Why Federal Funding Cuts at Home and Abroad Betray America’s Future

When you are drowning in financial troubles, the lifeline isn’t a rescue boat. It is a stranger who sees you when you think you have disappeared and offers your rightful share of money or aid. Let me tell a short story on the importance of getting back the rightful money which is due. Rajiv, a humble schoolteacher, once lent his life savings to a childhood friend who vanished without repaying him and with him vanished Rajiv’s dreams of buying a home, supporting his aging parents, and starting a family. Years later, Rajiv was diagnosed with a rare heart condition requiring urgent, costly surgery. With no insurance or savings, he faced a grim reality—until a nurse handed him an envelope. Inside was a cashier’s check for the exact amount he had once lent, plus interest, and a note from the friend: “I’ve lived with guilt for years. I hope this helps you rebuild your life.” The money arrived just in time, saving Rajiv’s life. After recovering, he returned to teaching and founded The Return Circle, a quiet initiative to help others reclaim what they’d lost—financially or emotionally. Rajiv’s story became a testament to how rightful money, returned at the right moment, can do more than settle a debt—it can restore hope, dignity, and life itself. 

A person is drowning in financial troubles but never getting his rightful share back. It is a demand for compensation and what is truly owed to him which never returned to save the person and his life. This is happening in America for the past one year, a country which seemed to have forgotten its moral obligations and sacred duties. Just like the person never getting the required aid or return for all work he has done and the loss endured, America has stopped a major part of foreign aid after implementing USAID and other aid cuts. This is turning the nation into a ghost land. U.S. foreign aid is not generosity, it is more like a repayment—an obligation rooted in global entanglements, past interventions, and economic dominance. The U.S. has intervened in dozens of countries politically, militarily, and economically—sometimes destabilizing regions. Aid to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Latin America is reparative, not charitable. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency. U.S. monetary policy affects inflation, debt, and trade in developing nations. When the Fed raises rates, poorer countries often suffer. Aid here balances the scales. Much U.S. aid goes to allies like Israel, Egypt, and Ukraine—not just out of goodwill, but to maintain influence and security alliances. This makes it less about altruism and more about geopolitical investment. The U.S. built its wealth partly through global trade, cheap labor, and resource extraction from poorer nations. Returning money is a moral debt for centuries of imbalance. So when American dollars flow abroad, they’re not always a gift—they’re sometimes a reckoning. A recognition that global leadership comes with global responsibility. When you are drifting away from this work, you are losing on the goodwill to fare better in this world. 

In Washington’s most recent wave of fiscal austerity, the U.S. government has suspended or severely reduced funding streams ranging from foreign assistance programs under USAID to domestic research grants awarded through federal agencies like the NSF, NIH, and Department of Education. To policymakers, the move was justified as a cost-saving measure, a signal to voters of fiscal prudence. But the reality is far more troubling: these cuts are not merely about budgets. They are a withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities—to its own citizens, to international partners, and to the generations who built today’s prosperity through public investments. 

This is not a debate over charity. It is about repayment, continuity, and the recognition that America’s wealth was built on a system of mutual obligations—investments in science, global stability, and moral leadership—that now risk being discarded in the pursuit of short-term savings. 

Nowhere are the cuts more visible than in America’s universities. For decades, federal funding has been the backbone of American higher education, underwriting not only teaching but the research that fuels innovation. 

When grants are suspended, laboratories are shuttered, midstream projects abandoned, and research teams scattered. Climate data collection cannot simply “pause”; agricultural field trials cannot wait for politics to stabilize. Losing even one research season breaks continuity, and restarting is often impossible. Scholars who trained for years in fields like public health or renewable energy now see their careers derailed. Graduate students lose fellowships. International students risk deportation as their visa-linked funding evaporates. 

The U.S. has long boasted the world’s strongest research ecosystem, attracting talent globally. But as labs close and postdocs depart for Europe, Canada, or Asia—where governments are doubling down on research investments—America risks a profound brain drain. The irony is stark: at a moment when the U.S. faces existential challenges from climate change, pandemics, and technological competition, it is hollowing out the very infrastructure designed to respond. 

This retreat is not fiscal prudence—it is self-sabotage. Every dollar cut from research today is a dollar lost in tomorrow’s cures, technologies, and industries. 

In Africa, where U.S. food and health programs are deeply embedded, the impact has been brutal after the recent aid cuts. In Uganda’s refugee camps, violence broke out over dwindling rations. In Sudan, soup kitchens closed. Across sub-Saharan Africa, clinics have shuttered, and layoffs of health workers have crippled fragile systems already battling HIV, TB, and malaria. 

UNAIDS warns that the disruptions in PEPFAR-funded programs have already caused 2,800 additional HIV infections in just weeks. Projections suggest 18 million more malaria cases, 200,000 polio cases, and 1 million untreated child malnutrition cases annually if the cuts persist. Refugees in Chad and Malawi, dependent on U.S. food shipments, are facing ration cuts to starvation levels. 

In Asia, the consequences are equally stark. In Afghanistan, the only midwifery school for women has shut down. In Myanmar, refugee camps and safe houses for activists lost funding, exposing vulnerable populations to state violence. In Bangladesh, a major health research center laid off over 1,000 staff, crippling disease monitoring capacity. 

In Latin America, stop-work orders have stalled development projects in Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras. Programs focused on clean water, anti-narcotics, and rural development—all critical to curbing migration pressures—are frozen. 

In the Middle East, U.S. support for Syrian refugee clinics has ended, leaving thousands untreated. Palestinian health networks, already under strain, report collapsing medical supply chains. 

For decades, American aid has functioned as soft power—a way of shaping the world not just through military might but through development and partnership. To cut these programs is to erode one of the most effective, least costly instruments of U.S. global leadership. 

Much of the debate in Washington frames aid and grants as “generosity.” But this framing is misleading—and dangerous. 

Domestically, federal funding for research is not a gift to universities. It is a repayment for the fact that America’s prosperity was built on collective investments: land-grant colleges, the GI Bill, public universities funded by taxpayers, and decades of public R&D that birthed the internet, GPS, and modern medicine. To withdraw funding now is to renege on that contract, leaving today’s scholars without the support their predecessors received and who built the prosperity of the nation. 

Internationally, foreign aid is often framed as charity to “help the poor.” But history tells a different story. American prosperity has long depended on global systems—trade routes, resource flows, labor markets—that enriched the U.S. while exploiting or destabilizing other nations. From Cold War interventions to climate change fueled by industrialized nations, much of the Global South bears costs imposed by the very economic order that enriched America. Aid, therefore, is not benevolence; it is repayment, a recognition of debts accrued through history. 

To cut funding is not simply to withdraw generosity—it is to shirk moral obligations. It is the equivalent of refusing to repay a loan, while continuing to live off the interest. 

The irony of these cuts is that they will cost more in the long run than they save in the short term. Abandoned disease surveillance today increases the risk of pandemics tomorrow. Cuts to agricultural research deepen global food insecurity, driving migration and instability that ultimately require far more costly military or humanitarian interventions. Reductions in university research funding today mean fewer innovations tomorrow—losses that compound across industries, jobs, and competitiveness. 

Short-term austerity, in other words, is long-term insolvency. 

Perhaps the gravest consequence is generational. America’s prosperity today is the direct product of investments made by prior generations: the GI Bill, federal highways, Apollo, public university research, Cold War science funding. Each generation paid forward, leaving behind infrastructure of knowledge and opportunity. 

Today’s cuts break that chain. They betray a younger generation that faces more complex global challenges than any before—climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, global inequality—yet will inherit a hollowed-out infrastructure of research, aid, and partnership. 

To withdraw now is to say: we benefited, but we will not invest for you. It is to hoard the fruits of prior investments while denying future generations their due. 

The question is not whether America can afford to fund research and aid. The question is whether America can afford not to. At a fraction of the federal budget, these investments deliver exponential returns in innovation, global stability, and moral leadership. To cut them is to forget that wealth is not maintained by consumption alone but by continuous reinvestment. 

We must reframe the narrative. Research grants are not subsidies—they are the engines of innovation. Aid programs are not handouts—they are repayments and stabilizers of a world order that has long benefited the United States. Both are obligations, not luxuries. 

If the U.S. wishes to remain not just powerful but respected, not just rich but relevant, it must restore these funding streams and recommit to the principle that investment in knowledge and partnership is not charity but necessity. 

Federal funding cuts at home and abroad may seem, in ledger terms, like a tightening of belts. In truth, they are an abdication: a refusal to recognize the debts America owes to its own scholars and to the global community whose resources and cooperation built its wealth. 

If America continues down the path of withdrawal, the cost will be counted not only in shuttered labs and abandoned aid projects, but in a diminished nation—poorer in knowledge, weaker in influence, and smaller in moral stature. 

In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy created USAID, he declared: 

“There is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations—our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people, our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.” 

That vision lasted for more than six decades. It shaped the modern world, curbed disease, fed millions, and cemented America’s role as a benevolent superpower. Today, that legacy is being dismantled piece by piece. 

The federal funding cuts may save dollars in the short term. But they are costing lives abroad, jobs at home, and influence everywhere. More dangerously, they signal to allies and adversaries alike that America is no longer willing to shoulder the responsibility of leadership. 

The bill for today’s cuts will come due. And when it does, the cost will far exceed the savings claimed. It is high time, the policy is reversed and if possible a number far greater than present day grants and aids is disbursed. This will make the country truly great in line with MAGA and not the pursuit of opposite.