MAGA voters want foreign aid back. Here’s what convinced them

The 2024 election sent a clear message: Americans wanted their government to focus on problems at home and spend taxpayer dollars with greater accountability. Foreign aid was a natural target for scrutiny. So, Washington acted. It did so without checking what the voters who delivered that mandate actually wanted done.

It turns out, they had a lot to say.

I’ve spent my career reading polls. I know the difference between what politicians assume their voters believe and what voters actually believe. Echelon Insights, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, surveyed more than 2,000 likely voters on their attitudes toward foreign aid, one year after the U.S. Agency for International Development was shut down. What we found among the public, and MAGA Republicans, defined in the survey as those who support or lean towards Republicans but say they primarily support President Donald Trump over the party, specifically, tells a more complicated story.

POPE LEO IS WRONG ABOUT HUNGER

Walk into any diner in Pennsylvania and ask what percentage of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. You’ll hear numbers like 20%. Thirty percent. Some people guessed more than half, more than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the entire defense budget combined.

The actual number, before the 2025 cuts, was 1%.

When MAGA voters learned that number, nearly two-thirds said the spending level was either about right or too low. Nearly half would double it. When we asked whether foreign aid should be reformed and strengthened instead of eliminated, 80% chose reform over elimination. Those numbers are consistent across party lines.

There is an Ebola outbreak right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is spreading faster than it should be. Experts have identified one of the reasons: U.S. funding cuts eliminated the infrastructure that was containing it. When we told MAGA voters those facts, just the facts, no lecture, no guilt trip, three-quarters said restore the funding.

Consider a U.S. program in Peru that redirected farmers from growing coca, the raw ingredient for the illicit drugs flooding American communities, to growing food crops instead. Sixty-nine percent of MAGA voters called that a convincing use of taxpayer dollars. Two in three MAGA voters found the national security framing compelling, stopping threats at the source, at a fraction of a fraction of the federal budget, makes America safer.

That’s the program Washington eliminated.

By the end of our survey, after respondents were simply told what foreign aid costs, where it goes, and what it has accomplished, MAGA favorability toward foreign aid moved from net negative 17 to net positive 10. A 27-point swing, driven not by ideology but by information.

What moved them wasn’t lectures about moral obligation or multilateral responsibility. It was concrete outcomes, many of them central to protecting Americans right here at home, like heading off the flood of illegal drugs or disease contained before it boards a plane to JFK.

What these voters wanted, consistently, across every demographic we measured, was accountability. Independent audits. Evidence of impact. Clear results. It wasn’t kneecapping successful programs like the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a program started under George W. Bush, estimated to have saved 25 million lives.

There is now an opportunity to rebuild these programs on a stronger foundation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Republicans in Congress have argued that foreign aid should continue, but in a more disciplined form: aligned with U.S. interests, delivered with “more accountability, strategy, and efficiency,” focused on concrete outcomes like preventing infectious disease.

BUILDING THE FOREIGN ASSISTANCE INFRASTRUCTURE THE PEOPLE DESERVE

That’s closer to what Americans say they want, not the root-and-branch elimination of many programs we saw last year. Even if many Americans were previously skeptical of the foreign aid brand, they overwhelmingly support much of what foreign aid does, with over 80% support for programs targeted at preventing disease outbreaks, preventing terrorist safe havens, humanitarian aid, and global health.

The lesson here isn’t complicated. Americans aren’t isolationists. They’re skeptical. They want to know their money is being spent wisely and that it’s making them safer. When you show them that, the support is there.

Patrick Ruffini is a co-founder of Echelon Insights.