The hantavirus outbreak, and the mpox epidemic before it, highlight how the United States faces a variety of threats that originate overseas. It also underscores how military tools alone cannot protect Americans from such challenges, whether infectious disease outbreaks or destabilizing intra-state conflicts that generate mass migration, as in Haiti, or complicate access to critical sea lanes, as with Sudan and the Red Sea.
We could increase the U.S. military budget tenfold, but no number of precision military strikes can neutralize deadly microbes, suppress terrorist recruitment, or stabilize important regions affected by conflict.
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We need non-military tools, such as international assistance, to mitigate these threats. This is not “soft” power but the smart use of non-military tools to insulate the American people from serious dangers.
But in the past year, governments across the world — including the U.S. — have significantly reduced support for foreign aid. These cuts risk both immediate and long-term global consequences that are counterproductive to U.S. priorities abroad. Cutting international assistance undermines U.S. strength, security, and prosperity by disrupting proven and effective efforts that deliver returns on U.S. taxpayer dollars. We should be making strategic, forward-looking investments that help insulate the U.S. from threats that do not respond to kinetic means alone.
Modest investments in international assistance have proven effective in stopping outbreaks before they reach the United States. Just this year, UNICEF increased support to contain outbreaks of measles and rubella in Nigeria, and of cholera in Mozambique. Vaccinating children doesn’t just protect that child or their immediate community — it protects everyone by preventing outbreaks before they become global public health threats. This is precisely the model the Trump administration’s own America First Global Health Strategy calls for: monitoring and quickly containing infectious disease outbreaks before they reach U.S. shores.
The Trump administration is concerned with mass migration and terrorism. Again, foreign assistance can mitigate both. Programs in areas including emergency relief, education, nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene mitigate destabilizing conditions that often lead to migration and leave children vulnerable to recruitment and exploitation by criminal gangs and traffickers. Between 2005 and 2022, at least 105,000 children were recruited by terrorist organizations and armed groups worldwide — each one a potential future threat to U.S. security. In South Sudan, UNICEF supported the release of 3,677 children from armed groups over five years and prevented their re-enrollment. In Mali, economic programming reached more than 23,000 people across seven regions, combining income opportunities with skills training to dry up the pool of recruits that extremist organizations depend on. These upstream counterterrorism investments reduce pressure on U.S. forces and prevent the formation of new threats to the homeland.
Through local economic development, capacity building, education, and skills and vocational training, U.S. foreign assistance enables communities to become self-sustaining. In Haiti, one mother established a local network dedicated to building sanitation infrastructure and implementing hygiene practices that prevent the spread of cholera in her community. In Egypt, a youth employment and entrepreneurship program has reached more than 400,000 young people since 2008, equipping them with skills and livelihoods that reduce the conditions that fuel extremism. Water, sanitation, and hygiene programming in Egypt’s Upper Nile governorates is further stabilizing a critical ally by improving public health in areas of acute need. Community-driven initiatives like these lessen a country’s dependence on foreign aid and advance the administration’s own “trade over aid” vision.
Federal foreign aid spending also provides a proven return on investment to the U.S. economy. In 2024, UNICEF invested $770 million in U.S. businesses across 37 states to procure life-saving medicine, ready-to-use therapeutic food, and humanitarian supplies — advancing U.S. interests abroad while also creating jobs here at home in companies that provide services from the East Coast to the West Coast.
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After recent aid cuts, the U.S. has begun to signal a willingness to restore funding to foreign aid priorities through its $2 billion commitment to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and several bilateral global health compacts. But these commitments pale in comparison to the need.
As the administration enters Year 2 of its tenure, senior officials must pair a clear-eyed assessment of key challenges with an evidence-based approach to selecting the tools best suited to keep Americans safe and promote our economic interests overseas. International assistance is one such tool.
Patrick W. Quirk is vice president for global policy and public affairs at UNICEF USA. He served on the secretary of state’s policy planning staff during the first Trump administration.