Trump Signs Law Cutting Foreign Affairs Budget 16 Percent And Winding Down The AIDS Program Credited With Saving 26 Million Lives, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That American Assistance Was Still Keeping People Abroad Alive

WASHINGTON. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed into law a roughly $50 billion foreign affairs budget that reduces spending on American diplomacy and global assistance by about 16 percent, a nearly $9.3 billion cut his allies celebrated as historic and fiscally responsible, and which will be absorbed largely by people who cannot vote in American elections.

The measure, enacted as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026, codifies the spending rescissions the administration had spent the previous year defending in court, then cuts further. It eliminates funding for climate, gender, and diversity programs the bill's authors described as Biden-era poison pills, and it creates a new America First Opportunity Fund granting the Secretary of State broad discretion to spend on unforeseen opportunities as they arise.

Tucked into the legislation is a directive instructing the State Department to establish a responsible strategy for transitioning PEPFAR programs off United States assistance. The reference is to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan initiative launched under George W. Bush and credited with saving an estimated 26 million lives over two decades. Administration officials characterized the wind-down of the largest program the world has ever mounted against a single disease as a matter of efficiency.

"For too long the United States has been in the business of keeping people healthy in places that do not sufficiently thank us for it," said one senior administration official, who added that a portion of the savings would be redirected toward countering Chinese influence abroad, a vacuum the same official conceded American programs had until now been filling.

The bill preserves security assistance for Israel and hundreds of millions of dollars to counter the People's Republic of China, even as it removes much of the development and public-health spending that has long constituted American soft power in the same contest. Supporters said the country would now do more with less. The Congressional record reflected that it would do less.

At press time, the State Department had begun drafting the memo instructing clinics on three continents on how to keep distributing antiretroviral medication in the absence of the antiretroviral medication.