April 2025
Data shows that, as of March 2025, while U.S. public concern and belief in the importance of meeting basic needs in the Global South has grown since the USAID cuts, the public report seeing little about the plight of Global South communities in the media and their feeds, throwing off a fundamental equilibrium which drives public engagement.
It sounds obvious: More media coverage about an issue equals more public engagement, more concern, more interest. When the U.S. administration decided to cut aid, reducing the U.S. Agency for International Development to approximately a tenth of its size, there was plenty of coverage in the media. Possibly, this had an impact: The U.S. public now report being more concerned about basic needs in the Global South – food, water, sanitation, access to healthcare and education – since the aid cuts, and also feel more strongly that basic needs in developing countries are important (see figure below), than they were before the cuts.
Figure 1: Public care and are concerned about basic needs in developing countries, but aren’t seeing their concerns reflected in the media
If more coverage means more public engagement, then why didn’t coverage of the USAID cuts translate to greater public engagement? One theory, backed by DEL data, is that this coverage, up until March, hadn’t yet tapped into what the public feel is important: The state of basic needs in the Global South as a result of the cuts. In other words, it’s about what exactly gets covered: Most of the coverage around the USAID cuts focused on the cuts, staffing, the politics around the closing of USAID. To get people to care about the impact of the cuts, the public need to see and hear stories of the people whose lives – and survival – are impacted.
What’s shifting?
First, how have U.S. public attitudes toward basic needs in developing countries – food, water, sanitation, access to healthcare and education – changed between November 2024 and March 2025? Have the cuts to the foreign aid budget shifted attitudes?
In 2024, 25% of the public ranked basic needs in developing countries in their top three most important issues. By March 2025, that had jumped to 28%. When asked in 2024 to rank the top three issues in terms of how concerned they were, 27% of the public chose basic needs in developing countries. Four months later, this has jumped to 31%.
Yes, it’s good news that research shows the U.S. public believe that meeting basic needs in developing countries is important. But the same research shows that stories about the state of basic needs in developing countries are conspicuously absent from the public discourse. The evidence suggests that it’s this mismatch between the public’s concern and those stories’ low prominence in the discourse that could be hindering engagement.
One of the conditions that can increase public engagement occurs when there is a balance between what people care about or feel is important, and what they see in the media, their feeds, or their daily lives. To get the public involved – with unmet basic needs in the Global South – stories and accounts of those suffering the most from the USAID cuts need to be more prominent.
Figure 2: U.S. public rank their top three global issues in terms of how much they care, levels of concern, perceived importance and perceived prominence (March 2025)
So how do campaigners, advocates and comms policymakers close the gap? How can they amplify public concern into action? To grow engagement, they should make the discourse match what the public believe is important. In other words, now is the time to circulate stories – stories, not statistics, which DEL research shows are less effective – about the cuts’ impact on communities in the Global South. News articles like the piece Nicholas Kristof wrote for the New York Times in the aftermath of the cuts, lauded for cutting through the statistical noise – begin on the ground, sourced often by aid workers, partners and affected communities.
