“A global development emergency” is how the UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the state of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in July 2025. Five years from the 2030 deadline, none of the 17 goals are on track to be achieved. The goals have been criticized for being too broad, too numerous, and too aspirational and, no doubt, have been set back by the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and conflict. Financing remains a perennial question. At the same time, the SDGs remain the organizing principle for global social and economic progress.

The United States publicly renounced the SDGs in March 2025 as a “globalist endeavor,” one “inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and the rights and interests of Americans.” More concretely, it closed its major development assistance agency, USAID, and significantly cut foreign aid.  Geopolitics and fiscal shocks will also make the road ahead difficult, but many countries remain focused on food systems, energy, digital connectivity, education, jobs and social protection, and climate and biodiversity—six areas that the UN has deemed could have the greatest impact on development.

What implications, if any, does the U.S. renunciation of the SDGs have for global development and for the United States? Will other countries reinvest and continue apace? More broadly, can and should the SDGs retain their relevance, and can progress on them be accelerated, in the final five years of their timeline?

To shed light on these and other questions, please join Carnegie’s Global Order and Institution Program Director and Senior Fellow Stewart Patrick for a conversation with Heba Aly, director at Article 109, Charles Kenney, senior fellow at Center for Global Development, and Sarah Mendelson, distinguished service professor of public policy and director of Sustainable Futures at Carnegie Mellon University.