Many heads of humanitarian relief and development agencies once supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development have followed a simple strategy since President Donald Trump’s inauguration: Keep your mouth shut and your head down and stay focused on your work. That way, maybe, your organization would be among the lucky survivors of the institutional storm being unleashed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a staunch supporter of international assistance, had indeed offered the assurance that truly life-saving work would be protected. But the bureaucratic sword of Damocles finally fell on Feb. 26, when Mr. Rubio confirmed that 90 percent of the foreign assistance programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. and about half the programs funded by the State Department would be terminated—more than 9,800 grants and contracts altogether.
In an interview with Fox News on Feb. 3, Mr. Rubio shed some light on his apparent change of heart, charging that U.S.A.I.D. had “basically evolved into an agency that believes that they’re not even a U.S. government agency…they’re a global charity, that they take the taxpayer money, and they spend it as a global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest or not in the national interest.”
A devastating global impact
In the days following the State Department announcement, confusion still reigns; information about which programs survive remains difficult to come by. Some humanitarian agencies never heard back about their waiver appeals; some were granted the emergency waivers but did not receive funding to continue their work. Around the world, health, nutrition, civil society and peace-building programs are unraveling, staff are being dismissed and the lights are being turned off.
“Women and children will go hungry, food will rot in warehouses while families starve, children will be born with HIV—among other tragedies,” InterAction, an alliance of international and U.S. relief organizations, charged in a press statement released on Feb 26. “This needless suffering will not make America safer, stronger, or more prosperous. Rather, it will breed instability, migration, and desperation.”
“These cuts impact a wide range of critical programs,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters at U.N. Headquarters in New York on Feb. 28. He noted disruption to scores of lifesaving humanitarian programs, development projects, counterterrorism efforts and initiatives to combat drug trafficking.
“The consequences will be especially devastating for vulnerable people around the world,” Mr. Guterres said.
The secretary-general took care to express his gratitude “for the leading role” the United States has played over decades providing overseas aid. The United States had been providing 40 percent of the world’s humanitarian assistance in recent years, reaching over 100 million people each year through U.N. programs alone.
“The generosity and compassion of the American people have not only saved lives, built peace and improved the state of the world,” Mr. Guterres said, “they have contributed to the stability and prosperity that Americans depend on.”
Sadly, the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown was not the only recent blow to global humanitarian efforts. In a statement released on Feb. 26, Alistair Dutton, secretary general of the Catholic humanitarian network Caritas Internationalis, deplored a recent decision by the United Kingdom to cut its aid budget by 40 percent. Along with the U.S.A.I.D. termination, he called the U.K. decision “the latest display of cruel indifference to the poorest billion people in the world who face war, famine and dehumanising poverty.”
“Turning away from the world’s most vulnerable is not just strategically reckless—endangering peace, stability and human life—it is morally indefensible,” Mr. Dutton said.
A Caritas press statement noted that France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany were also trimming billions from foreign aid budgets “in favour of increased defence spending.”
Caritas warned that this spending shift “will have devastating consequences for millions of people worldwide, driving forced migration and undermining the very stability these countries seek to protect. Once again the books of the richest nations are being balanced at the expense of the poorest people.”
The sudden collapse of U.S. humanitarian assistance could not be more ill-timed as conflict and health and nutrition crises spike in Gaza, Sudan, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other sites of poverty and discord around the world, leaving millions at risk of hunger, disease and displacement. Paul Martin, the former inspector general for U.S.A.I.D., warned in his final report—he was fired shortly after issuing it—that $8.2 billion in relief aid around the world was at risk of theft, diversion and spoilage following the abrupt canceling of contracts and termination and withdrawal of staff.
A memo written by U.S.A.I.D.’s acting assistant administrator for global health that was leaked to the press warns that the agency’s dismantling would likely be the cause of enormous human suffering, including 18 million more cases of malaria and 166,000 more malaria deaths; 200,000 children paralyzed by polio; and one million children left untreated for acute malnutrition.
U.S.A.I.D.-funded projects were at work in some 130 countries, aimed at fighting epidemics, educating children, providing clean water and supporting other areas of development. While programs that had been interrupting the spread of Ebola and tuberculosis and finally eradicating polio will be deeply hampered by the abrupt loss of U.S. aid, perhaps the biggest loss in terms of lives—outside of famine relief—will be the end or at least the substantial reduction of Pepfar, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
Launched in 2003 during the George W. Bush administration, the effort, which had received strong bipartisan support for decades, has been credited with saving 27 million lives. About 60 percent of the program’s funding was administered through U.S.A.I.D.
“People will die,” Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, told The N.Y. Times. But the American public will likely never know how many, she said, “because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”
No waivers for Catholic relief efforts
Jesuit Refugee Service had been among the agencies hoping that the State Department would assess its efforts as lifesaving. Instead they learned on Feb. 26 that five of their nine cooperative agreements with the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration had been terminated, closing down programs that provided educational, psychosocial, medical and subsistence support to refugees in Thailand, Iraq, Chad, Ethiopia and Uganda.
The fate of J.R.S.’s other contracted programs remains undecided at this time. The total cost of the State Department’s agreements for 2025 with J.R.S. was about $8 million.
Catholic Relief Services had relied on U.S.A.I.D. for about half the funding it uses to sponsor programs in 122 countries that reach more than 255 million people. The end of that support will inevitably mean deep cuts at a time of great peril for many of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The U.S. church’s relief and development agency began its annual Lenten fundraising program, CRS Rice Bowl, on Ash Wednesday, pointing out that global disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic still hamstring anti-hunger efforts. C.R.S. noted in a press statement that “the world is still far off track to achieve the United Nations’ Zero Hunger goal.”
“According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 580 million people could be chronically undernourished in 2030—just five years away—if the trajectory is left unchecked. Elevated hunger levels are quickly becoming the new normal, causing long-term and generational harm to children, families and communities,” C.R.S. said.
According to C.R.S., more than 340 million people around the world are currently facing some level of food insecurity, with nearly 2 million facing catastrophic hunger, particularly in the devastated Gaza Strip and in Sudan, where a near genocidal campaign conducted by the rebel Rapid Support Forces is again besieging the people of Darfur province.
The Trump administration claims savings of about $58 billion after cutting off the nation’s humanitarian arm. The purported goal of the D.O.G.E. initiative is cutting fraud and waste, but so far, critics say, the White House and Mr. Musk have not provided evidence of much fraud or waste, just programs they did not appreciate. Humanitarian assistance would have represented about 1 percent of federal spending in 2025.
Federal courts have ruled that the White House’s moves against U.S.A.I.D. were outside the scope of executive authority, and the Supreme Court on March 5 supported a lower court’s ruling that the funding freeze should be lifted and existing contracts be honored. But while the judiciary continues to hash out the constitutional issues, the dirt keeps getting piled higher on the U.S.A.I.D. gravesite. It is not clear now, should even the highest court in the land order it, how U.S.A.I.D. might be revived.
The crisis began hours after Mr. Trump had been sworn into office on Jan. 20, when he ordered a 90-day halt on foreign aid while a program-by-program review was purportedly undertaken. It is not clear how thoroughly that review was conducted.
The Associated Press reports that humanitarian groups owed money on contracts with U.S.A.I.D. said both Trump political appointees and members of Musk’s D.O.G.E. teams began terminating U.S.A.I.D.’s contracts around the world at breakneck speed, without time for any meaningful review. The nonprofits, among thousands of contractors, owed billions of dollars in payment since the freeze began, called the en masse contract terminations a maneuver to get around complying with a court order to lift the funding freeze temporarily, according to The Associated Press.
Just days after the president’s executive order, U.S.A.I.D. had been decimated as a functioning federal agency, its headquarters closed and its staff around the world terminated or furloughed; some were essentially abandoned overseas. Then, a little over a month after the 90-day review period had been ordered, Mr. Rubio announced the end of just about all U.S. foreign assistance programs.
Liz Schrayer, chief executive of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, said in a press statement on Feb. 27: “Nothing about this process has been in ‘good faith’. Abruptly ending the review—just 30 days into a stated 90-day process—and gutting nearly all U.S. international assistance programs, dangerously undermines America’s ability to win.”
“Make no mistake,” Ms. Schrayer said, “that the U.S. is ceding ground to our rivals—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—who will exert greater influence around the world at our expense. This is not winning.”
She urged bipartisan supporters of foreign assistance in Congress to “demand answers from the Administration on how these decisions were made, on what basis, and at what cost to America’s interests. The American people deserve a transparent accounting of what will be lost—on counterterror, global health, food security, and competition.”
If you want to find out more about the history of U.S.A.I.D., the work it was engaged in, the viral outbreaks it was monitoring and the lives it was saving, good luck—you will not find much evidence that the agency even existed on the internet since the D.O.G.E. takeover. In an unprecedented institutional erasure, the White House has stripped all U.S.A.I.D. pages, including descriptions of active programs, archives and agency history, from government servers.
Among the wiped pages was the digital home of the U.S.A.I.D.-administered Food for Peace program, which for decades has managed the delivery of surplus U.S. commodities to famine emergencies around the world. The apparent loss of Food for Peace has alarmed some Republican members of Congress in agricultural states. While they express general support for the Trump administration’s dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., two Kansas members of Congress are urging that Food for Peace be afforded a “safe harbor” by handing over its administration to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
How safe that harbor will prove to be for a formerly uncontroversial humanitarian effort remains to be seen. On March 5, a federal court ordered the reinstatement of 6,000 U.S.D.A. staff terminated by D.O.G.E. in February. The order puts them back to work for 45 days.
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.
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