United Kingdom Foreign Secretary David Lammy warned President Donald Trump against cuts in foreign aid programs, saying that when Britain took similar actions, it was a “great strategic error.”
The Trump government wants to reform the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which resulted in frozen aid programs and suspended employees at the agency that manages crucial humanitarian assistance around the world. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said he is now in charge of the agency and could eventually dismantle it.
Lammy said to Guardian On Friday, the US government should “closely analyze what went wrong” when the previous conservative government of the United Kingdom extinguished its International Development Department and placed its duties within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“We spent years unraveling this strategic error,” he told the newspaper. “Development remains a very important soft power tool.”
Usaid’s main recipients include Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Syria.
Lammy’s comments highlight the tensions between the center-left administration of Prime Minister Keir Strmer in the United Kingdom and the new republican government in the US. Wishing to avoid provoking Trump’s wrath after a troubled beginning in the relationship during last year’s presidential campaign, Lammy and Stmerer have sought to adopt a conciliatory tone since the president’s inauguration.
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But Lammy – who for years, while in opposition, called Trump a “deep threat to international order” – has always been an advocate of a greater investment in foreign aid and told the Guardian that it is concerned that China and others can fill a gap left in development financing.
By 2020, the previous British government announced that spending on help would be temporarily reduced to 0.5% of gross national income, but since then consecutive administrations have failed to increase the expense for the originals 0.7%. Conservative Administration extinguished DFID in the same year.
“We were extremely critical of the way the last government dealt with the decision,” said Lammy. “Therefore, I would advise US friends to look closely at what went wrong in the UK while sailing for that decision.”
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