Filling the gap? US aid cuts and European solidarity

A number of major bilateral donors have enacted cuts to their foreign aid in the past years, with overall levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) declining in 2024 and 2025. This decline creates funding gaps, putting populations across the Global South at risk. The OECD has called for donors to work together to find solutions to close these gaps, especially for those most in need. The sudden suspension of US aid and the abolition of USAID in early 2025 during the start of the second Trump administration has especially had drastic consequences, with health and other programmes being halted practically from one day to the next and putting lives in immediate danger. The paper aims to provide a preliminary exploration of how European official and civil society actors have reacted to the US aid cuts. Article 21(1) of the Treaty on European Union lists solidarity as one of principles guiding EU external actions, and solidarity with those most in immediate need is consistently high among European populations. This means that European donors and civil society organisations might have felt moral need and societal pressure to rapidly fill the gaps left by the withdrawal of US ODA. The paper investigates three questions: (1) did European actors (the EU, bilateral donors and NGOs) mobilize funding to replace the withdrawal of US ODA; (2) did European actors coordinate with each other to identify the populations or regions and countries most in need; and (3) has European solidarity been even-handed, or have some geographical areas been prioritised. We focus on the health aid, as it is the sector where a cut in aid would most immediately threaten lives, and thus where solidarity would be most needed. We build on the literature on donor identity construction, and specifically how the EU and European development NGOs have traditionally emphasized solidarity with the global poor in their rhetoric, creating expectations that aid to them will be prioritized. Given how recent the US cuts have been, and no comprehensive dataset is yet available, we use a variety of exploratory methods to identify the actions of European actors. We use three sources of qualitative data: speeches and statements by European decision makers to identify how US aid cuts and European solidarity in response to these has been framed; press releases and online news items published by a key set of donors (DG INTPA, GIZ, Sida, Save the Children, Oxfam, Welthungerhilfe and Médecins Sans Frontières), as well as interviews with staff at these organisations. The key finding emerging from this research is that there is evidence of European actors moving into areas where US health aid has been cut, but given budgetary pressures, it has been relatively sporadic and by no means even close to filling the immense gap. Much of the European involvement seems to have been designed as temporary, rather “bridging the gaps” than filling them. Finally, there is relatively little evidence of cooperation between European actors, and the EU itself did little to coordinate their efforts.