The United Nations program overseeing the fight against AIDS urged countries to step up with support to fight the disease as the Trump administration pulls back, and warned that a permanent halt in funding by the US would undo years of progress.
“This is not just a funding gap — it’s a ticking time bomb,” UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said in a statement accompanying the program’s 2025 Global AIDS Update. “We have seen services vanish overnight. Health workers have been sent home. And people — especially children and key populations — are being pushed out of care.”
The report highlighted the effect of large-scale funding cuts from the US on countries most affected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The group estimates that a decision by the Trump administration to discontinue the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, would lead to more than four million additional AIDS-related deaths and more than six million additional new HIV infections by 2029.
“The end of aids by 2030 with figures like that is simply impossible,” UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director Angeli Achrekar told reporters on Thursday.
The US mission to the UN could not immediately provide comment.
Even before the disruption, 9.2 million people living with HIV were still not able to get access to life-saving treatment in 2024, according to the Global AIDS Update. The report also noted that the number of countries criminalizing populations most at risk of HIV has risen for the first time since UNAIDS began publishing data.
Earlier: Cuts to US Aid Imperil World’s Largest HIV Treatment Program
Achrekar said the US was not the only country to take a step back, with some European nations also decreasing their contributions to AIDS prevention. While several low-to-middle income countries are making strides in the battle against AIDS, they still need support from donor countries, she said.
Achrekar warned of the worst-case scenario if countries do not step up their efforts. “We will go back to those days where death was on the doorstep” and the cost of AIDS treatment will increase, she said.
Still, Achrekar said the hope is that AIDS stops being a public health threat by 2030, but nations have to come together “as we did at the beginning of the HIV response.”
Currently, the number of people getting infected with HIV and dying from AIDS-related causes are at their lowest in 30 years, the UN report’s authors said. By the end of 2024, HIV infections were down by 40% and AIDS-related deaths by 56% since 2010. By 2030, five countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, were on track for a 90% decline in new infections.
Pepfar had committed $4.3 billion to UNAIDS in 2025. With that financing suddenly withdrawn, treatment and prevention programs around the world were severely disrupted, the report said. Byanyima told Bloomberg in June that her organization had lost almost 50% of its funding.
President Donald Trump has suspended funding from most foreign aid programs since his inauguration. A separate study from the British medical journal Lancet concluded that cuts to the US Agency for International Development could result in about 14 million additional deaths by 2030.
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AIDS, HIV, UNAIDS, Trump administration, Pepfar
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