Last Monday, as I was reading through Chimes, I couldn’t help but notice an article that discussed the current happenings around the United States’ temporary freeze of foreign development aid – aid that has been a large part of the U.S.-led world order since the Cold War. The article was critical of the move, characterizing it as “merciless,” “irresponsible,” “inhumane” and “contrary to the Christian faith.” After all, the Bible does say that we should be loving our neighbors as ourselves. According to the article, that’s what we did in 2003 when the George Bush administration, along with Congress, introduced and implemented the “U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.” However, the situation with the United States and our foreign development aid today is very different than it was in 2003. It simply is not as cut and dried, Biblically or practically speaking, as the aforementioned article makes it seem. This week, I hope to introduce a healthy dose of pragmatic realism into the discussion.
I’ll start (somewhat circuitously) by establishing a foundation for all this – the reality of the purpose of government. The government exists “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because that is a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. When President Lincoln said that government exists “for the people,” I believe that he meant for the people of the nation that a government serves, given that he was speaking to the people of the nation which his administration served. The fact is, the primary responsibility of the United States government is to make sure its own citizens are able to pursue the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which, according to the Declaration of Independence, are the unalienable rights of humans which are endowed by our Creator. In other, more incendiary words…the purpose of the United States government is to quite literally put “America First.”
The idea that a government’s foremost obligation is to its people, combined with the idea that people have a responsibility to their country before other countries, is known as “Nationalism.” I think that the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mr. Russell Vought, puts it well when he writes: “Nationalism is not just a patriotic love for one’s country, but a commitment to prioritize the needs and interests of one’s own country over others — not unlike parents who prioritize their family over others, or pastors who prioritize their local church over others.”
I think most (if not all) of us should be able to get behind Director Vought here. This is also a very clearly articulated Biblical principle. Paul writes, “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8, NIV). Just imagine being parents and feeding other children a meal while giving your own children the scraps – that would make you a highly irresponsible parent at best. This is not unlike being a citizen of a country, though of course there’s a difference in magnitude. The bottom line is this: if citizens put foreign countries’ interests before the interests of their own country, those citizens are irresponsible at best. This is how you get the Edward Snowdens of the world. Similarly, if a government prioritizes other citizens over its own citizens, that would make it an irresponsible government at best.
Now, I concede that this would be different if the United States government had the ability to provide vast amounts of global aid without significant consequences and revoked the aid anyway. This, however, is not the reality. The reality is that the United States, though objectively the most powerful country in the history of the world, has been a declining hegemon for decades by numerous metrics and also is approximately 36.2 trillion dollars in debt – the largest amount of debt on record.
The article from last week points out that only about one percent of the US budget is spent on foreign aid annually, so it wouldn’t lessen our debt substantially anyways to freeze it. And if you stop there, you once again miss the point and overlook reality. The reality is, the budget for Fiscal Year 2025 is 7 trillion dollars. One percent of that would be 70 billion dollars. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire budget of the U.S. State Department – not an insignificant amount of money despite what the aforementioned article would have you believe. Imagine being able to allocate 70 billion dollars toward affordable housing, domestic hunger programs, naval shipbuilding infrastructure, improving our nuclear arsenal, and so much more. With resources like that, the potential for domestic improvement is vast.
At the end of the day, when the Trump administration temporarily freezes aid and executes other cost-cutting moves, no matter how small – those are not vindictive, selfish moves. They have trade-offs, just like everything else. Not everyone will like them, and that is okay. Ultimately, these cost-cutting measures are simply acts of self-preservation that are designed to decrease our spending, little by little, to benefit the citizens that the government serves. In other words, the government is fulfilling its purpose as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people of the nation it serves.
Kate van Liere • Feb 20, 2025 at 12:23 pm
Joe, you make a valid point about the responsibility of Christian rulers to defend their own people’s interests, and I agree with you that this responsibility sometimes requires them to consider difficult trade-offs between competing kinds of goods. In a different political context, I would even say it’s courageous to point out that there are fiscal limits to how much the U.S. government can spend on alleviating disease and hunger overseas when we have such an alarming deficit. There may be good arguments for reducing U.S. foreign aid as part of a multi-pronged deficit reduction plan. But it’s really alarming to see you defend the reckless and largely illegal campaign that DOGE has been waging against USAID and other US government agencies as if it were part of a legitimate and well thought-out fiscal policy or foreign policy. Suggesting that these measures— abrupt program cancellations, groundless firings of honest civil servants, and total disdain for the interests of people abroad who were trusting and relying on the good faith of the U.S. Government—are an acceptable manifestation of “nationalism” seems to divorce nationalism from any moral obligation to keep promises or respect the rule of law. You are defending policies that are being carried out with total disregard for constitutional processes and justified by flagrant lies (Musk’s claim that “USAID is a criminal organization” being just one). I will grant you that a “pragmatic” lens is more helpful in some contexts than a Biblical lens, but where is the pragmatic realism in destroying our nation’s international reputation? Parents do have a primary responsibility to care for their own children, but if they do that by bullying their kids’ playmates, encouraging them to betray their friends and to break rules they don’t like, and lying to justify their every move, are they still good parents? This seems to me to be the moral logic of Trump’s “America First.” It’s all well and good to have honest debates about fiscal priorities, but it’s disheartening to see you defending such a dark vision of our country’s values.
Joe Toly • Feb 20, 2025 at 10:52 pm
Dr. van Liere,
It is always a pleasure to hear from you, and I’m honored that you took the time to critique my article so thoughtfully and thoroughly. I’m grateful for the opportunity to clarify my position.
First, while we agree that good governance requires respecting the rule of law, the purpose of my article was not to delve into the legality of the methods used to implement the cost-cutting policies. Rather, the purpose was to frame the broader end goals of President Trump’s policies in the context of the government’s primary responsibility to its citizens, particularly when the United States faces such a daunting fiscal reality. The failure of the article to address the legality of various means of implementation can be attributed to the constraints of a word count, and I would certainly be happy to explore the legal and moral considerations of implementation more fully in a separate conversation. My focus here was on the merit of the policies themselves and the necessity of securing the nation’s fiscal health. By focusing on sustainable fiscal policy, we can safeguard the ability to help both ourselves and others in the long term.
You correctly point out the importance of maintaining international trust—something I have reflected on in the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal and current jeopardizing of NATO, which I find inexcusable. However, I believe we must ask: Can we continue making and fulfilling global humanitarian aid promises while our nation struggles under a $36 trillion debt? The answer is no. If we don’t manage our finances carefully, we risk undermining our capacity to provide long-term help to ourselves and necessarily to others. This applies similarly to current discussions on the sustainability of domestic programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, but of course, that’s a discussion for another time and place. In my view, temporarily freezing foreign aid isn’t about abandoning global responsibility, but about stewarding our resources wisely to ensure the nation’s future is secure.
I fully recognize the moral, practical, and Biblical importance of how these policies are implemented, and again, I would welcome further discussion with you on these aspects in a different space.
As for your point on nationalism, I do not see a necessary contradiction between prioritizing national interests and upholding moral values. Nationalism, as Director Vought and myself define it, isn’t about malice toward other countries but about responsible self-preservation, which ultimately positions the U.S. to be a more effective global actor. Just as parents care for their own children first, a government must look after its citizens before extending resources abroad. Though I recognize that our current implementation is the subject of great controversy, the focus of my article was not on the specifics of policy implementation but on the legitimacy of such policies in principle. I know you already heard that point from me multiple times, but at this point I’m making it in anticipation of arguments from other sources.
I understand your concern about the destruction of the U.S.’s reputation, but I want to emphasize that reputation is built on more than aid programs. It is also based on a nation’s ability to deliver for its citizens. The U.S. must balance its obligations to even bare-minimum domestic prosperity with its global role, ensuring that aid is both sustainable and effective. The real betrayal would be to bankrupt the nation in an attempt to fulfill promises that cannot be kept. Foreign aid should not be considered to be sacrosanct.
In conclusion, my defense of a nationalist policy is not a call to abandon our international commitments entirely and with permanence, but a defense of reassessing them through a temporary funding freeze in light of our fiscal reality. The U.S. cannot continue making unsustainable promises abroad when its own financial health is at risk. The question now is not whether we should prioritize domestic needs, but how do we do so while maintaining the ability to engage with the world in a way that respects both our interests and global fairness.
While my article doesn’t address the full scope of how these policies should be and are being implemented, and I certainly won’t attempt that in this particular space, I look forward to exploring these complexities further with you.