last year was one of the worst on record for international aid programs, 2026 is set to solidify the downward trend.
The OECD’s latest projections show net ODA falling another 6.9 percent in 2026, down to $152 billion in constant 2024 prices. That would make 2026 the third consecutive year of decline—something the OECD says has happened only once before, in the post-Cold War years following the fall of the Soviet Union.
The average donor effort is expected to fall from 0.25 percent of gross national income in 2025 to 0.23 percent this year, and then to 0.21 percent by 2028.
In plain English: the global aid budget is not suffering a temporary Trump-induced concussion. It is being reset lower, almost entirely across the board. In many cases, European nations—particularly some of America’s closest NATO partners—are pointing to increased defense spending as the chief reason behind the withdrawal of aid.
The UK has already written the trade-off into its books; Britain is reducing its aid target to 0.3 percent of gross national income by 2027, with a House of Commons report estimating that aid reductions will provide £500 million for defense in 2025-26, £4.8 billion in 2026-27 and £6.5 billion in 2027-28.
Aid spending at 0.3 percent of GNI in 2027 is expected to total £9.2 billion, the lowest cash level since 2012 and the lowest share of national income since 1999.
Germany is moving in the same direction. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s draft 2027 budget, finalized earlier this month, locks in higher military spending while humanitarian assistance sits at just €1.05 billion, or 0.19 percent of the federal budget.
Germany’s development ministry is also facing a further reduction, after its humanitarian budget was already halved from 2024 levels.
Loud and Proud
The shocking drop-off in global aid spending does not mean the strategic or moral cases for development assistance have disappeared. It simply means there is only so much money to go around, and governments that want to spend more on missiles, tanks, air defense systems and troop readiness have to find it somewhere.
European leaders are facing the same sour public mood that characterized much of the U.S. domestic political debate: higher prices, strained public services, angry taxpayers and voters who want to know why money is being sent abroad when rent, groceries and energy bills still feel punishing at home.
Cutting foreign aid is one of the quickest and most convenient ways to show you’re addressing the public’s concerns because its beneficiaries do not vote in Berlin, London, Paris or Warsaw. Europe knows this, and is doing this.
The only real difference is that Trump was louder and bolder about it.