NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, November 10, 2016

No one knows what the Trump administration has planned for U.S. foreign aid programs and other global initiatives that fight poverty and disease.

There are some topics that Donald Trump has not addressed. Global advocacy groups such as the ONE Campaign have tried to get Trump to share his ideas of how to “tackle extreme poverty” on the record. After a year of campaigning, he still hasn’t responded.

But the president-elect has commented on a number of global issues. Here’s what he has said in speeches and interviews.

Clean water. “Perhaps the best use of our limited financial resources should be in dealing with making sure that every person in the world has clean water,” Trump said in an interview on science, medical and environmental issues with Chemical & Engineering News in September 2016.

HIV/AIDS. In a C-SPAN recording of a press briefing from October 2015, an audience member who identified himself as a college student asked Trump whether he would support PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief, which was established by President George W. Bush in 2003. The specific question: Would he double the number of people on treatment to 30 million people by the year 2020?