The $9 billion Republican rescission bill is now law, and foreign aid is getting much of the chop. This turn of events highlights a fundamental weakness in the pro–foreign aid constituency: The collapse of bipartisan support for assistance, at least as it’s currently conducted by the federal government. 

While the cuts to the lightning-rod PEPFAR program were canceled, other cuts will happen—a total of $9 billion. Senate Republicans tweeted a “greatest hits” list of zero-outs, including “$300,000 to hold a pride parade in Lesotho,” “$500,000 for a gender equality and empowerment hub,” and “$4.4 million for the ‘Melanesian Youth Climate Corps.’” 

Is this adversarial cherry-picking? Sure it is. And it must also be said that the cuts, while too big in the view of some, are small in the scheme of things. As Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said, “What we are talking about is one-tenth of one percent of all federal spending . . . but it’s a step in the right direction.” To put the data another way, 99.9 percent of federal spending was deemed to be more popular (or untouchable) than foreign aid and other targets the Republican majority loves to hate, PBS and NPR. 

In fact, the rescission counts as a triumph for the conservative critique of “woke” aid. The Heritage Foundation, still leading GOP policy formulation after all these years, has long been pounding away (here, here, and here).  

Furthermore, the Heritage-hubbed Project 2025 declared of the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development, “The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.”  

This intellectual fuel pile chain-reactioned in Donald Trump’s second presidency. Immediately upon taking office, 47 issued an Executive Order declaring that “the United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.” 

Guided by that ukase, Team Trump DOGE-d or otherwise kiboshed not only USAID, but also the U.S. Institute of Peace and various smaller offices. Additionally, it pulled out of the World Health Organization and terminated many other international agreements and understandings. 

Yes, it’s possible that court orders will undo some of these RIFs. Yet no judge is going to undo the influence of Trump’s point man on cutting, Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Even after DOGE Musked out, Vought & Co. have been planning not only more rescissions, but also freezes, impoundments, and whatever other stratagems were dreamed up in the Project 2025 idea lab.  

Notably, if the federal government shuts down again—there have been 20 “funding gaps” in the last half century, and in this divisive time it’s easy to foresee a 21st soon enough—Vought would be able to use his insider perch to wield both his scalpel and his cleaver. So while past shutdowns have usually worked against Republicans, a new one would make Vought’s day. 

Of course, the Democrats, who have been solidly opposed to all these moves, will be back in charge eventually. No doubt there are already tuning up their anti-Vought bot, eyeing rescissions of the rescissions.  

But it’s also likely the Democrats will have a hard time putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Why? Because the politico-media environment has changed much. For instance, PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, was created by George W. Bush in 2003. Back then, 43 was guided by his unique combination of “wars of choice” plus “compassionate conservatism.” And for a while, Republicans—and many Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden—loved it, supporting both the Iraq War and PEPFAR. As Bush 43 secretary of state Condoleezza Rice concedes with a sigh, there’s no going back to those days. 

Moreover, in those days, the mainstream media were much more influential; many Republicans would slaver to get a nice mention in, say, the New York Times. For Bush, battered as he was by Iraq (American soldiers had it worse), PEPFAR paid off (One Times headline from 2008: “In Global Battle on AIDS, Bush Creates Legacy”). That’s a legacy Bush has embraced (what else does he have?). Just this year, 43 teamed up with 44, Barack Obama, to denounce Republican plans to cut PEPFAR.  

Yet the world is different now; old bipartisan halos may provide some cover—PEPFAR survived the rescission unscathed—but they don’t speak to any genuine commitment among active politicians about cross-party comity. Indeed, the Times reports that Trump officials still wish to “sharply curtail or end” the program, as part of their long twilight struggle against many kinds of welfarist spending. 

In his first presidential campaign, Trump trashed Bush 43, Jeb Bush, and even Bush 41—and the feelings have long been mutual. So don’t expect any scion of the once-dynasty to be speaking any time soon to a Republican National Convention. So good bye, aid-on-your-sleeve Bush-style compassionate conservatism.  

During the same two decades, the MSM, too, have shriveled. The Times is still powerful, and yet its influence is mostly on the left half of the country; the right half now looks elsewhere for news and exhortation.   

Not surprisingly, there’s been a corresponding slide in conservative and Republican support for the “rules-based international order,” which the right takes as code for globalism—or, as a Trump Pentagon spokeswoman puts it, “the evil of globalism.” 

So even when the Democrats get back in charge, they won’t have much support from America First Republicans. And history shows that at least a modicum of bipartisanship is key to successful long-term endeavors. Absent an across-the-aisle concord on aid, the likely outcome is a see-saw, as supply chains are snapped up and down by partisan gusts.

For many sincere conservatives, this scenario is painful to contemplate. After all, charity is not a left-wing idea—it’s a biblical idea. Long before anyone heard of the Frankfurt School, Christians were comforting the afflicted, including in faraway lands.  

Yet in all those biblical preachings on almsgiving, there’s nothing about funding sexual liberation or transgenderism—and that’s the crux of the current aid crisis. Christians (and a good many others) who are called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked are not all left-wing—just the opposite, often. But in the eyes of one of the two major parties, the GOP, the foreign-aid establishment has gone woke—and with just a handful of exceptions, no GOPer wants to vote to fund that.  

Thus the question for the future of U.S. government-run aid: Can the system be changed, or at least somewhat reformed? The viability of foreign aid as a popular national project depends on an affirmative answer.  

Of course, there are plenty of other right-coded arguments for foreign aid, including the realpolitik gaining of influence in foreign countries and the opening up of markets for U.S. exports. 

Nevertheless, as the recent voting shows, all these arguments—whether advanced by Christians or by the Chamber of Commerce—are having less impact.  

So perhaps the pro-foreign aid constituencies, across the spectrum, will see the value of a rethink. They need a stronger, broader, political platform—and that will take no small reassessment. 

There’s a paradox at the heart of the contemporary foreign aid establishment: The people who push hard to boost the Third World are the same ones who seek to restrain the First World. The left is expansionary abroad and contractionary at home. (By contrast, the right is contractionary abroad and expansionary at home—more on that later.)  

The Trump administration rightly touts strong capital expenditure numbers and zooming small businesses optimism as evidence that Main Street is doing even better than Wall Street—the latter being heavily influenced by the foreign trade that Team Trump seeks to supplant with domestic production. 

For the most part, liberals will deny that they are anti-growth. Yet to make their points on growth, they typically insert modifiers, such as “smart,” or “sustainable”—or most loaded of all, “equitable”— that actually underscore their ambivalence about wealth creation. In the words of contrarian Democrat Ruy Teixeira, “Progressives now prize goals like fighting climate change, procedural justice, and protecting identity groups above prosperity.” 

At the same time, those further to the left—but still Democratic voters, who can win important primaries—make no bones about being anti-growth. And as for the hardcore greens, fuhgeddaboutit. Indeed, it seems fair to say that for those preoccupied with carbon dioxide molecules, the needs of the planet’s dispossessed are a lower priority—much lower. 

Optics and opinions aside, the record is clear enough: The Biden administration and almost all Democrats in Congress consistently opposed development of carbon-fuel energy and other natural resources. Everything was at least somewhat subordinated to concerns about climate change, which Joe Biden described as an “existential threat” too many times to count. (For those who really believe that the greatest danger to the world is climate change, of course GDP matters less.)  

For a while, Democrats insisted that solar and wind energy would fill up all the shortfalls and shore up prosperity. Yet now we see that was just magical thinking. Moreover, it was magical to think that construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline could be closed down—as the Biden administration did in 2021—and that the jolted workers would then pivot to good new careers as computer coders. (It was also magical to think that those blue collars wouldn’t retaliate by voting Republican.) 

To be sure, these days, the fastest growth is coming from digital technology, most of that clustered in blue dots near top universities. These blue zones regard themselves as not only progressive, but clean.  

Yet by now we’ve figured out that the highest of high tech, AI, is an energy hog. Indeed, even green tech is heavily dependent on rare earths. Not only do the electrons have to come from somewhere, but so does the scandium, terbium, yttrium, etc. 

Not so long ago, liberals and greens could comfort themselves by thinking that all this dirty-industrial work was being done in faraway China. (That some of it was also coming from slave-pits in Africa was not so comforting.) But now that the PRC is decoupling from the U.S., even oh-so-green Apple is realizing that it needs to mine and refine nearby.

Ah, but what of the so-called Abundance Democrats? Those shibboleth-smashing opponents of red tape and NIMBYism? Aren’t they a pro-growth tonic for their party? As Michael Woronoff observed acidly in Commentary, the Abundance Dems do, indeed, seek to smash the small idols of anti-growth—but only to make more room in the temple for the mega-idol of anti-growth, climate change.

To be blunt about it: Climate change is the uber-deity of economic contraction. 

We see this in Europe, which has instantiated Net Zero into wealth-destroying holy writ. In the words of the Dane Bjorn Lomborg, the European Union “has consistently prioritized carbon cuts and ever more expensive energy, often through less reliable wind and solar power. This climate crusade is a masterclass in self-sabotage, chaining its economy to ruinous policies while preaching moral superiority.” No wonder even the poorest U.S. states are now richer than European countries, and that continental corporations are now just shadows of their American rivals. 

We can say that the Europeans have the right to follow their bliss their way, but we can also observe that the green-palsied EU is cutting back on foreign aid. Of course it is—because it’s no longer rich. 

Adjacent to the EU is the United Kingdom, where green-red czar Ed Miliband dictated, magically, that cloudy England would be a solar superpower. Physics got in the way, of course, so the UK has the highest electricity prices in Europe. Indeed, economic growth has been so depressed that the left-wing government has slashed its foreign aid budget by 40 percent. That’s what happens to the recipient poor when the giving country, too, goes poor.  

The reaction to this decline has been, well, reactionary, with still more backlash to come. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is now leading in British public opinion. If he, or a like-minded figure—including a convert from the wet Toryism that once spearheaded the economic dégringolade of Net Zero—wins the next national election, foreign aid will be redirected to thwarting, even evicting, foreigners. 

Yet even after these defeats, liberalism is still braided with eco-gloomism, that paradoxical bundling of hoped-for generosity and real-world austerity. For example, a look at the website of Global Citizen—a large NGO with its headquarters in Manhattan and six satellite offices around the world—shows two tandem priorities: “Defeat Poverty” and “Defend the Planet,” the latter which highlights, of course, “the climate crisis.”

The left is free to be what it wants to be. And if that means prioritizing slower growth, so be it. Yet the right is just as free to be itself, including its go-go economic vanguard.   

So leftists should understand that if ordinary voters are presented with a choice, slow-growth foreign-aiders, on one side, and faster-growth non-foreign-aiders, on the other, vox populi is foregone.  

It’s simple, really: If the overall pie is smaller, the slice going to the global poor will be smaller. But is there another way? A larger pie, more widely shared? Perhaps, but nobody’s baking it. A better recipe is needed. 

A new grand bargain for foreign aid could be this: The left unbundles, and unburdens itself from austerity and agrees to help unleash more prosperity. In return, as its part of the deal, the right takes most of the money and runs—leaving behind an agreed-upon amount for foreign aid. So both domestic sides, left and right, score a win, and the international poor, too, share in the winning. So it’s actually a win-win-win. 

The ideal would be the creation of a dedicated—the two-dollar word is hypothecated—fund that guarantees a steady stream of aid.  

History shows that these sorts of funds can be apolitical: For a century-and-a-half, it’s been a perfectly natural thing that the University of Texas system has been funded, in part, by resources from set-aside lands, including, of course, oil. Similarly, the National Park Service Historic Preservation Trust Fund is endowed by oil revenues. And the Alaska Permanent Fund delivers a carbon-fuel dividend to each resident. The amount fluctuates with prices, but over the last five years, the dividend has averaged $1,680 per annum. At the same time, the Fund’s assets exceed $83 billion, which works out to more than $112,000 per Alaskan.  

These disparate plush funds are the face of abundance. Politically, they are all winners, such that nobody in politics, in either party, talks about messing with them. In other words, they enjoy a sanctity that makes it easy for authorities to dole out money as they see fit—so long as everyone, or every interest, gets a piece. 

Are there environmental concerns associated with these monies, and their sources? Of course. Yet Alaska, Texas, and the U.S. as a whole are perfectly habitable—that environmental mitigation is much improved is one of those stories the Malthusians don’t want people to know about.  

In fact, we could drill, baby, drill—and dig, baby, dig—and have a lot more such public funds. Then the political system could figure out where the money should go. If pro-foreign aid groups are in the room, helping to achieve producerist plenty, they’ll get their share of the goodies. “Everyone fat and happy” is another way of saying, “sustainability.”  

By contrast, if foreign-aid constituencies stick with their current allies, the greens, they’ll be left out in the cold limbo of austerityland, quite possibly to be rescissioned over and over again. As they say in politics, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. 

Creative bargaining on abundance—divvying up the growth dividend—could well lead to fiscal outcomes outside the normal protocols of taxing and spending. How much is it worth to drillers to be able to drill in X? How much is it worth to diggers to dig in Y? Or to build on Z? These questions could be put to auction, just as Uncle Sam has auctioned off radio spectrum—a process that has netted the feds $100 billion, with more money coming. 

Okay, now for the possible objections.

The current left, including the Democratic Party, might not be ready for this much agonizing reappraisal—even if it’s happened before. That is, the greens, who loom so large in both donation and ideation, will fight a true abundance agenda. So the Democrats will have to make a choice. Which side are they on: the masses, or the molecules?  

Speaking of the masses, one famous leader spoke well for them—that would be Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor for nearly four decades. When asked what the workers wanted, he answered, with one simple and non-ideological word: “More.” Out of such pragmatic thinking, there’s plenty of hope for a new compact. 

Yet the current right, including the Republican Party, also might shrink from the brink. After all, more money for foreign aid means more money for NGOs. Without minimizing moral concerns, we can assert: Every dealmaking session is an opportunity to set terms, understanding that bargaining is not surrendering—by either side. In the meantime, others on right might be thinking: If deal-making Democrats were no longer blocking development, but instead cheering it on, how much is that worth? Such calculating is the beginning of dealing. 

A new report from the Trump White House Council of Economic Advisers reminds us that both sides have cards to play. The report finds that extra energy production alone could add two points to GDP by 2035—but only if that energy unleashing is accompanied by continued deregulation. That caveat underscores the importance of the report’s decade-long timeline, which includes two presidential elections. 

The conclusion is clear: For maximum growth, as well as maximum profitability, businesspeople and entrepreneurs need to be assured that no hostile regime will re-regulate, thereby stranding the investment. The best assurance of a loose leash comes from a reciprocal political deal, inked by both parties, and boosted by continued good faith. 

As political players consider their stance on growth and the distribution of its benefits, the best advice is borrowed from statecraft: We don’t have permanent allies, we have permanent interests. 

Yet in the short term, there’s a variable who is, well, yuge.

No doubt some Ultra-MAGA boasts a bracelet with the letters: WWTD (What Would Trump Do?). This author’s answer—sketched out here at TAC well before the election—is that Trump would seize the opportunity to do a multi-trillion-dollar beauty of a deal.

Yes, of course, Trump is America First, and has been quoted—quotes never confirmed—saying that some Third World counties are “sh*tholes.”   

Yet words are just words. What really matters are deals, including, perhaps, an agreement that yields him the coveted Nobel Peace Prize. (Note to the Norwegians and the rest of NATO: The quicker Trump gets his Nobel, the nicer he will be, even if his own base finds such behavior boring.) 

For sure, there’s plenty of plenty to deal with—enough to pay for a world-historical win-win. 

In 2023, eerily anticipating Trump, Science magazine described “a golden age for economic geology.” That is, everywhere prospectors look, there’s one rich discovery after another. Consider lithium. Just in the last year, seekers have found an estimated $540 billion of lithium in California, $800 billion in Arkansas, and $1.5 trillion in Oregon. And all that’s on top of earlier recent lithium discoveries in Florida, Maine, and Wisconsin. 

Okay, maybe lithium is too green for some tastes. Similar tales could be told about other minerals—all of them, in fact. 

Why is this so? The answer goes back to the origin of the Earth, formed 4.5 billion years ago by the coalescing of gases, dust particles, and asteroids surrounding the Sun. All that galactic stuff, now congealed, contains literally every element known in the universe—it all having been sprayed about, even longer ago, by the Big Bang. 

So that’s why natural resources are scattered all over the Earth, and, of course, within Earth. Our planet’s diameter is nearly 8,000 miles, with a mass of six sextillion tons (21 zeros). Every ton of this globe has something of value in it, from lead to gold to everything else. 

Yet upon this planetary plethora, no mine has ever gone deeper than 2.5 miles. In the most literal sense, we’ve only scratched the surface. So if we could—and we will, especially if there’s a big enough X-Prize—figure out how to mine deeper, we’d find vastly more of everything. 

Yes, the Malthusians are that wrong—we’re not running out of anything. 

We could be that rich, and we could share that much more with the world. Of course, the world, too, including the Third World, could join in on this abundance. America could share its technological knowhow, and other countries, too, including poor ones, could dig deeper and get richer.  

Of course, the proper sharing of wealth-producing capacity would require considerable forethought, to make sure that it reaches the truly needy, not just local elites. So that would necessitate new thinking on politics, and geopolitics, as well as technology. Those controversies can be taken up in another time.  

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Yet in the meantime, there’s much we Americans can do: We could agree to do a better job of producing and sharing our own wealth. If so, as part of the agreement we could not only be wealthier ourselves, but have lots of money left over for good causes, including aiding the world’s poor.  

And if Trump were to be the humanitarian dealmaker? Would that be too ironic for words? Another pro-growth Republican, Ronald Reagan, had the right answer: “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.” 

Amen.