US Aid to Israel: Trump Says $3.8 Billion Ends in 2026

President Donald Trump has stated that the roughly $3.8 billion in military aid the United States provides Israel every year will be cut off at the end of 2026, close to two years before the ten-year agreement that governs the funding is due to expire. Speaking in a television interview on the morning of November 3, as Americans voted in the midterm elections, Trump said: “We were giving them $4 billion. We are. But it gets cut off at the end of the year.” Trump, who called the aid “a bad talking point” for Democrats, added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had raised the idea himself months earlier. No order, budget request or bill giving effect to the statement had been made public by that afternoon, leaving the largest Foreign Military Financing allocation Washington makes to any country hanging on a presidential remark rather than a policy document.

The funding rests on a memorandum of understanding signed in September 2016, which committed $38 billion over the fiscal years 2019 to 2028, divided into $3.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million a year for cooperative missile defence programs, with Congress appropriating the money annually. Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on January 9 that he wanted to taper the aid to zero within a decade, describing the shift as “in the works”, and in May he went further, stating: “I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.” Trump’s timeline compresses that decade-long taper into less than two months, and it remains uncertain whether he means Foreign Military Financing, the missile defence line or both, with the President having said the aid could be considered “military aid or cash.”

Foreign Military Financing has paid for much of the Israeli Air Force’s modernisation, including the F-35I Adir fifth generation fighter fleet that Israel has expanded to 75 aircraft on order, 25 F-15IA strike fighters and four KC-46A tankers, all bought from American manufacturers. The missile defence line co-funds production of Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow 3 interceptors, a large share of them built in the United States, and those interceptors have been consumed at a considerable rate in the war with Iran, with Arrow 3 interceptors costing millions of dollars apiece and each Iron Dome interception adding tens of thousands more. Congress added a further $5.2 billion for Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Iron Beam laser in the April 2024 supplemental alone, a figure that highlights how far Israel’s air defence network depends on American money beyond the memorandum itself.

The statement lands as Netanyahu’s own position at home is unsettled, with the count from Israel’s election giving his bloc 53 seats against 48 for Gadi Eisenkot’s camp, both short of the 61 needed to govern, and with questions already raised over what a caretaker government can order in wartime. Netanyahu’s office issued no immediate comment on Trump’s remarks on November 3. Under the 2016 agreement, the share of the annual aid that Israel had long been allowed to spend in its own defence industry rather than in the United States, 26.3 percent when the memorandum was signed, was already being phased down to zero by the 2028 fiscal year.