The White House has hailed H.R. 1, aka the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as a “once-in-a-generation piece of legislation” that puts “America First.” Most of the public debate focused on its extension of lower taxes for the rich, the ballooning federal debt, and massive cuts in Medicaid spending. Yet equally important is what the act will do to America’s standing abroad as a champion of the world’s neediest people, and the “soft power” influence that effort provides.

The budget act was hardly President Donald Trump’s first assault on America’s humanitarian leadership. On his inauguration day, he issued two executive orders concerning US refugee programmes. One, titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” states that the America’s “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy” was not aligned with American interests, and acted in ways antithetical to the country’s values. It called for a 90-day pause in development assistance and review of related programmes to ensure their “efficiency and consistency” with US foreign policy.

The other, “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program,” states that the US could not absorb refugees without endangering Americans or compromising their access to taxpayer-funded resources. The Trump administration has indefinitely suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program, which helps resettle refugees in conjunction with private sponsor groups; it is one of the most successful humanitarian programs and public-private partnerships in US history. The administration has also excluded more than 22 000 people already approved for admission, including Afghans who had worked with the US during the war in their homeland.

By late March, the White House had helter-skelter cancelled 5 341, or about 86%, of US foreign assistance programmes — even though Congress, which has the power of the purse in the federal government, had authorised their funding. Scholars at the Boston University School of Public Health estimate the loss of US aid led to 176 000 deaths during this period, and may exceed 320 000 by year’s end. Yet the savings from gutting refugee assistance programs is vanishingly small, a small percentage of the roughly 1% of US spending devoted to international affairs.

The Lancet, a British medical journal, reported last month that budget cuts and the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development — whose programs saved an estimated 91-million lives over the last two decades — could cause 14-million deaths in low- and middle-income countries by 2030.

The impact of the US cuts will be felt for generations, undermining the possibility of a constructive immigration policy at home and diminishing US power and standing abroad. Meanwhile, China has exploited the situation by funding aid and humanitarian programmes of its own, particularly in the strategically vital Indo-Pacific, as well as in Africa and South America.

I work with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS)/USA, a branch of a 45-year-old nongovernmental organisation that has aided refugees from 57 nations. It serves some of the world’s neediest people, including unaccompanied children, the severely handicapped and the chronically and terminally ill. Its work, and that of similar NGOs, has promoted a secure and productive world that values human life and dignity.

Feed the Future worked in 20 countries to lift 23.4-million people out of poverty, relieve 5.2-million households from hunger, and remove 3.4-million children from the threat of stunted growth caused by malnutrition. In the 2024-2025 school year, JRS Chad served 32 975 Sudanese children in 21 refugee camps, offering them educational support and, by extension, child protection. The US President’s Malaria Initiative, launched under the George W. Bush, has helped save 11.7-million lives and has prevented 2.1-billion cases of malaria since 2000, primarily among children under the age of 5 in African countries.

The president’s executive orders sideswiped hundreds of such NGOs, bankrupting humanitarian and development programs that operate on barebones margins, and forcing staff layoffs in some of the world’s poorest communities. The administration offered waivers on cuts if recipients could demonstrate that they were engaged in “lifesaving” activities (narrowly defined), but our applications for waivers were not acted upon, and even programmes that were terminated, then reinstated faced delays in funding and will no longer receive advances to allow them to cover upfront costs.

Now the budget legislation will make it that much harder to revive humanitarian aid and refugee programmes in the years to come. The White House has also urged Congress to retroactively cancel more than $9.4-billion in congressionally authorised spending, including $1.3-billion from two of the main refugee assistance programmes funded by the Department of State. The president would eliminate these accounts in 2026, and merge unobligated balances into a new International Humanitarian Assistance account, or IHA. The White House has said the new IHA fund will support disaster relief only “when it fulfills the President’s foreign policy aims.”

The cuts to aid agencies aren’t just costing lives. They represent an attack on traditional US virtues. The budget law redirects $170-billion to US immigration enforcement agencies, which already account for two-thirds of all federal law enforcement spending. This despite the fact that illegal entries at the southern border have fallen to near-record lows over the past 18 months, obviating the need for massive additional allocations for the wall, detention, technology, staffing and military deployment.

It’s a dangerous time in America and the world, and Congress and the courts need to weigh in strongly. A first step would be for lawmakers to step up and ensure that the administration returns congressionally approved funding to humanitarian agencies this year. Payment for contractually obligated work is a core objective of the legal action brought by a coalition of the government’s implementing partners on foreign assistance. A second step would be to ensure that these agencies can continue their work in the future, so that the US still leads in saving lives and promoting a more stable, peaceful and prosperous world.