Ordinary People Just Helped Save Millions of Lives.
Congress Showed Some Spine. It Happened Because Citizens Took Action.
With growing civic agony, an avalanche of questions demand our attention: Where is Congress’s backbone? What can I do? And will it even matter?
On Tuesday, Feb. 3, we saw glimmers of congressional backbone, in victories that should be shouted out. That day, President Trump signed into law a package of appropriations bills that included foreign assistance funding for the remainder of fiscal 2026.
Buried in the legislation was a story that few Americans know about: Congress rejected Trump’s drastic cuts to global health. Ordinary citizens played a key role in making that happen.
They didn’t do it by protesting, though protests matter, or by funding lawsuits, though lawsuits matter, or even through elections work, though elections matter. They did it through transformational advocacy – by building relationships with elected officials who make decisions in their names and, in the process, building a little bit of backbone in Congress.
Some highlights of what they accomplished:
In fiscal 2025, total funding for global health programs was $10 billion. For 2026, the Trump administration asked for just $3.8 billion. The figure enacted into law was $9.4 billion.
The 2025 allocation for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was $1.65 billion. The Trump administration wanted to reduce that to $800 million. The amount enacted was $1.25 billion.
In 2025, Maternal and Child Health programs received $915 million. Trump’s request for 2026 was to slash funding to $85 million. The enacted amount was $915 million – fully restored.
This is literally a matter of life and death for millions of people. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria partnership has saved 70 million lives since 2002. (Let that sentence sink in.) And U.S. Maternal and Child Health programs have helped drive a 66 percent drop in global child deaths since the early 1980s, saving some 10 million young lives a year. (That’s not a typo.)
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The restoration of this money did not happen by chance. Behind these numbers – both the funds appropriated and the lives saved – are decades of tireless grassroots advocacy, including work last year to get 160 House members to sign a letter urging top appropriators to strongly fund the Global Fund and PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and 128 members to sign a separate letter calling for robust funding for maternal and child health, GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance), and nutrition programs.
The Global Fund letter was led by two House Republicans and three House Democrats: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), Ami Bera (D-Calif.), and Mike Kelly (D-N.Y.). The Maternal and Child Health letter was led by the same two Republicans and Reps. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and James P. McGovern (D-Mass.).
Why did the members of Congress who signed these letters – and the House and Senate appropriators who took the initial action – push back against Trump and his budget in this way? It’s foreign aid, for goodness’ sake. Some realized that what Trump, Elon Musk, and Marco Rubio had done to life-saving programs was wrong. Moreover, they were finally willing to say so, after conversations with citizen lobbyists, volunteers who received training and support from their local chapters of RESULTS.
RESULTS launched in 1980 to teach the skills of transformational advocacy. This is not transactional advocacy (e.g., sign the petition, transaction complete), but a set of strategies and skills empowering ordinary Americans to meet and build relationships with their members of Congress, to write letters to the editor and op-eds on any number of issues they care about, and to build backbone along the way. RESULTS chapters meet monthly to learn, practice, and support each other in effective advocacy.
For example, Nancy Taylor, who volunteered with the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS, had her first op-ed on global health published in the Chicago Tribune in 1986. “I can’t remember what pushed me past my fear and helped me dial the telephone,” Nancy told me decades ago, “but I found myself talking to an editorial writer at the Tribune, who encouraged me to submit an op-ed.”
Taylor took the challenge, but nothing appeared for two weeks. “My calm was shattered early one morning, when my husband thrust the editorial page in my face,” she said. “There it was — my words and my name. As I read what seemed like foreign phrases, I felt a head rush equivalent to an unfiltered cigarette and a stiff martini being ingested simultaneously. I had my first adult experience with getting ‘high on life.’”
That’s a key part of the transformation in transformational advocacy.
This work of grassroots advocates building congressional spine goes beyond global health. Initially, Trump proposed a 55 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency for fiscal 2026, House Appropriators proposed a 23 percent cut, and Senate Appropriators a 5 percent cut. In late January, however, the president signed into law an appropriations bill that provided a much smaller 3.5 percent cut to the EPA – 16 times smaller than his original proposal. Some pressure came from the United Church of Christ Climate Hope Affiliates, who used RESULTS’ methods of transformational advocacy to build relationships – and some backbone – with their members of Congress, and got dozens of letters to the editor published supporting the Environmental Protection Agency.
What will you be doing over the next few months? You could doomscroll your blood pressure ever higher as elected officials pursue policies and take actions that contravene your values and priorities.
Or you could try transformational advocacy. You could go here to get help connecting with a group like RESULTS or the Climate Hope Affiliates that continue to advocate for issues that matter and train their advocacy muscle.
It’s your move.
Sam Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage.
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Great article, Sam