Washington, DC – Preliminary data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found that international development aid from its members dropped by about 23 percent from 2024 to 2025. Much of that decline was attributed to a major shortfall in funding from the United States. The forum, which includes many of the the largest economies across Europe and the Americas, said on Thursday that the US saw a nearly 57 percent drop in foreign aid in 2025.
The OECD’s four other top contributors — Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and France — also saw declines in their foreign aid assistance. The report marked the first time foreign development assistance from all five of the OECD’s top donors simultaneously declined. The total assistance for 2025 totaled only $174.3bn, down from $214.6bn the year before, representing the largest annual drop since the OECD began recording the data.
OECD officials warned the dramatic decrease comes at a time when global economic and food security has been cast into doubt amid the stresses of the US-Israeli war with Iran. Thursday’s preliminary data shows that only eight member countries met or exceeded their funding from 2024. But the numbers offer an incomplete picture of global development aid, as it fails to include influential non-DAC members including Turkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and China.
The data tracked by the OECD distinguishes official development assistance from other forms of aid, including military funds. In its preliminary assessment, the OECD noted that the US “alone drove three-quarters of the decline” in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump has overseen widespread cuts to the US’s aid infrastructure, including dissolving the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a wider effort to shrink government spending.
The US contributed about $63bn in official development assistance in 2024, which was cleaved to just short of $29bn in 2025, according to OECD. Research this year from the University of Sydney has suggested that cuts to US funding over the past year have corresponded with an increase in armed conflict in Africa, as state resources grow more scarce. Other experts have noted that the slashed assistance is likely to prompt upticks in cases of HIV-AIDS, malaria and polio.
Analysts at the Center for Global Development have projected that the US cuts were linked to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 deaths globally in 2025 alone. A recent article published in the medical journal The Lancet found that a “continuation of current downward trends” in development funding could lead to over 9.4 million new deaths by 2030. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has maintained it is transforming, not eschewing, the US aid model.
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