This article is part of First Focus on Children’s analysis of Project 2025, the granular policy agenda intended to serve as the “playbook” for a Republican presidential administration. This extremist agenda, along with the Republican candidate’s own words and platform, proposes measures that would leave America’s children poorer, sicker, and less likely to become productive citizens. Our series explores some of the most harmful proposals.
Project 2025, the detailed policy agenda assembled by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation for the next Republican administration, would slash or eliminate programs and systems that keep children in poor countries alive, healthy, and protected. This plan to gut current U.S. efforts that protect children’s lives will not only hurt the young, it will damage our nation’s foreign policy.
The U.S. historically has led the charge to assemble poverty-focused development and humanitarian assistance that has saved millions of young lives around the world. Together with other countries, U.S. assistance has reduced preventable deaths in children under 5 from 12 million a year in 1990 to 5 million today and has ensured that 5.5 million babies have been born HIV-free over the last two decades.
And the U.S. has done all of this with just a sliver of the federal budget. Less than 1 percent of all U.S. spending goes to foreign assistance and of that amount, less than 9 cents of every foreign assistance dollar goes to children.
As a bipartisan organization, First Focus on Children works to expand the share of funding that children receive in the U.S. foreign assistance budget and counsels lawmakers to take a holistic approach to prioritizing their needs. Our advocates promote policies that support children globally and collaborate with international organizations to advance children’s well-being worldwide.
Project 2025, on the other hand, would raid the relatively minuscule pot of money that goes to children overseas.
The authors call for deep cuts to the international affairs budget and would slash humanitarian assistance for the most desperate populations based on the political stances of their country’s leaders. Project 2025 also plans to “harvest” funding from programs headed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), including those for children living in extreme poverty or on the street and children with disabilities, in order “to fund new priorities”.
For 75 years, U.S. objectives for foreign assistance have included “promoting economic growth, reducing poverty, improving governance, expanding access to health care and education, promoting stability in conflict regions, countering terrorism, promoting human rights, strengthening allies, and curbing illicit drug production and trafficking.” Project 2025’s “new priorities” would instead promote U.S. strategic interests, encourage private sector approaches to poverty rather than public funding, and transfer financial responsibility for some of the world’s most successful global health programs to low-income countries in support of what it considers an “America First” approach.
Under this plan, recipient countries and local entities would assume financial responsibility for global health programs including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), life-saving programs that would potentially be gutted by this change. History has shown that program localization can only succeed if the local entities are provided adequate financial resources and expertise upfront to sustainably support programs. Project 2025 would threaten the successes of these world-class programs by transitioning them to national governments and local entities without adequate capacity-building and technical support and potentially threaten their long-term success should low-income governments be unable to fund them.
Thanks to PEPFAR, 57% of HIV-positive children now have access to treatment. Without treatment, 50% of HIV-positive children die before age 2, and 80% die by age 5. In fact, while children make up only 3 % of those living with HIV, they make up 12% of those who die from the disease. PEPFAR also protects the health and well-being of 7.2 million orphans and vulnerable children and their caregivers. PMI has saved 11.7 million lives since 2000, most of them pregnant women and children under 5.
Foreign aid programs have not only saved the lives of babies and children, they have engendered goodwill toward the United States around the world.
U.S. foreign aid has been shown to boost socio-economic development, state stability, and public opinion of the U.S. in recipient countries, which in turn enhance our own national security. U.S. military officers and diplomats have particularly favored PEPFAR and PMI. During a discussion of PEPFAR at the program’s 20th anniversary, retired U.S. Air Force general Charles F. Wald said that for every dollar the U.S. invests in foreign aid, it gains $16 in not having to deploy troops and that the economic benefits of PEPFAR are likely “hundreds of times the cost of the investment.” Gallup poll data on public opinion of U.S. leadership from 2007 to 2011 showed that PEPFAR countries have an average approval rating of 68% compared to the global average of 46% approval.
Project 2025 also proposes ending support for international organizations and multilateral engagements.
This drastic disengagement would potentially damage some of the world’s most effective programming for children’s health and well-being, including:
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance: Since its inception in 2000, Gavi has helped immunize more than 1 billion children — an entire global generation — against deadly and debilitating diseases, helping to cut the child mortality rate in half in nearly 80 low-income countries.
UNICEF: The United Nations’ International Children’s Emergency Fund works in war zones, environmental disaster sites, and other hard-to-reach places to ensure that children are healthy, educated, and protected. UNICEF has saved an estimated 122 million children’s lives since 1990.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria: By increasing treatment and prevention of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, the Global Fund has saved 59 million lives and reduced death rates from these three diseases by more than half.
The World Health Organization: Since its creation in 1948, WHO has led global efforts to expand universal health coverage, and also directs and coordinates the world’s collective response to global health emergencies.
Children make up one-third of the world’s population and up to half the population in some countries. Project 2025’s proposals seem deliberately constructed to harm these children. First Focus on Children will continue to urge our nation’s leaders to center children’s needs in foreign policy and program development. To learn more about our efforts on behalf of children internationally, please see our Children’s Agenda for the 118th Congress.