Global Development Policy and the New World Disorder: The Trump Administration’s Delivery of a High-Voltage Shockwave
Andy Sumner and Stephan Klingebiel assess how President Trump’s decision to quit 66 international organisations continuities the administration’s attempt to reshape the operating space for global development policy.
The now and the before
The Trump administration has confirmed the withdrawal of the United States from sixty-six international organisations and how this will put America first on the global stage.
This continues a pattern of delivering a high-voltage shockwave to the policy norms that have underpinned global cooperation since 1945. We analyse the trajectory of US development cooperation and policy past, present and future in a new IDOS brief.
The history matters for interpreting the present rupture. The US was an initiator and rule shaper of development policy. From post-war reconstruction and the Marshall Plan, through the creation of the World Bank’s core reconstruction functions, to the institutionalisation of aid bureaucracies and the creation of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), US choices helped set the framing of development cooperation. That influence also ran through staffing and agenda setting, across the UN development system and the multilateral development banks.
In 2024, the United States provided US$63.3 billion in development cooperation, close to 30 per cent of total DAC member contributions, even if the US remained a low performer relative to national income (0.22 per cent of GNI). The scale of US finance, the political weight attached to it, and the signalling effects of US choices have shaped the behaviour of other donors for decades.
The Trump shockwave begins
In early 2025, United States development policy shifted from a familiar mix of interests and values into something sharper, narrower, and openly disruptive.
A rapid retreat is then not just a budget cut. It is a systemic event. The speed and scope of the changes after January 2025 have been breathtaking. The administration moved quickly away from central multilateral structures, slashed budgets, and pushed the effective dissolution of USAID, with residual functions shifted to the State Department. It framed global norms, including those embodied in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as threats to US interests. This was paired with conspiracy narratives that helped legitimate dismantling in domestic politics. The result is a development posture built hardly around programme performance and more around political loyalty and strategic bargaining.
This is the 'New Washington Dissensus'. It rests on five principles. One, development cooperation is recast as a means to weaken global cooperation, with recipients pressed to distance themselves from international organisations. Two, ideological vetting becomes central, with aid contingent on political alignment and the policing of “anti-American” positions. Three, projects are judged by their contribution to migration control. Four, climate action and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are excluded by design. Five, assistance becomes explicitly transactional, expected to generate economic returns for the United States.
The withdrawal from 66 international organisations is consistent with this in this not only in the sense of undermining multilateralism itself but also in terms of withdrawal from global organisations with mandates on climate change or environment, human rights, equity, justice and development.
Looking further into 2026, one big flag is that the the US hosts the G20 but is actively seeking to marginalise the G20 Development Working Group. Meanwhile at the G7 there seems to be ambivalence to the sustainable development agenda and ODA.
The consequences
The wider consequences show up at three levels.
At the level of global governance, the US retreat destabilises an already crowded development architecture. It weakens coordination, reduces the authority of shared standards, and increases incentives for forum shopping. Major club groupings have already been discussing the “aid architecture” in unusually direct language, treating institutional reshaping as a political project rather than a technical tidying exercise. This pushes development cooperation further into the orbit of strategic competition.
At the level of partner countries, the rupture creates new room for manoeuvre for some, and new dependencies for others. Stronger developing and emerging economies can widen South–South cooperation and pursue multi-alignment strategies. Yet this comes with higher exposure to bargaining pressure, shifting conditionalities, and intensified bloc logics. Development policy becomes another terrain of geoeconomics, with fewer stabilising expectations about collective provision and shared rules.
At the level of human outcomes, the implications are severe. The Lancet published estimates that US cuts could translate into up to 14 million additional deaths by 2030. It also notes underfunding in refugee contexts, with knock-on effects for insecurity. These are not distant abstractions. They are measurable harms tied to institutional decisions.
What next?
What, then, is likely to persist of US “development” policy? A development infrastructure remains though with a renewed mandate focused on geoeconomic returns. The Millennium Challenge Corporation and the US Development Finance Corporation appear central, since both align with strategic competition, critical minerals, and private-sector oriented finance. This is a shift from grant-heavy approaches, toward investment instruments and compacts that sit comfortably inside an “America First” national security frame.
So, what others should do next? European decision-makers need to articulate a clearer counter-strategy, rooted in explicit commitment to global sustainable development and credible partnerships with countries in the Global South.
That agenda cannot rely on rhetorical defence of multilateralism alone. It needs institutional choices, predictable finance, and alliances that extend beyond Europe, including with like-minded partners and middle powers.
In a period of disorder, development cooperation still signals what kind of international politics is being built. The New Washington Dissensus signals fragmentation. Other actors now face a choice about what they signal back.
Andy Sumner is Professor of International Development at King’s College, London, and President of European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes. He is also a Senior Non-Resident Research Fellow at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research and the Center for Global Development; and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Stephan Klingebiel heads the research program “Inter- and Transnational Cooperation” at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). He previously led the UNDP Global Policy Centre in Seoul (2019–2021) and the KfW Development Bank’s office in Kigali, Rwanda (2007–2011). He is also a guest professor at the University of Turin, Italy, a senior lecturer at the University of Bonn, and an Honorary Distinguished Fellow at Jindal University, India.
Photo by Ksenia Chernaya
