Most Americans still back foreign aid after USAID cuts, Reuters poll finds
Most Americans still back foreign aid after USAID’s dismantling, and support jumped once voters learned it had been about 1% of the budget.
A new 2,022-voter survey conducted June 12-16 by Echelon Insights for The Rockefeller Foundation found support for foreign aid rose to 70% from 54% after respondents learned foreign aid had amounted to about 1% of the U.S. budget before 2025.
Seventy-eight percent favored maintaining or increasing foreign-aid spending after hearing that budget figure. Support was especially strong for specific uses: 90% backed humanitarian relief, 90% supported efforts to prevent disease outbreaks, and 78% favored peacekeeping and conflict resolution. Eighty-one percent preferred strengthening foreign-aid programs with stricter safeguards over eliminating them, and 8 in 10 said the path forward should be to reform and strengthen foreign aid rather than scrap it.
More than a third believed foreign assistance consumed 20% of the federal budget. Seven in 10 Americans support setting foreign aid at 2% of the federal budget, double the level before the cuts. In a separate public consultation, 89% said the United States should spend at least 1% of the federal budget on foreign aid.
The policy shift began with Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14169 on January 20, 2025, which imposed a 90-day pause while foreign assistance was reviewed. Marco Rubio later announced on July 1, 2025, that USAID would stop implementing foreign aid and its remaining functions would move to the State Department. By then, more than 10,000 USAID personnel and contractors had been fired, thousands of programs had been canceled, and U.S. foreign-aid disbursements had fallen to $47 billion in fiscal 2025 from $72 billion in fiscal 2024.
The Congressional Research Service put USAID's combined appropriations at more than $35 billion in fiscal 2024. A 2025 Lancet study projected 14.1 million additional deaths by 2030 if the dismantling continued, including 4.5 million deaths among children under 5.
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