While we usually expect the summer months to be slower than usual, it has certainly not been the case over the past week. In an exclusive Devex story, we found out that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development will most likely declare that the United Kingdom cannot legally spend its overseas development assistance on domestic refugee costs because of a new law cracking down on arrivals.

In 2022 the country spent £3.7 billion — 29% of its ODA budget — domestically, exploiting OECD rules that allow the allocation of refugees’ hotel and other bills as ODA for 12 months.

On the other side of the pond, the United States’ bipartisan foreign affairs budget is set to be tangled up in debates around the country’s domestic cultural wars and its competition abroad with China.

To make sense of these stories, as well as UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director Angeli Achrekar’s call to keep the fight against HIV and AIDS on the political agenda, I sat down with Global Nation co-founder Jonathan Glennie and Harvard Center for International Development Executive Director Fatema Sumar for this week’s podcast episode.

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