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Foreign secretary David Lammy has warned Donald Trump that slashing foreign aid to countries could be a major ”strategic mistake”, drawing parallels to the fallout from Britain’s own aid cuts.
Mr Trump has sent shockwaves across the countries that were dependent on US foreign aid after his administration imposed a sweeping freeze on aid programs under the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Thousands of staff have already been laid off, and programs supporting health services, disaster relief, and anti-poverty efforts in nearly 100 countries are scrambling after the shutdown, including in Ukraine.
Mr Lammy told the Guardian on Friday that the US government should “look closely at what went wrong” when the previous UK government shut down its Department for International Development (Dfi). He was referring to former prime minister Boris Johnson’s actions of merging Dfid with the Foreign Office in 2020.
“What I can say to American friends is it’s widely accepted that the decision by the UK with very little preparation to close down DfID, to suspend funding in the short term or give many global partners little heads up, was a big strategic mistake,” he told the newspaper.
“We have spent years unravelling that strategic mistake. Development remains a very important soft power tool,” he added.
“We were hugely critical of the way that the last government handled the decision. So I would caution US friends to look closely at what went wrong in the United Kingdom as they navigate this decision.”
The top receivers under the USAID programme’s roughly $40bn budget were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Syria.
On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, DC, put the brakes on the controversial plan to gut the USAID workforce by issuing a temporary restraining order. It blocked the Trump administration from placing roughly 2,200 USAID workers on administrative leave, hours before the administration was set to send them packing at midnight.
It was after unions representing nearly 2,000 USAID employees filed a lawsuit against Trump and administration officials on Thursday.
Mr Lammy, who was in Kyiv, met Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior officials.
He said he did not see any hope of an imminent end to war with Russia despite Mr Trump’s pledge to end the war under his second administration. Peace talks are set to begin at a security conference in Munich next week.
“I am not sure we are weeks away from peace talks. And I say that because our assessment, which I’m quite sure the US shares, is that Putin shows absolutely no appetite for negotiation and to bring this war to an end,” he told the Guardian.
He added that the “Ukrainians are pretty clear there can be no ceasefire before negotiations”.
“So I don’t anticipate a ceasefire in this war anytime soon. I’m very clear that Putin at the moment shows no desire to negotiate. And therefore, sadly, I think this war of attrition will go on for some months yet,” he said.
