Foreign Aid Bill: Bridge Financing for the Radical Left?

On Thursday night, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act 2026. The bill provides the foreign aid industry $50 billion in taxpayer funding, $20 billion over the president’s budget request. The foreign aid industry praised it “as a long-awaited break for a beleaguered development community.”

Heritage Action criticized the aid bill for “falling short of responding to American outrage over systemic waste, fraud, and abuse,” and “throws a lifeline to a corrupt, leftwing foreign aid establishment … that keeps open the door for the return of the progressive multi-billion-dollar aid industry” after President Donald Trump leaves office.

On day one in office, Trump froze all foreign aid funding, denouncing the aid industry as “run by radical lunatics.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the U.S. Agency for International Development of “rank insubordination.”

Congressional hearings exposed the ideological rot in our aid programs from “funding transgenderism in Muslim Bangladesh, atheism in Hindu India, illegal abortions in traditional Mozambique and distributing condoms in Taliban-run Afghanistan.”

Last September, a government report stated that 60% of the $10 billion per year global health funding was spent on “various forms of overhead” incurred by U.N. agencies, international NGOs and for-profit contractors.

Last month, the State Department ceased funding humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Yemen where billions in taxpayer money have been diverted to terrorists.

The administration dismantled USAID, dismissed thousands of aid officials, defunded billions in woke programs, and reset foreign aid as a tool of national security in line with American values. Foreign aid has been transformed from a global platform to promote progressive radicalism to generating global wealth by promoting America’s economic interests.

The strategy of the decimated foreign aid industry is to financially survive these next three years until Trump leaves office, expect a progressive to replace him as president, and reboot foreign aid spending to levels of the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, a powerful coalition of aid lobbyists, spearheaded by millions of dollars from Bill Gates, have been actively working to falsely equate aid cuts with “millions of deaths.”  

It worked. The bill overfunds the administration by $20 billion. Whereas the State Department wants to cut the global health budget by half (the US taxpayer has provided over $200 billion of health-related aid since 2001, double any other donor), this bill makes a cut of only 6%.

Worse, the bill fully funds the left-wing National Endowment for Democracy whose board is openly anti-Trump. In comparison, the bill provides only $40 million for persecuted religious minorities despite the president taking military action against terrorists killing Nigerians Christians and although global persecution of Christians is at an all-time high.

Conservatives in Congress were stunned by the bill’s massive funding of the National Endowment for Democracy. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, decried the organization for supporting “leftwing, anti-American NGOs.”

A 2024 Heritage report details how the endowment became captured by anti-conservative progressives to attack conservatives at home and abroad with board members interfering in U.S. elections, denouncing Trump as “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”

H.R. 3625, introduced by Eli Crane, R-Ariz., and which sought to prohibit new funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, lost but did win a majority of House Republican votes, a reputational stain on the organization.  

The bill also includes a $100 million payment per year for ten years for a new similar foundation for international conservation to co-finance the leftwing global conservation industry, such as the World Wildlife Fund and Bezos Earth Fund.

With congressional elections set for next year and the prospect of progressives retaking power, this bill provides the bridge financing the aid industry hoped for. If so, post-Trump America will again face the prospect of billions of its tax dollars funding radicalism at home and abroad.

Congress still has another shot to align this harmful foreign aid appropriations with the administration’s reforms as the U.S. Senate considers it later this month. Don’t count on it though.

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