When Nate Soule watches the news from abroad — images of hungry children and crumbling health systems — he sees a problem he believes American conservatism can help solve. Soule, a Republican strategist, is leading the Campaign for America First International Assistance, a conservative-backed group working to restore the international aid funding that Elon Musk's DOGE initiative slashed earlier this year. Their approach is strategic and surprisingly simple: convince fellow Republicans that foreign aid isn't just morally right, but politically smart.
The campaign has already spent more than $1 million on advertising in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Arizona — three states that could decide control of Congress. In Iowa, one of their ads cuts to the heart of a rural argument: "America is strongest when we help our farmers stop starvation." The message is twofold — that foreign aid saves lives overseas, and that canceling it has hurt American farmers who relied on USAID purchasing programs to stay afloat.
"Our focus is to try and ensure that there is as much funding as possible for the life-saving, evidence-backed programmes that are run and funded by the US and ultimately save tens of millions of lives around the world," Soule said.
The political winds may be at their backs. A 2025 pollster survey commissioned by Trump found that more than 70 percent of Trump voters supported the United States providing international aid — along with more than 77 percent of evangelical voters. "This is an issue where if a Republican talks about the work they've done, especially in swing districts, there's a sizeable number of Democrats and even more independents who say they're more likely to vote for them," the group noted.
Even Susie Wiles, Trump's own chief of staff, acknowledged last year that "anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work." The challenge, of course, is that good words haven't yet translated into restored funding.
CAFIA's backers — conservatives who argue the United States has both a moral and strategic imperative to help poorer nations — are preparing for a longer game. They're building arguments for a Republican Party that may look very different after the next election cycle, when different priorities and different leaders may be ready to listen. Whether they can shift the conversation while Donald Trump remains in office is another question — but in Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, they're betting that voters want their representatives to care about what happens beyond American borders.