USAID

WASHINGTON — President Trump has told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he won’t be spending $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.

Trump, who sent a letter to Johnson, R-La., on Thursday, is using what’s known as a pocket rescission — when a president submits a request to Congress to not spend approved funds toward the end of the fiscal year, so that Congress cannot act on the request in the 45-day timeframe and the money goes unspent as a result. It’s the first time in nearly 50 years a president has used one. The fiscal year draws to a close at the end of September.

The letter was posted Friday morning on the X account of the White House Office of Management and Budget. It said the funding would be cut from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, an early target of Trump’s efforts to cut foreign aid.

The last pocket rescission was in 1977 by then-President Jimmy Carter, and the Trump administration argues that it’s a legally permissible tool. But such a move, if standardized by the White House, could effectively bypass Congress on key spending choices and potentially wrest some control over spending from the House and the Senate.

The 1974 Impoundment Control Act gives the president the authority to propose canceling funds approved by Congress. Congress can vote on pulling back the funds or sustaining them, but by proposing the rescission so close to Sept. 30 the White House ensures that the money won’t be spent and the funding lapses.

Trump had previously sought to get congressional backing for rescissions and succeeded in doing so in July when the House and the Senate approved $9 billion worth of cuts. Those rescissions clawed back funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid.

The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as foreign populations lose access to food supplies and development programs.

In February, the administration said it would eliminate almost all of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance abroad. USAID has since been dismantled, and its few remaining programs have been placed under State Department control.

The Trump administration on Wednesday appealed to the Supreme Court to stop lower court decisions that have preserved foreign aid, including for global health and HIV and AIDS programs, that Trump has tried to freeze.

The New York Post first reported the pocket rescission.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

Food intended to feed 27,000 starving children in Afghanistan and Pakistan will soon be incinerated in the wake of President Donald Trump’s closure of the United States’ aid agency.

A senior US official on Wednesday said nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits, to be used as emergency food for malnourished young children, expired this month while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai.

Under questioning by lawmakers, Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state in charge of management, tied the decision to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which closed its doors on July 1.

“I think that this was just a casualty of the shutdown of USAID,” Rigas said, adding that he was “distressed” that the food went to waste.

Aid officials managed to save 622 tonnes of the energy-dense biscuits in June – sending them to Syria, Bangladesh and Myanmar – but 496 tonnes, worth $793,000 before they expired this month, will be destroyed, according to two internal USAID memos reviewed by Reuters, dated May 5 and May 19, and four sources familiar with the matter.

The wasted biscuits will be sent to landfills or incinerated in the United Arab Emirates, two sources said. That will cost the US government an additional $100,000, according to the May 5 memo verified by three sources familiar with the matter.

Trump has said the US pays disproportionately for foreign aid, and he wants other countries to shoulder more of the burden. His administration announced plans to shut down USAID in January, leaving more than 60,000 tonnes of food aid stuck in stores around the world, Reuters reported in May.

The food aid stuck in Dubai was fortified wheat biscuits, which are calorie-rich and typically deployed in crisis conditions where people lack cooking facilities, “providing immediate nutrition for a child or adult”, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said lawmakers had specifically raised the issue of the food with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March. In May, he promised lawmakers that no food aid would be wasted.

“A government that is put on notice – here are resources that will save 27,000 starving kids, can you please distribute them or give them to someone who can?

“Who decides, no, we would rather keep the warehouse locked, let the food expire, and then burn it?”

Rigas said that the US remained the world’s largest donor, and he promised to learn further details about the biscuits.

“I do want to find out what happened here and get to the ground truth,” he said.

The US is the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor, amounting to at least 38 percent of all contributions recorded by the UN. It disbursed $61bn in foreign assistance last year, just over half of it via USAID, according to government data.

The Trump administration notified Congress in March that USAID would fire almost all of its staff in two rounds on July 1 and September 2, as it prepared to shut down. In a statement on July 1 marking the transfer of USAID to the State Department, Rubio said the US was abandoning what he called a charity-based model and would focus on empowering countries to grow sustainably.

The WFP says 319 million people have limited access to food worldwide. Of those, 1.9 million people are gripped by catastrophic hunger and on the brink of famine, primarily in Gaza and Sudan.

Former United States Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush have delivered a rare open rebuke of the Donald Trump administration in an emotional video farewell with staffers of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Obama called the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID “a colossal mistake”.

Monday was the last day as an independent agency for the six-decade-old humanitarian and development organisation, created by President John F Kennedy as a soft power, peaceful way of promoting US national security by boosting goodwill and prosperity abroad.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered USAID to be absorbed into the US State Department on Tuesday.

The former presidents and U2 singer Bono  – who held back tears as he recited a poem – spoke with thousands in the USAID community in a videoconference, which was billed as a closed-press event.

They expressed their appreciation for the thousands of USAID staffers who have lost their jobs and life’s work. Their agency was one of the first and most fiercely targeted for government cuts by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk, with staffers abruptly locked out of systems and offices and terminated by mass emailing.

Trump claimed the agency was run by “radical left lunatics” and rife with “tremendous fraud”. Musk called it “a criminal organisation”.

Obama, speaking in a recorded statement, offered assurances to the aid and development workers, some listening from overseas.

“Your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come,” he told them.

Obama has largely kept a low public profile during Trump’s second term and refrained from criticising the seismic changes that Trump has made to US programmes and priorities at home and abroad.

“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,” Obama said. He credited USAID with not only saving lives, but being a main factor in global economic growth that has turned some aid-receiving countries into US markets and trade partners.

The former Democratic president predicted that “sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realise how much you are needed”.

Asked for comment, the State Department said it would be introducing the department’s foreign assistance successor to USAID, to be called America First, this week.

“The new process will ensure there is proper oversight and that every tax dollar spent will help advance our national interests,” the department said.

USAID oversaw programmes around the world, providing water and life-saving food to millions uprooted by conflict in Sudan, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, sponsoring the “Green Revolution” that revolutionised modern agriculture and curbed starvation and famine. The agency worked at preventing disease outbreaks, promoting democracy, and providing financing and development that allowed countries and people to climb out of poverty.

Bush, who also spoke in a recorded message, went straight to the cuts in a landmark AIDS and HIV programme started by his Republican administration and credited with saving 25 million lives around the world.

Bipartisan blowback from Congress to cutting the popular President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, helped save significant funding for the programme. But cuts and rule changes have reduced the number getting the life-saving care.

“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work – and that is your good heart,” Bush told USAID staffers. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you,” he said.

More than 14 million of the world’s most vulnerable, a third of them young children, could die because of the Trump administration’s move, a study in the Lancet journal projected Tuesday.

“For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict,” study co-author Davide Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, said in a statement.

Bono, a longtime humanitarian advocate in Africa and elsewhere, was announced as the “surprise guest”.

he recited a poem he had written to the agency about its gutting. He spoke of children dying of malnutrition, a reference to millions of people who Boston University researchers and other analysts say will die because of the US cuts to funding for health and other programmes abroad.

“They called you crooks,” Bono said, “when you were the best of us.”

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A video showing dozens of people marching toward the office of Haiti’s prime minister elicited gasps from some viewers as it circulated recently on social media. The protesters, who are HIV-positive, did not conceal their faces — a rare occurrence in a country where the virus is still heavily stigmatized.

“Call the minister of health! We are dying!” the group chanted.

The protesters risked being shunned by society to warn that Haiti is running out of HIV medication just months after the Trump administration slashed more than 90% of the United States Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall aid across the globe.

At a hospital near the northern city of Cap-Haitien, Dr. Eugene Maklin said he struggles to share that reality with his more than 550 HIV patients.

“It’s hard to explain to them, to tell them that they’re not going to find medication,” he said. “It’s like a suicide.”

‘We can’t stay silent’

More than 150,000 people in Haiti have HIV or AIDS, according to official estimates, although nonprofits believe the number is much higher.

David Jeune, a 46-year-old hospital community worker, is among them. He became infected 19 years ago after having unprotected sex.

“I was scared to let people know because they would point their finger at you, saying you are infecting others with AIDS,” he said.

His fear was so great that he didn’t tell anyone, not even his mother. But that fear dissipated with the support Jeune said he received from nonprofit groups. His confidence grew to the point where he participated in last week’s protest.

“I hope Trump will change his mind,” he said, noting that his medication will run out in November. “Let the poor people get the medication they need.”

Patrick Jean Noel, a representative of Haiti’s Federation of Assns. of HIV, said that at least five clinics, including one that served 2,500 patients, were forced to close after the USAID funding cuts.

“We can’t stay silent,” he said. “More people need to come out.”

But most people with HIV in Haiti are reluctant to do so, said Dr. Sabine Lustin, executive director of the Haiti-based nonprofit Promoters of Zero AIDS Goal.

The stigma is so strong that many patients are reluctant to pick up their medication in person. Instead, it is sent in packages wrapped as gifts so as to not arouse suspicion, she said.

Lustin’s organization, which helps some 2,000 people across Haiti, receives funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though its funding hasn’t been cut, she said that shortly after President Trump took office in January, the agency banned HIV prevention activities because they targeted a group that is not a priority — which she understood to be referring to gay men.

That means the organization can no longer distribute up to 200,000 free condoms a year or educate people about the disease.

“You risk an increase in infections,” she said. “You have a young population who is sexually active who can’t receive the prevention message and don’t have access to condoms.”

‘That can’t be silenced’

On the sunny morning of May 19, a chorus of voices drowned out the din of traffic in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, growing louder as protesters with HIV marched defiantly toward the prime minister’s office.

“We are here to tell the government that we exist, and we are people like any other person,” one woman told reporters.

Another marching alongside her said, “Without medication, we are dying. This needs to change.”

Three days after the protest, the leader of Haiti’s transitional presidential council, Louis Gérald Gilles, announced that he had met with activists and would try to secure funding.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations across Haiti are fretting.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Marie Denis-Luque, founder and executive director of CHOAIDS, a nonprofit that cares for Haitian orphans with HIV/AIDS. “We only have medication until July.”

Her voice broke as she described her frantic search for donations for the orphans, who are cared for by HIV-positive women in Cap-Haitien after gang violence forced them to leave Port-au-Prince.

Denis-Luque said she has long advocated for the orphans’ visibility.

“We can’t keep hiding these children. They are part of society,” she said, adding that she smiled when she saw the video of last week’s protest. “I was like, whoa, things have changed tremendously. The stigma is real, but I think what I saw … was very encouraging to me. They can’t be silenced.”

A dangerous combination

Experts say Haiti could see a rise in HIV infections because medications are dwindling at a time that gang violence and poverty are surging.

Dr. Alain Casseus, infectious-disease division chief at Zanmi Lasante, the largest nongovernmental healthcare provider in Haiti, said he expected to see a surge in patients given the funding cuts, but that hasn’t happened because traveling by land in Haiti is dangerous since violent gangs control main roads and randomly open fire on vehicles.

He warned that abruptly stopping medication is dangerous, especially because many Haitians do not have access or cannot afford nutritious food to strengthen their immune system.

“It wouldn’t take long, especially given the situation in Haiti, to enter a very bad phase,” he said of HIV infections. And even if some funding becomes available, a lapse in medication could cause resistance to it, he said.

Casseus said gang violence also could accelerate the rates of infection by rapes or other physical violence as medication runs out.

At the New Hope Hospital run by Maklin in Haiti’s northern region, shelves are running empty. He used to receive more than $165,000 a year to help HIV/AIDS patients. But that funding has dried up.

“Those people are going to die,” he said. “We don’t know how or where we’re going to get more medication.”

The medication controls the infection and allows many to have an average life expectancy. Without it, the virus attacks a person’s immune system and they develop AIDS, the late stage of an HIV infection.

Reaction is swift when Maklin tells his patients that in two months, the hospital won’t have any HIV medication left.

“They say, ‘No, no, no, no!’” he said. “They want to keep living.”

Coto and Sanon write for the Associated Press and reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Port-au-Prince, respectively.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) opened its office in Palestine back in 1994. Its website, which is no longer available, used to boast that since then, it has “helped four million Palestinians lead healthier and more productive lives”.

Now that the agency has been shuttered by US President Donald Trump’s administration, it is pertinent to evaluate the claim that USAID was a force for good in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Undoubtedly, the shutdown of the agency has affected Palestinians, especially those benefitting from its funding for education and healthcare institutions. Humanitarian provision was also affected, with the World Food Programme, one of the main humanitarian actors in the occupied Palestinian territories, facing major disruptions.

While the short-term negative impact is apparent, the utility of USAID and other US funding becomes questionable when put in the larger political context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

As a researcher, I have been directly and indirectly involved in assessing USAID-funded programmes for years, and I have seen first-hand how they have contributed to maintaining Israeli occupation and colonisation. The US agency was far from “helping” Palestinians lead better lives, as it claimed.

A policy of pacification

USAID opened its West Bank and Gaza Strip office as part of the broader American effort to lead and shape the political settlement between Palestinians and Israelis initiated by the Oslo Accords of 1994.

The so-called “peace process” promised Palestinians an independent state on the lands occupied by Israel in 1967, with a final agreement supposed to be signed by 1999. Needless to say, such an agreement was never signed, as Israel never intended to conclude peace with the Palestinians and recognise their right to self-determination.

Instead, Oslo was used to cover up Israel’s relentless colonisation of the occupied Palestinian territories in the rhetoric of peace negotiations. The creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a local governing body tasked with managing civil affairs for Palestinians in designated areas was part of this strategy.

While the official Palestinian leadership envisioned the PA as a transitional polity that would administer daily life until an independent state was established, it was ultimately designed and closely overseen by the US to function as a client regime, managing and controlling the occupied population.

To that end, the PA was obliged to engage in close coordination with Israeli security forces to suppress any form of resistance in the territories it managed. Its two main security bodies – the Intelligence Service and the Preventive Security – were set up to fulfil this duty.

While US intelligence agencies were tasked with supporting and training the Palestinian security apparatus – funnelling millions of dollars to it every year – USAID was tasked with supporting the civilian functions of the PA.

Between 1994 and 2018, USAID provided more than $5.2bn in aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It funded infrastructure, health, and education initiatives, with the aim of winning public support for the peace negotiations.

A portion of its funding was funnelled through civil society organisations with two primary objectives: to depoliticise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to cultivate a network of civil society actors who would promote this agenda.

The depoliticisation framework treated the Palestinian issue as an economic and humanitarian matter. This approach addressed Palestinian economic and social problems in isolation — detached from their primary cause: Israeli occupation.

It also sought to delegitimise Palestinian resistance by portraying it as a source of instability and chaos rather than a political response to occupation.

To distribute its funding, USAID established a complex system of background checks, alongside an Orwellian set of conditions. The vetting extended beyond the individual to their extended family, the name of the place, and even the cultural context in which the funds would be used — none of which could be associated with resistance.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that USAID programmes often failed to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

Normalisation through people-to-people programmes

A lot of USAID funding went into initiatives that sought to normalise Israeli colonisation by seeking to establish connections between Palestinians and Israelis. The premise was that the two people “can learn to live together”, which of course completely ignored the realities of apartheid and occupation.

One of the USAID-funded programmes I assessed was the Conflict Management and Mitigation (CMM) Program, promoted under USAID’s People-to-People Partnership framework. By 2018, CMM had allocated over $230m to different initiatives and was set to distribute another $250m by 2026.

The programme included projects targeting bereaved parents, farmers, and students to promote peacebuilding. One such project sought to foster cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli farmers through shared farming experiences.

During one focus group discussion, I spoke to a Palestinian farmer who explained that Palestinian olive oil production has been stagnating due to the Israeli occupation regime that restricted Palestinian farmers’ access to water and, in some cases, to their land. “These programmes,” he said, “don’t talk about these issues.”

When I asked why he participated, he explained that the project enabled him to obtain an Israeli travel permit — allowing him to work on Israeli farms and earn an income to survive.

The absurdity of this dynamic was striking: on paper, the programme spoke of fostering productive relationships between Palestinians and Israelis, building a shared, peaceful future where farmers become friends. In reality, however, Palestinian farmers signed so they could a travel permit and work on Israeli farms — many of which were established on confiscated Palestinian land. Participation in the programme did not resolve any of the problems the Palestinian farmers faced in olive farming – i.e., Israeli occupation policies.

Another USAID-funded programme I studied, Seeds of Peace, had the mission to bring together young people from conflict regions who had the potential to become future leaders in their countries. The programme’s central activity was a youth summer camp in an affluent area in the US state of Maine, where participants engaged in dialogue and leadership training.

The two largest participant groups were Israelis and Palestinians. While the Israeli Ministry of Education was responsible for selecting Israeli participants, the Seeds of Peace office in Ramallah oversaw the recruitment of Palestinian participants. Each participant benefitted from a heavily subsidised programme, with costs reaching up to $8,000 per person.

A closer look at participant lists over the years revealed a striking pattern: the sons and daughters of PA leaders and affluent families frequently appeared.

Curious about this pattern, I once asked a programme officer about it. The response was revealing: “In Palestinian society, leadership often passes to the children of high-ranking officials.”

This meant that the organisation’s —and by extension, the US’s – vision of political leadership in Palestine assumed that power in Palestinian politics is hereditary and therefore, US initiatives should focus on the sons and daughters of the current elite.

Political interference

Seeds of Peace was by far not the only programme that served to support PA cadres and their families. Some relatives of high-ranking officials have received preferential treatment in securing lucrative USAID contracts; others have led nonprofit organisations funded by the agency.

USAID has also been involved indirectly in the political scene in Palestine by supporting political actors favoured by Washington.

Between 2004 and 2006, it implemented an expansive democracy promotion programme in the Palestinian territories in the lead-up to the 2006 legislative elections. While there is no direct evidence of financial support for specific candidates or party lists, observers have noted that civil society organisations (CSOs) linked to Fatah or the Third Way candidates were recipients of USAID funding. In some cases, this support was channeled through organisations operating in unrelated sectors.

Despite substantial funding and political support, these groups failed to secure enough seats to prevent Hamas’s electoral victory. After Hamas took control of Gaza, USAID continued supporting Palestinian CSOs, in some cases dramatically increasing their funding.

USAID also supported the police force under the PA through rule of law programmes, although the bulk of funding for the PA’s repressive security apparatus has come through the CIA and the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) of the US Department of State.

A more recent and stark example of problematic USAID involvement is the malfunctioning pier constructed by the US military in 2024 to facilitate aid delivery into Gaza, at a cost of $230m. The project was promoted as a humanitarian initiative and USAID was one of the organisations tasked with distributing the trickle of aid that came through it.

In reality, the pier served as a public relations stunt by the administration of former US President Joe Biden to obscure US complicity in Israel’s blockade of Gaza. It was also used by the Israeli military in an operation that resulted in the killing of more than 200 Palestinians, raising serious questions about the militarisation and misuse of aid infrastructure.

The pier farce is a good illustration of the US approach to providing aid to the Palestinians: it was never done in their best interest.

It is true that some impoverished Palestinians may be affected by the shutdown of USAID operations in the West Bank and Gaza. However, it is unlikely to decisively alter the situation on the ground. The cutoff of aid will have a more dramatic impact on the US strategy of leveraging Palestinian civil society organisations to promote a pacification agenda and perpetuate empty rhetoric about peace.

In this regard, the shuttering of USAID could give an opportunity for the Palestinian civil society to reconsider its engagement with US government donors in light of its moral obligations to the Palestinian people. Millions poured into pacification clearly did not work; it is time for a new approach that actually serves the interests of the Palestinians.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has notified the U.N. World Food Program and other partners that it has terminated some of the last remaining lifesaving humanitarian programs across the Middle East, a U.S. official and a U.N. official told the Associated Press on Monday.

The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Trump advisor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whom the Trump administration appointed to oversee and finish dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to letters sent to USAID partners and viewed by the AP.

About 60 letters canceling contracts were sent over the last week, including for major projects with the World Food Program, the world’s largest provider of food aid, a USAID official said. An official with the United Nations in the Middle East said the World Food Program received termination letters for U.S.-funded programs in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Some of the last remaining U.S. funding for key programs in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and the southern African nation of Zimbabwe also was affected, including for those providing food, water, medical care and shelter for people displaced by war, the USAID official said.

The U.N. official said the groups that would be hit hardest include Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon. Also affected are programs supporting vulnerable Lebanese people and providing irrigation systems inside Syria, a country emerging from a brutal civil war and struggling with poverty and hunger.

In Yemen, another war-divided country that is facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, the terminated aid apparently includes food that has already arrived in distribution centers, the U.N. official said.

Aid officials were just learning of many of the cuts Monday and said they were struggling to understand their scope.

Another of the notices, sent Friday, abruptly pulled U.S. funding for a program with strong support in Congress that had sent young Afghan women overseas for schooling amid Taliban prohibitions on women’s education, said an administrator for that project, which is run by Texas A&M University.

The young women would now face return to Afghanistan, where their lives would be in danger, according to that administrator, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration had pledged to spare those most urgent, lifesaving programs in its cutting of aid and development programs through the State Department and USAID.

The Republican administration already has canceled thousands of USAID contracts as it dismantles USAID, which it accuses of wastefulness and of advancing liberal causes.

The newly terminated contracts were among about 900 surviving programs that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had notified Congress he intended to preserve, the USAID official said.

There was no immediate comment from the State Department.

Knickmeyer and Magdy write for the Associated Press. Magdy reported from Cairo.

The administration of President Donald Trump has made a formal request to Congress to reorganise the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as the Republican leader faces constitutional challenges over his dismantling of the agency so far.

USAID was set up under an act of Congress. But on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a notification signalling that the Trump administration would fold the agency’s independent functions into the Department of State under executive control.

“We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens,” Rubio said in a statement on social media. “We are continuing essential lifesaving programs and making strategic investments that strengthen our partners and our own country.”

But critics have accused the Trump administration of exceeding its executive authority — and seeking to undermine independent agencies that do not align with its priorities.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce addressed the matter at a news briefing later in the day.

She said department officials “have notified Congress on their intent to undertake a reorganisation that would involve realigning certain USAID functions to the department by July 1, 2025, and discontinuing the remaining USAID functions that do not align with administrative priorities”.

Bruce also denied that the dismantling of USAID would affect the country’s ability to respond to international disasters like Friday’s earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand.

“ We are ready to move now. So there has been no impact on our ability to perform those duties, those requests for aid if and when they come in,” she said.

USAID was established under Congress’s authority through the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. But it does operate under the secretary of state.

Until the start of Trump’s second term as president, the agency was one of the largest distributors of foreign aid in the world — but that activity largely stopped when the president implemented a freeze on foreign assistance.

In 2023 alone, the US distributed approximately $72bn in foreign aid. USAID was responsible for distributing about half of that sum.

But Rubio has since announced on social media that 83 percent of USAID’s contracts have been cancelled.

Further employee cuts at USAID

The agency has also suffered massive layoffs, a trend that continued on Friday.

US media obtained an internal memorandum to USAID employees warning that all positions — save those required by law — would be eliminated. Bruce, the State Department spokesperson, asked about the scope of those changes during her briefing.

“With any major change, there’s going to be disruption,” she said, adding that the layoffs were not unexpected.

“We’ve been waiting for this conclusion. It has arrived. I can’t speak to the number of people who will not be a foreign service officer at this point. I can’t say if it’s going to be every single one.”

“ It’s a restructuring essentially,” she continued. “Like any restructuring, there will inevitably be disruptions from Secretary Rubio down. We are committed to ensuring that USAID personnel remain safe and that the agency’s ongoing lifesaving aid programmes remain both intact and operational.”

Bruce tied the layoffs to the Trump administration’s campaign to eliminate alleged “waste and fraud and abuse”, a project led by adviser and billionaire businessman Elon Musk.

Already, in February, USAID saw large-scale cuts to its workforce. About 1,600 people were laid off, and all but a handful of the remaining staff were placed on leave, including those stationed abroad.

Its headquarters in Washington, DC, was also shuttered, and workers were given 15-minute time slots to enter the building and quickly collect their belongings.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a ruling that Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways” by dismantling USAID.

Judge Theodore Chuang wrote that Musk and DOGE “deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down an agency created by Congress”.

Through a temporary injunction, Chuang ordered DOGE and Musk to stop their efforts to slash USAID’s staff and contracts. But it is not clear whether that order applies to actions taken by the secretary of state.

But on Friday afternoon, a federal appeals court lifted Chuang’s injunction, allowing DOGE to proceed with its cuts.

Musk has previously boasted that he was involved in “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.

President Donald Trump on Feb. 4 named Secretary of State Marco Rubio to serve as acting administrator of the organization, which initially had 5,200 employees. On Friday, Rubio said the remaining 900 employees will be terminated.

“Today, the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have notified Congress on their intent to undertake a reorganization that would involve realigning certain USAID functions to the Department by July 1, 2025, and discontinuing the remaining USAID functions that do not align with Administration priorities,” Rubio said in a statement.

On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump ordered a 90-day freeze of all U.S. foreign aid and a review of whether aid programs were aligned with his administration’s policy.

On March 10, Rubio terminated some 5,200 contracts. The remaining 18% of the programs were to be taken over by the State Department.

Some programs to be canceled provided for nutrition assistance for infants in developing countries and for treatments and prevention of diseases such as polio, malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola and HIV.

USAID distributed nearly $43.8 billion in aid in 2023. In all, the U.S. government disbursed $71.9 billion in foreign assistance, about 1.2% of the total budget according to ForeignAssistance.gov.

Jeremy Lewin, a Department of Government Efficiency employee, took over running the day-to-day operations at USAID from Pete Marocco on March 20.

In an email to staff Friday, he said terminations would go into effect on July 1 or Sept. 2. Although workers may be asked to work in some capacity, the email obtained by NPR said they were ordered to leave “the front office” by 1 p.m. Friday without a reason given.

“As you can imagine, there will be lots of work to responsibly migrate operations and responsibility to the State Department,” Lewin wrote in the email to staff.

He noted overseas staff “will be offered safe and fully compensated return travel.”

Lewin explained the process of some workers moving to the State Department will be provided in detail most likely in April or May.

There is a separate process “for hiring personnel into available roles at the State Department,” he wrote.

“In the next three months, we will work closely with the State Department to build their capacities to assume the responsible administration of USAID’s remaining life-saving and strategic aid programming.”

Rubio said he expects aid to be better handled.

“Foreign assistance done right can advance our national interests, protect our borders and strengthen our partnerships with key allies,” Rubio said. “Unfortunately, USAID strayed from its original mission long ago. As a result, the gains were too few and the costs were too high.”

He added: “Thanks to President Trump, this misguided and fiscally irresponsible era is now over. We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens.

“We are continuing essential lifesaving programs and making strategic investments that strengthen our partners and our own country. This is yet another promise made and delivered to the American people.”

On March 18, a federal judge ruled that efforts by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to shut down USAID “likely violated the U.S. Constitution in multiple ways.”

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, who was appointed by Barack Obama, ordered DOGE to reinstate USAID employee and contractors’ access to email, payment and other electronic systems, according to the 68-page ruling.

“The court will require defendants, within 14 days, to secure and submit a written agreement among all necessary parties that ensures that USAID will be able to reoccupy USAID headquarters at its original location, in the event of a final ruling in favor of plaintiffs,” the ruling from Cuang, who served in Maryland, said.

On Feb. 14, District Court Judge Amir Ali, an appointee of President Joe Biden in the District of Columbia, ruled that almost $2 billion in unpaid fees for related humanitarian work must be paid out despite a freeze on foreign aid.

The order was paused on Feb. 26 by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, but the full court by a 5-4 vote March 5 denied the Trump administration’s request to block the order.

WASHINGTON — A senior official at Elon Musk’s White House advisory team is taking a leadership role at the U.S. Agency for International Development, giving Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency direct authority over an agency that it has worked to dismantle, according to an email obtained by the Associated Press.

Pete Marocco, a Trump administration political appointee who was serving as deputy head of USAID, disclosed the change in the email to State Department staff. It comes after Marocco and Musk’s team oversaw the gutting of 83% of USAID contracts, shifting the remaining programs under the State Department.

Marocco said in his email that he will serve as the State Department’s head of foreign assistance.

Marocco wrote that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will “effective immediately” designate Jeremy Lewin as deputy administrator for policy and programs at USAID and as chief operating officer.

Lewin is a DOGE official who has worked with Musk’s government-cutting efforts at USAID and other federal agencies.

Rubio also designated Kenneth Jackson as administrator for management and resources who will also serve as the agency’s chief financial officer. President Trump also appointed Jackson as acting president of the U.S. Institute for Peace, a government think tank meant to promote conflict resolution.

The email outlining the DOGE team member’s appointment came the same day a federal judge ruled that Musk and his team appeared to have no constitutional authority for their two-month effort helping the Trump administration shut down State and USAID foreign assistance funding, fire staffers and terminate humanitarian and development contracts.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland, in a ruling Tuesday, indefinitely blocked Musk’s team from making further cuts to the agency.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by USAID employees and contractors, who argued that Musk and his team are wielding power that the Constitution reserves only for those who win elections or are confirmed by the Senate. Their lawyers said the ruling “effectively halts or reverses” many of the steps taken to dismantle the agency.

Brown and Knickmeyer write for the Associated Press.

The judge also ordered DOGE to provide written confirmation of compliance to the court within a week and confirmation that USAID would reoccupy its headquarters within two weeks.

“The court will require defendants, within 14 days, to secure and submit a written agreement among all necessary parties that ensures that USAID will be able to reoccupy USAID headquarters at its original location, in the event of a final ruling in favor of plaintiffs,” the ruling states.

Chuang granted the preliminary injunction Tuesday after more than two dozen current and former USAID employees and contractors challenged efforts to close the foreign aid agency.

The judge said Musk, who is the founder of SpaceX and current adviser to President Donald Trump, most likely violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and separation of powers.

“To deny plaintiffs’ Appointments Clause claim solely on the basis that, on paper, Musk has no formal legal authority relating to the decisions at issue, even if he is actually exercising significant authority on governmental matters, would open the door to an end-run around the Appointments Clause,” Chuang wrote.

“If a president could escape Appointments Clause scrutiny by having advisers go beyond the traditional role of White House advisers who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads and instead exercise significant authority throughout the federal government so as to bypass duly appointed officers, the Appointments Clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality,” he wrote.

Musk was put in charge of DOGE by Trump, shortly after his inauguration in January, and announced plans to shut down USAID.

USAID, which administers billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to more than 100 countries, announced last month that most of its “direct hire” workers were being placed on leave as the agency prepared to be turned over to Secretary of State Marco Rubio‘s control.

The American Foreign Service Association has called the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle USAID a subversion of congressional authority because USAID “directly supports U.S. security and global stability.”

In Tuesday’s ruling, Chuang said Musk’s decision “usurped the authority of the public’s elected representatives in Congress to make decisions on whether, when and how to eliminate a federal government agency, and of officers of the United States duly appointed under the Constitution to exercise the authority entrusted to them.”

Musk responded to Tuesday’s decision in a post on X, referencing an article on Judge Chuang’s appointment by former President Barack Obama, with one word: “Indeed.”

A federal district judge in Maryland has found that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appear to have breached the United States Constitution through their efforts to dismantle an agency dedicated to distributing foreign aid.

Judge Theodore Chuang issued the preliminary ruling on Tuesday, in response to a complaint filed by 26 employees and contractors for the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

“The Court finds that Defendants’ actions taken to shut down USAID on an accelerated basis, including its apparent decision to permanently close USAID headquarters without the approval of a duly appointed USAID Officer, likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways,” Chuang wrote in his decision.

Not only were the plaintiffs harmed, he added, but the “public interest” was also.

DOGE and Musk “deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down an agency created by Congress”, Chuang said.

As a result of that finding, the judge approved a temporary injunction that would prevent DOGE and Musk from continuing with USAID-related staff cuts, contract cancellations, building closures and the destruction of USAID materials.

“The restrictions will assist in maintaining the status quo so as to delay a premature, final shutdown of USAID,” Chuang wrote.

It was a significant blow to Musk, whose role in the government has been ambiguous – but who has wielded significant power due to his close relationship with US President Donald Trump.

A tech billionaire and one of the wealthiest men in the world, Musk is considered a “special government employee”, a temporary role often given to outside advisers.

In that role, however, he has led DOGE in a vast campaign to restructure the federal government, through downsizing its workforce, ending contracts and attempting to shutter entire agencies.

USAID was one of the first in DOGE’s crosshairs. Upon taking office for a second term on January 20, Trump issued a presidential order calling for a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid – a central part of USAID’s work.

Established in 1961 by an act of Congress, USAID had become the US’s primary arm for distributing foreign assistance abroad.

But under Trump’s order, only aid that aligned with the president’s foreign policy would be allowed to continue.

Musk became the face of the campaign to close USAID entirely. “USAID is a criminal organization,” he wrote on his social media platform X on February 2, without offering proof. “Time for it to die.”

Later that day, Musk posted another message on X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

By the end of February, the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, was effectively closed, with employees given only 15 minutes to collect their belongings. An estimated 1,600 workers were fired, and another 4,700 were put on leave.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio eventually announced that 83 percent of all USAID contracts had been cancelled.

To justify the cuts across government, Musk and Trump have repeatedly accused departments and agencies of having perpetrated “waste” and “fraud”, without offering proof.

Given that USAID was established as an independent agency under Congress’s Foreign Assistance Act, Judge Chuang ruled that Musk’s actions “likely violates the constitutional principle of Separation of Powers”.

As part of Tuesday’s injunction, Chuang required DOGE to restore USAID employees’ access to electronic systems and called for the department to restore any deleted emails.

Trump allies, however, quickly slammed Chuang – an appointee of former President Barack Obama – for his temporary injunction.

Musk reposted a social media message from conservative commentator Charlie Kirk which accused Chuang of partisanship. “Indeed”, Musk wrote in a one-word reply.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the Constitution and blocked billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from further cuts to the agency.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to restore email and computer access to all employees of USAID, including those who were placed on administrative leave.

The lawsuit singled out Musk as a defendant covered by the preliminary injunction. Lawyers for USAID employees and contractors had requested the order.

In February, the Trump administration placed all but a fraction of USAID’s worldwide staff on leave and notified at least 1,600 of its U.S.-based staffers they were being fired. The effort to gut the six-decade-old aid agency was part of a broader push to cancel billions of dollars in foreign spending.

Trump on Inauguration Day issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all U.S. aid and development work abroad. Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.

Whitehurst and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press.

United States President Donald Trump has suspended nearly all operations of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for 90 days, leaving millions of people without critical support. HIV clinics shut down overnight, cutting off life-saving treatment, while diseases like cholera and malaria are set to spread. Food aid programmes from Venezuela to the Democratic Republic of the Congo have halted, and many students can no longer continue their education. USAID’s crucial work in healthcare, human rights and education is now frozen, disrupting thousands of global projects and lives. What will be the long-term impact of this decision?

Far from being a tragedy for Africa, the demise of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) at the hands of President Donald Trump’s administration should be cause for celebration, argues Arikana Chihombori-Quao, the former ambassador of the African Union to the US.

Chihombori-Quao tells host Steve Clemons that USAID doesn’t have much to show for its decades of education and healthcare projects in Africa and often destabilised countries under the guise of environmental, human rights or social justice agendas.

And if the US is not interested in Africa, African leaders shouldn’t beg for better relations, she said. “It takes two to tango,” the former diplomat said.

WASHINGTON — President Trump overstepped his constitutional authority in freezing almost all spending on U.S. humanitarian and development work abroad, a federal judge ruled, saying the administration could no longer simply sit on the tens of billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated for foreign aid.

But Judge Amir H. Ali stopped short of ordering Trump officials to use the money to revive the thousands of contracts they have abruptly terminated for U.S. aid and development work around the world.

Ali’s ruling Monday evening came hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the administration had finished what has been a six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development, cutting 83% of them. Rubio said he would move the remaining aid programs under the State Department.

Rubio made his announcement in a post on X, in one of his few public comments on what has been a historic shift away from U.S. foreign aid and development, executed by Trump political appointees at the State Department and Elon Musk’s White House advisory team, which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Rubio in the post thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign aid.

Trump on Jan. 20 issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all U.S. aid and development work abroad. Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.

Rubio’s social media post Monday said that review was now “officially ending,” with some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs eliminated. Those programs “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote. About 1,000 remaining contracts would now be administered by the State Department, he said.

Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally funded programs illegal, saying such a move requires Congress’ approval.

In his preliminary injunction Monday, Ali said Trump could not simply ignore most of what is roughly $60 billion in foreign assistance funding that was given to USAID and State by Congress, which under the U.S. Constitution has the authority to spend money.

“The constitutional power over whether to spend foreign aid is not the President’s own — and it is Congress’s own,” Ali wrote, adding elsewhere that Trump officials “offer an unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected.”

But Ali declined the request from nonprofit groups and businesses to revive the canceled contracts for foreign assistance work around the world, saying it was up to the administration to make decisions on specific contracts. The mass contract cancellations also were a separate matter than the funding freeze that two global health groups, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council, had originally gone to court to challenge, he said.

Ali also ordered Trump officials to pay all of the roughly $2 billion it owed to aid groups and businesses up to mid-February, and ordered them to do it at a pace of at least 300 back payments a day.

Despite claims from the administration it was continuing to fund at least life-saving programs in its foreign aid freeze, USAID staffers and the agency’s nonprofit and business partners say all payments through USAID were cut off until recently, and that USAID’s payment system itself was disabled by Musk’s DOGE.

Ali’s ruling came after the Supreme Court had rejected the Trump administration’s appeal in the case.

USAID supporters said the sweep of the cuts have made it difficult to tell what U.S. efforts abroad the Trump administration actually supports.

“The patterns that are emerging is the administration does not support democracy programs, they don’t support civil society … they don’t support NGO programs,” or health or emergency response, said Andrew Natsios, the USAID administrator for Republican former President George W. Bush.

“So what’s left”?” Natsios asked.

Republicans broadly have made clear they want foreign assistance that would promote a far narrower interpretation of U.S. national interests going forward.

The dismantling of USAID that followed Trump’s order upended decades of policy that humanitarian and development aid abroad advanced U.S. national security by stabilizing regions and economies, strengthening alliances and building goodwill.

The State Department said in a court filing earlier this month it was killing more than 90% of USAID programs. Rubio gave no explanation for why his number was lower.

In the weeks after Trump’s order, one of his appointees and transition team members, Pete Marocco, and Musk pulled USAID staff around the world off the job through forced leaves and firings, shut down USAID payments overnight and terminated aid and development contracts by the thousands.

The shutdown has left many USAID staffers and contractors and their families still overseas, many of them awaiting back payments and travel expenses to return home.

The Trump administration on Monday gave USAID staffers abroad until April 6 to move back to the United States if they want to do so on the government’s tab, according to a USAID email sent to staffers and seen by the Associated Press. Staffers say the deadline gives them scant time to pull children from school, sell homes or break leases, and, for many, find somewhere to live after years away from the United States.

Knickmeyer writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this reported.

The Trump administration has targeted USAID as part of his efforts to trim government spending and reduce ‘waste’.

The United States has cancelled 83 percent of all the programmes at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) following a six-week review, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“The 5,200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote in a post on the social media platform X.

Rubio did not specify exactly which programmes were being cancelled and which would be allowed to continue.

However, he added that the remaining approximately 1,000 programmes would be administered “more effectively” under the State Department and in consultation with Congress.

The top US diplomat also thanked the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — an advisory body headed by billionaire Elon Musk — for its role in achieving “this overdue and historic reform”.

A few hours later, Musk responded: “Tough, but necessary. Good working with you. The important parts of USAID should always have been with Dept of State.”

Musk, with the blessing of President Donald Trump, has led a broad campaign of layoffs and downsizing within the federal government, arguing it was necessary to combat “waste” and “fraud”.

The New York Times reported last week that there had been open tension between Musk and Rubio at a recent cabinet meeting over proposed cuts to the State Department.

USAID in turmoil?

According to its official website, USAID is the “principal US agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms”.

But when Trump returned to office for a second term on January 20, he immediately ordered a 90-day pause on foreign aid, pending a review of whether the country’s aid programmes align with his “America First” foreign policy.

This order, and ensuing stop-work orders, threw USAID into turmoil, halting the agency’s operations around the world, jeopardising the delivery of life-saving food and medical aid, and throwing global humanitarian relief efforts into chaos.

USAID previously employed more than 10,000 workers, but in late February, 1,600 people were laid off, and 4,200 were placed on leave.

The majority of those put on leave are not expected to be reinstated. Sources told the Reuters news agency on February 6 that the Trump administration hoped to cut the staff to less than 300.

Last week, hundreds of American diplomats at the State Department and USAID signed onto a letter denouncing the planned cuts.

“The decision to freeze and terminate foreign aid contracts and assistance awards without any meaningful review jeopardises our partnerships with key allies, erodes trust, and creates openings for adversaries to expand their influence,” said the letter, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.

US Senator Bernie Sanders also slammed the dismantling of USAID last week, saying it would lead “to millions of preventable deaths”.

Before the aid freeze, the US was the largest distributor of foreign assistance in the world, and USAID was its primary mechanism for disbursing those funds.

In 2023, the US provided $72bn of assistance worldwide, which supported everything from women’s health in conflict zones to clean water access, HIV/AIDS treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work.

In 2024, that amounted to 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration had finished its six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development, and said he would move the 18% of aid and development programs that survived under the State Department.

Rubio made the announcement in a post on X. It marked one of his relatively few public comments on what has been a historic shift away from U.S. foreign aid and development, executed by Trump political appointees at the State Department and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Rubio in the post thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign aid.

President Trump on Jan. 20 issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all of the tens of billions of dollars of U.S. aid and development work abroad. Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.

Rubio’s social media post Monday said that review was now “officially ending,” with some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs eliminated.

Those programs “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote.

“In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping … to be administered more effectively under the State Department,” he said. Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally-funded programs illegal, saying such a move requires Congress’ approval.

The Trump administration has given almost no details on which aid and development efforts abroad it spared as it mass-emailed contract terminations to aid groups and other USAID partners by the thousands within days earlier this month. The rapid pace, and the steps skipped in ending contracts, left USAID supporters challenging whether any actual program-by-program reviews had taken place.

Aid groups say even some life-saving programs that Rubio and others had promised to spare got the termination notices, such as emergency nutritional support for starving children and drinking water serving sprawling camps for families uprooted by war in Sudan.

Republicans broadly have made clear they want foreign assistance that would promote a far narrower interpretation of U.S. national interests.

The State Department, in one of multiple lawsuits it is battling over its rapid shutdown of USAID, had said earlier this month it was killing more than 90% of USAID programs. Rubio gave no explanation for why his number was lower.

The dismantling of USAID that followed Trump’s order upended decades of policy that humanitarian and development aid abroad advanced U.S. national security by stabilizing regions and economies, strengthening alliances and building goodwill.

In the weeks after Trump’s order, one of his appointees and transition team members, Pete Marocco, and Musk pulled USAID staff around the world off the job through forced leaves and firings, shut down USAID payments overnight and terminated aid and development contracts by the thousands.

Contractors and staffers running efforts including epidemic control, famine prevention, and job and democracy training stopped work. Aid groups and other USAID partners laid off tens of thousands of their workers in the U.S. and abroad.

Lawsuits say the sudden shutdown of USAID has stiffed aid groups and businesses that had contracts with it worth billions of dollars.

The shutdown has left many USAID staffers and contractors and their families still overseas, many of them awaiting U.S.-paid back payments and travel expenses back home.

Knickmeyer writes for the Associated Press.

When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called President Trump this week to discuss the imposition of stiff U.S. tariffs, Trump linked the decision to deadly fentanyl and undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S. along its northern border.

Trump said he blamed Trudeau for “weak border policies” allowing “tremendous amounts” of fentanyl and migrants to “pour into” the U.S.

“I told him that many people have died from Fentanyl that came through the Borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “He said that it’s gotten better, but I said, ‘That’s not good enough.’”

The framing was on brand for Trump in that it cast him as a tough negotiator on two of his favorite political issues: illegal immigration and synthetic opioid deaths. But it also was on brand as another 1% policy war for the president, stoking fear around a proportionally tiny issue.

Seizures of fentanyl at the northern border represented less than 1% of all recent U.S. seizures of the drug nationwide, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Most fentanyl seizures occur along the southern border with Mexico.

Apprehensions of undocumented migrants at the northern border have increased in recent years, but still only represented about 1.5% of apprehensions nationwide in fiscal 2024, according to an analysis by FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Again, most apprehensions occur along the southern border.

Trudeau has repeatedly referenced those relatively small stakes in pushing back against Trump in recent months, calling Trump’s focus on such issues a “pretext” for a trade war that will destabilize Canada’s economy and make it easier to annex, a goal Trump has espoused.

Trump has similarly attacked transgender people, who represent about 1.3% of the U.S. population, according to recent Gallup polling, and foreign aid issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which represents less than 1% of the federal budget, according to multiple analyses.

Trump and his supporters say he is pursuing an “America First” agenda that supports “common sense.” They say even small amounts of fentanyl or fraud in government spending are cause for alarm, and that transgender people represent a growing threat to women and children and deserve equal concern.

But Trump’s critics and other experts reject those defenses as alarmist, inaccurate and unduly dismissive of such policies’ downsides.

In an interview on “The View” last month, transgender actress Laverne Cox blasted Trump for spreading “propaganda and lies” about transgender people being a threat. She noted the community has no real power or influence in the lives of average Americans, and contrasted that with the outsize influence of “the other 1%” — a clear reference to the nation’s ultra-wealthy.

“At the end of the day, trans people are less than 1% of the population, and trans people are not the reason you can’t afford eggs. We’re not the reason that you can’t afford healthcare. We’re not the reason that you can’t buy a house or your rent’s too high,” Cox said. “I think they’re focused on the wrong 1%. I think the other 1% is the reason for all those things.”

LGBTQ+ rights organizations and other critics have echoed that argument, in part by highlighting Trump’s reliance on Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has been trying to close out USAID.

According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, the U.S. government spent $71.9 billion on foreign aid in fiscal 2023, which amounted to 1.2% of that year’s overall federal spending of more than $6.1 trillion. Of that $71.9 billion, less than $43.8 billion was distributed by USAID — meaning its budget was well under 1% of federal funding that year.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) recently drew attention by comparing USAID’s budget to much larger expenditures by the Department of Defense, including on its F35 fighter jet program, and to the roughly $40 billion in federal contracts held by Musk and his companies, which Garcia noted could essentially cover USAID’s entire annual budget.

“The [Republican] majority isn’t talking about Elon Musk’s programs or asking him here to testify. They’re attacking USAID, and are supporting a billionaire who gets richer every single day,” Garcia said. “We gotta push back.”

Musk and Trump have largely brushed off such criticisms. Trump’s supporters have said attempts to cast Trump’s favorite targets as small issues miss the point.

They point to the fact that younger generations of Americans are identifying as LGBTQ+ in greater numbers, and suggest that means “woke” activists will “indoctrinate” even more children if they don’t intervene, which is a baseless claim used to suppress LGBTQ+ rights for generations.

They have alleged with little evidence that USAID is awash in waste and corruption and a major drain on U.S. resources, and that such waste — large or small — should be rooted out anywhere it exists. And they have noted that fentanyl is deadly in even tiny amounts like those seized at the northern border.

When recently asked about imposing such serious tariffs on Canada over such small amounts of fentanyl — just 43 pounds were seized at the northern border last year — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt avoided the issue of scale and called the question “disrespectful to the families in this country who have lost loved ones at the hands of this deadly poison.”

She said Trump has spoken to those families, and they are grateful he is imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China for their roles in fentanyl reaching the U.S. “There need to be consequences for that. Period,” Leavitt said.

Republican leaders also have backed the president. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, for instance, said fentanyl is a major issue that many Americans expect Trump to address, and Trump is using tariffs to do so.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said Trump’s amplification of relatively small issues into major threats to his constituents — and putting human faces to those issues, as he did at his joint address to Congress this week — is not a new political tactic, but one he uses particularly well.

“President Trump masterfully plays to his base’s fears by exaggerating the extent and significance of problems and their effects in dramatized detail,” she said.

Such plays on fear can be effective politically, but can also carry “costs that are disproportionate to any benefit,” Jamieson said.

Halting every fentanyl package from Canada would hardly make a dent in the U.S. opioid epidemic, but Trump’s tariffs will have a major negative effect on individual consumers, industry and the relationship between the two countries, she said. Cuts to USAID — couched by Trump as a simple crackdown on U.S. handouts abroad — will save relatively small amounts of money, but could have major consequences in the U.S., she said, including if infectious diseases that otherwise could have been contained abroad manage to arrive stateside.

Jamieson said placing Trump’s policies within the proper context — and on the right scale — will be important in turning down the temperature in American politics moving forward, as Americans tend to moderate their opinions when they know the facts.

For example, according to a recent KFF poll, 86% of Americans overestimate the share of federal dollars that go to foreign aid, estimating on average that the U.S. spends about a quarter of its budget on such aid.

After being told the figure is closer to 1%, however, the percentage who believe the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid “drops more than twenty percentage points,” KFF found, to just 34%.

United States President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg campaign against the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has demolished the organisation described as the “world’s largest donor” and left aid workers scrambling to salvage the international development aid and humanitarian response system. Many have lamented the grave consequences of the US president’s unprecedented decision as well as moves by other countries, such as the United Kingdom, to cut aid.

In a LinkedIn post commenting on the situation, Luca Crudeli, who said he has been “immersed in development since 2003”, spoke of “the sense that the moral center of our work is quietly slipping away” and “the uneasy realization that development’s humanistic soul might be lost in a shuffle of contracts and strategic scorecards”.

But describing “development” as having a humanistic soul would be to many people in the Global South a contradiction in terms. That is not to say that many people who work in “development” are not decent, moral human beings genuinely interested in improving the welfare of others around the world. Nor is it to deny that the aid industry delivers crucial assistance that millions rely on to survive.

It is to say that the soul of “development” has always been much less humanistic than its proponents assert. In fact, the entire enterprise of aid has been a tool for geopolitical control, a means of preserving, rather than eliminating, global inequality and the resource extraction that feeds it.

In recent days, following the demise of USAID, there has been growing openness about this reality – consciously or unconsciously.

For example, a statement issued by InterAction, which “unites and amplifies the voices of America’s leading humanitarian and development organizations”, made that quite clear. These organisations, it said before a hasty rewrite, “work tirelessly to save lives and advance US interests globally”. It added that the attack on USAID had suspended “programs that support America’s global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill”.

That doesn’t sound very humanistic, does it?

Marina Kobzeva, who has spent nearly two decades as an aid worker commented on how colleagues from the Global North and the Global South reacted differently to the statement. She described the former bemoaning it as “poor wording, … an honest mistake” while the latter expressed a sense of vindication: “Finally, they are showing their true colours.”

Western humanitarianism has not just lost its way. It has been intimately tied to Western colonialism from the start. For example, the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, which set the stage for Europe’s conquest of Africa, was framed as a humanitarian event.

And although the first humanitarian organisations were created to deal with the barbarous consequences of conflict in Europe as post-World War II reconstruction projects wound down, many started playing an active role in the Global South, where they actively propped up imperial domination.

The aid industry, in effect, inherited colonialism’s “civilising mission”. Its do-gooder image papers over the extractive nature of the international system and attempts to ameliorate its worst excesses without actually challenging the system. If anything, the two are in a symbiotic relationship. The aid industry legitimises extractive global trade and governance systems, which in turn produce the outcomes that legitimise the existence of the aid agencies.

As a result, today, despite the proliferation of aid and development agencies, the racialised global order has barely budged, and deep inequality continues to characterise the relations between nations. A 1997 study by the US Congressional Budget Office found that foreign aid played, at best, a marginal role in promoting economic development and improving human welfare and could even “hinder development depending on the environment in which that aid is used and the conditions under which it is given”.

It is thus not surprising that as the aid sector finds itself on the brink, some of those it claims to help would not be entirely saddened to see its back. Heba Aly, a former CEO of The New Humanitarian news agency, noted that at a recent meeting, “some activists from the Global South proved less worried about aid cuts than the donors were in the hope this would force their own leaders to take responsibility & stop depending on aid”.

This highlights how aid substitutes fundamental reform of both global and national systems of colonial extraction for charity.

The hollowing-out of Western aid will undoubtedly be tragic and painful. Some of the world’s most vulnerable people will suffer, and many will die. We must not lose sight of this in arguments about the righteousness or wickedness of aid in general. The fact is, we should address the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, and do all we can to ameliorate the impact.

That said, this is also an opportunity to begin to build a world without aid. “If this is the beginning of the end of aid,” Aly wrote, “we should focus on structural transformation.” That is the reform of global trade and financial systems that have seen the poorest pay for the lifestyles of the rich.

That does not mean it would be a Hobbesian world without solidarity. Rather, it would be one where charity is not allowed to be a cover for global injustice.

And the end of aid should also see the end of “development”, a pernicious ideology that assumes the “developed world”, whose prosperity is built on the ruination of other societies and of the planet, is an example worth emulating. We need to work for an order that truly embodies a humanistic soul.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The foreign aid represents about 1% of the federal budget.

The United States Agency for International Development, which manages 61% of the U.S. foreign aid, had a workforce of 4,675 in March 204.

Employees had 15 minutes to collect personal items from the federal building in Washington, D.C., on Thursday and Friday.

People gathered outside the building to support the ex-USAID employees who were placed on leave, holding signs that read, “You’re not the federal worker that should be fired” and “Make America compassionate again.”

On the day he took office on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump placed a 90-day freeze on foreign aid. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday night temporarily paused a lower court-imposed midnight deadline to restart $2 billion in foreign aid payments.

The Department of Government Efficiency, led by multi-billionaire Elon Musk, investigated the agency and recommended cuts after identifying “wasteful” spending and a liberal agenda on programs and initiatives around the world. President Donald Trump wants to kill the agency, which was formed in the 1960s, and turn over foreign aid to the Department of State.

On Sunday, the Trump administration placed nearly 1,600 USAID employees on administrative leave globally.

USAID provided assistance to around 130 countries in fiscal year 2023. The top 10 recipients were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria.

How cuts affect organizations

The State Department, after finishing a review, terminated nearly 10,000 government contracts worth in humanitarian work abroad with the agency and the State Department. Ninety percent of USAID contracts were ended.

Representatives with nongovernmental agencies are fearful of being publicly identified.

One spokesperson said they were afraid they could lose funding for the few remaining programs not hit by Wednesday’s cuts and another hoped the administration would reconsider the cuts altogether.

“There seems to be no pattern to it” other than shutting down U.S. foreign aid, one humanitarian official told NBC News.

“It’s going to be really hard to drive this truck in reverse, because they’ve washed out the road behind us,” a humanitarian official also told NBC News.

“We are no longer the shining city on a hill,” one humanitarian leader said to ABC News.

The aid cuts are far-reaching, affecting drought-prone populations in Africa, school feeding programs in West Africa, outreach to youth at risk of recruitment to extremist organizations like the Islamic State group, and public health efforts focused on HIV/AIDS.

“Any type of communicable disease, I think we will see rage rampant,” said Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight, an international organization that provides food, medicine and services for refugees in 20 countries around the world, told ABC News. “I think we will see increased conflict in the world. I think we will see increased terrorism in the world. And so, I think, the implications are going to be really dire in terms of the instability that this creates in already very unstable regions of the world.”

Alight halted programs in Uganda and Myanmar but secured waivers from the State Department for lifesaving humanitarian aid to keep their operations going in Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan. But on Thursday, all of Alight’s U.S. contracts have been canceled going forward, even ones related to those programs that had received waivers to continue in the last few weeks.

UNAIDS, the joint United Nations program responding to HIV/AIDS globally, on Friday said it had received a letter terminating funding with immediate effect. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known at PEPFAR, has been credited with saving more than 26 million lives in 55 countries since its creation in 2003, according to UNAIDS.

“The U.S. funding cuts are dismantling the system,” International AIDS Society President Beatriz Grinsztejn said in a statement to NBC News. “HIV treatment is crumbling. TB services are collapsing. No data means no tracking of who’s in care. No counsellors, no HIV testing — even in hospitals. No outreach means people fall through the cracks. Services for the most vulnerable people, including mobile clinics and drop-in centres, are shut down. Lives are on the line.”

Groups dealing with gender-based violence are affected. The International Rescue Committee has been forced to shut down some of its operations, according to its president.

“These are people who depend on the U.S.-funded services for the basics of survival,” President and CEO David Miliband said in a statement to ABC News. “These programs are not just numbers on a spreadsheet; they represent real lives and real futures. The countries affected by these cuts — including Sudan, Yemen, Syria — are home to millions of innocent civilians who are victims of war and disaster. We now face the starkest of stark choices about which services can be protected, and are calling on the American public, corporations and philanthropists to show that America’s generosity of spirit and commitment to the most vulnerable has not been lost.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. International Organization for Migration told NBC News that the cuts directly affect the organization’s “ability to support some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Development Alternatives, a USAID-funded international development organization, works in 160 countries and said it received termination notices for more than 90% of its contracts. DAI assistance includes help after natural disasters.

“We prefinance all that work, then we invoice the government for reimbursement; without that reimbursement, we can’t pay our staff, our partners, our vendors, our creditors,” spokesman Steven O’Connor told NBC News.

International Medical Corps, one of the largest first responder and disaster relief organizations in the world, said in a statement that they received cancellation notices for “the majority of our U.S. government-funded programs” late Wednesday night.

The IMC, which works in over 30 countries, said they provided direct health care services to over 16.5 million people It had received about half of its funding from the U.S.

It is running only two of the only field hospitals still operational in Gaza.