The harsh rhetoric between Trump and Democrats will likely continue, but the critical story is where the two parties agree on new ways forward for US foreign policy.

Washington appears to be a constant battlefield between the Trump administration and Democrats over every single issue. But below the surface, US politicians often take bipartisan approaches to important issues — a fact that gets lost in the media’s need to portray everything as an existential struggle.

A surprising example has just come into the open. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an overwhelmingly bipartisan spending bill that restructures US diplomacy and development programs in significant ways.

This was unimaginable a year ago, when one of the biggest stories in Washington was the apparent end of the US foreign assistance program. The Trump administration abruptly closed the venerable US Agency for International Development, once the world leader in effective aid programs. In a chaotic house-cleaning, thousands of USAID employees were laid off, and many programs were terminated. What was left was merged into the State Department.

Trump’s task was made politically easier by the nature of some of the aid projects. Many Americans were surprised to learn that their tax dollars paid for a diversity, equity and inclusion musical in Ireland and a transgender comic book in Peru.

Elon Musk, as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, seemed particularly intent on eliminating foreign assistance. He posted on his social media platform that "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die."

This kind of over-the-top rhetoric and the actual end of USAID produced justified outrage and a bleak outlook for the United States’ foreign aid leadership. British international charity Oxfam predicted that the loss of health and humanitarian programs caused by Trump’s aid cuts would mean three million unnecessary deaths each year.

Dire forecasts such as Oxfam’s were overstatements, but there has been genuine concern across the political spectrum that the US was losing an important foreign policy tool. Mitch McConnell, once the leader of Senate Republicans and a stalwart conservative, worried that aid cuts might give China an opportunity to win friends in the developing world as the US withdrew.

Trump’s aid-cutting efforts, particularly the shuttering of USAID, were shocking, but not totally surprising. US foreign assistance programs had become a partisan battleground years earlier. Policy battles over abortion, family planning, climate change and other programs linked to controversial political issues sucked up much of the attention and sapped the overall effort of its bipartisan support.

In 2024, Trump campaigned on an inward-looking, build-up-America platform. Foreign assistance programs are tough to sell to US voters in the best of times, but almost impossible when domestic needs are seen as acute. After taking office last year, Trump followed through and revamped aid unilaterally — without specific approval from Congress. Many called on Congress to oppose Trump’s actions.

Of course, the US Congress today is aligned with Trump. The vast majority of Republicans in Congress support Trump’s agenda and, when they do disagree on an issue, will raise objections behind closed doors so as not to give any succour to adversarial Democrats. Thus, calls for a Republican-majority Congress to actively oppose the president’s cuts to aid programs were never going to work.

One year later, however, we are seeing a different story. Through its regular budgeting process, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have given life to a slightly smaller and transformed US foreign assistance program. Last week, as part of a larger spending package, Trump signed into law a foreign assistance spending bill. This is a remarkable achievement in the current political environment.

Led by Mario Diaz-Balart, a strong Trump ally from South Florida, the new spending law provides for a foreign assistance program run out of the State Department at 86% of the Biden administration’s last budget. Diaz-Balart’s bill won votes from Freedom Caucus Republicans and progressive Democrats.

There will be some changes to US foreign aid programs, of course. Spending is modestly reduced across the board. Trump has more flexibility to use funds for non-traditional development programs, allowing him to offer transactional deals to developing countries in a manner that fits his style of diplomacy. This instrumentalisation of aid — linking it directly to US national security — will earn plenty of criticism from aid professionals, but it has the virtue of building back Republican support for assistance programs.

Without USAID and with many aid professionals now gone from government service, the State Department will have to program billions of dollars with reduced accountability and monitoring tools. There are simply not enough people to effectively manage the programs. These challenges will have to be managed deftly. Assistance partnerships with allies such as Australia are now more important than ever.

The harsh rhetoric between Trump and Democrats will likely continue, but the critical story is where the two parties agree on new ways forward for US foreign policy.