President Trump said Tuesday that the United States will stop giving Israel roughly $4 billion in annual aid, starting at the beginning of next year.
Appearing on “Fox & Friends” as polls opened on Election Day, Trump said he had discussed ending the aid with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu months ago, and the leaders agreed to make the change since Israel no longer needs the assistance. Israel will still be able to purchase U.S. arms, Trump said, and may receive additional aid if necessary.
“Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal,” Trump told the Fox News morning hosts. “We give Israel $4 billion a year, and we made a deal months ago that we’re stopping — and they’re fine with it, because, you know, they’ve become a very successful country.”
Trump also framed the cessation of aid in fiscal terms, saying he would like to balance the federal budget, and the aid is “a lot of money.”
The U.S. and Israel are currently operating under a military assistance agreement signed in 2016 during the Obama administration under which the U.S. provides $3.8 billion a year in aid to Israel through 2028. Of that total, $3.3 billion is provided through the Foreign Military Financing program, which helps foreign partners acquire U.S. military equipment through grants and loans, and $500 million is for joint research and development of missile defense programs.
In addition, outside the agreement, the U.S. provided Israel with at least $21.7 billion in military aid in the two years following the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, according to an analysis by the Costs of War project at Brown University.
Trump did not address the status of the military assistance agreement or provide details about how the aid would be cut off, but the agreement is not a legally binding treaty. Funding for the assistance is subject to congressional appropriation, raising questions about lawmakers’ role in continuing or ending the aid program.
Trump also did not discuss ongoing cooperation and joint operations between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, which could expand significantly under the terms of the proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.
The politics of aid to Israel: Trump indicated that the agreement to end the aid was informed by rising criticism of the arrangement in American politics, especially from “lunatics” on the left.
“The left uses the $4 billion payment that everybody knows about, it’s no secret, as a signal of unfairness, and we can’t allow that to happen,” Trump said. “I don’t like that because, you know, it’s too easy. It’s almost too easy a target.”
Although criticism of military aid to Israel has come from both the left and the right, Trump singled out one Democratic critic in particular: Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate nominee in Michigan.
“When you see their rallies, when you see this lunatic that’s running in Michigan, he talks about the money that we pay them all the time,” Trump said, referring to El-Sayed, who has sharply criticized the aid. “He says, ‘Why are we giving Israel $4 billion?’ You take that off the table. They don’t need it.”
Trump said that ending the aid would eliminate the “best talking point” of the left. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when they don't need it?” Trump said. “It's a bad talking point.”
El-Sayed welcomed the news, however caustically. “Even a broken clock can be right twice a day,” he told reporters after meeting with voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. El-Sayed reportedly declined to answer questions about whether he thought the end of military aid to Israel was a permanent policy shift or a political tactic timed for Election Day.
Netanyahu signals shift: The Israeli prime minister has referred to ending U.S. military aid in recent months, telling The Economist magazine in January that he wanted to phase out American aid over a period of years. In May, he told CBS News that he wants the U.S. and Israel to act more as partners than as patron and client. “I want to taper off American support for Israel to zero,” he said. “We’ve come of age.”
Last week, while warning Israelis that U.S. aid would be coming to an end, though not perhaps on the rapid timeline laid out by Trump today, Netanyahu gave a different sense of what was driving the change in the relationship between the two countries. “If you think we will continue receiving what I secured twice — tens of billions of dollars in American aid for the defense budget — you’d better prepare yourselves and get used to the idea that this will not continue,” Netanyahu said, per Bloomberg. “That is because America has changed, not because Israel has changed. It will end. It is only a matter of time.”