Trump’s new aid rules risk lives, EU says

The European Commission has warned that Donald Trump’s latest restrictions on foreign aid are dangerous and threaten global health — while saying the EU can’t fill the funding gap alone.

The Trump administration revealed further conditions on foreign aid last week, which seek to restrict NGOs, governments and agencies in receipt of U.S. funding from promoting not only abortion but also “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.”

The measures come as lower-income countries face catastrophic health impacts after many donors, led by the U.S., dramatically cut funding last year, leaving them with little choice but to accept conditional funds.

The policies have appalled health experts who say they are an unprecedented attack on sovereignty and confirm the weaponization of aid under Trump, whose administration is seeking more direct influence over global health programs. Europe has also criticized the expanded policy, stepping up its response compared with more restrained positions to the Trump administration’s other diverging health policies.

“Limiting international assistance through restrictive funding conditions undermines joint efforts for human rights, global health, peace and stability. It makes funding more unpredictable and increases the vulnerability of those already most at risk,” European Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper told POLITICO.

“Ultimately, this risks our goal of saving lives,” Hipper said. The EU would assess the implications for the programs it funds and will remain a “credible, reliable, principled and predictable partner,” but Europe “cannot fill the gap left by others,” Hipper added.

The new policy is the widest expansion of the Mexico City Policy — which international groups have called the ‘global gag rule’ because of the restrictions it imposes — that the U.S. has ever imposed.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance said last week the Trump administration was “expanding this policy to protect life, to combat [diversity, equity and inclusion] and the radical gender ideologies that prey on our children.” He said it would increase the reach of the Mexico City Policy, which has traditionally only applied to abortion advocacy, threefold.

It’s the latest policy that underlines the Trump administration’s explicitly strings-attached foreign aid agenda.

The U.S. has rolled out a series of bilateral deals with 14 African countries, requiring them to guarantee the U.S. access to pathogen samples and data in exchange for health funding — much of which the U.S. had withdrawn last year through USAID cuts.

It has also offered to restore funding to global vaccine program GAVI, but only if the organization stops using a common mercury-based preservative that Trump’s top health officials have linked to autism, without evidence.

The latest policy is part of a “much larger project by the Trump administration to advance this radical anti-rights agenda,” Beirne Roose-Snyder, a senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality, told reporters this week.

Desirée Cormier Smith, a former U.S. diplomat, said she hoped governments in the EU and elsewhere would “push back” and deliver a bracing message to the Trump administration: “We refuse to leave all of our people behind. You’re not going to export your domestic culture wars and the division that plagues the U.S. to our own countries.”

The new rules, which come into effect Feb. 26, will also increase pressure on European governments over their own levels of global health funding. Major donors such as France, Germany and the Netherlands have trimmed their own contributions, as part of the global crunch in aid spending.

Lisa Goerlitz, head of the Brussels office at global health NGO DSW, said Europe must keep foreign aid spending at levels needed “to allow a credible transition towards domestic resources and new financing mechanisms”. The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, meanwhile, said the EU faced a “clear test of its leadership and credibility on equality and human rights.”

Claudia Chiappa contributed reporting.