Could doing a great job directing foreign aid ever be a giant step toward the presidency? It certainly was for Herbert Hoover.

After World War I, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which saved millions of lives in Central and Eastern Europe, including newly communist Russia. By 1920, he was nationally famous and won the presidency in 1928.

A century later, the Trump administration initially offered $500,000 for relief to Nepal after last month's floods. Nepal's GDP per capita in 2025 was about $1,536 compared to the United States' $90,027. As a percentage of U.S. GDP, it's as if someone earning $62 million a year dropped $1 into the collection basket.

Looking back to the postwar year of 1919, former Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski said: "Herbert Hoover saved us from that catastrophe. He gave us bread, strength and peace within ourselves." During the Russian famine of 1921-23, the Hoover-led ARA fed up to 11 million people a day.

By contrast, in 2025 the Trump administration cut U.S. support for a program that used satellite observations for flood forecasting and landslide monitoring, including a flash flood prediction tool for Nepal. The U.S. raised its initial aid allocation for Nepal to $3.6 million, still less than that provided by the United Arab Emirates, Australia or the U.K. The U.S. gave about a penny per person. The far poorer nation of Bhutan gave well over a dollar.

The American tradition of aiding people overseas devastated by war, disease, disaster and famine continued beyond Hoover. In the wake of World War II, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall spoke at the 1947 Harvard graduation, where he acknowledged it was hard for Americans "to comprehend the plight... of long-suffering peoples." He concluded, nevertheless, that with "a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome."

And so it was. In 1949, 3% of U.S. GDP went to all foreign aid including the Marshall Plan. Julius Raab, federal chancellor of Austria, said, "Without this aid, Europe would have collapsed in poverty, misery and chaos and would have dragged down the whole world in ruins." And so America benefited, too, through booming trade and enhanced security.

Did any of this unprecedented generosity spring from caritas, the Latin word that came to embody Christianity's ideal of charitable love, or from tzedakah, the Hebrew word for righteousness and justice expressed through giving? To those whose lives were saved, it did not matter.

But that's not how it works today. Trump has repeatedly framed foreign assistance in transactional terms. Why should he give funds to Nepal? Did it send support for his military campaign against Iran? Did it buy Trump meme coins? Did it contribute to his new White House ballroom?

Nepal is not being singled out for neglect by the Trump administration. Even here at home, Trump has approved federal disaster aid for blue states at a far lower rate than red ones. An analysis by the news outlet Politico found Trump had approved 23% of requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators versus 89% from states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators.

According to a model cited by NPR, Trump's abrupt cuts to U.S. foreign aid contributed to an estimated 700,000 deaths over about a year. In a study published by the respected medical journal Lancet, researchers estimate that, if the deep cuts continue, as many as 14 million people could die, about one-third of them children under age 5. As calculated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. foreign aid amounted to just 0.09% of gross national income in 2025, versus 1.03% for Norway, a comparably wealthy country.

What happened to the precedents set by Hoover and Marshall? What happened to our generosity? It was once part of being an American. Whether motivated by love, justice or national interest, providing aid to the imperiled, sick and starving is the right thing to do. Whether they are children drowning at a Texas summer camp or in a Nepalese village, their deaths diminish us.

Trump has long complained about America being the "sucker country" when it comes to aiding other countries. That is not how I see it.

Four centuries ago, the English poet and cleric John Donne made an observation still appropriate in 2026: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company, and had six books published including five novels and a collection of his columns. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. You can learn more about him at keithraffel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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