USAID: Goodbye to All That? 

In South Africa and Kenya, HIV clinics have shuttered, depriving people of life-saving medication. In Uganda, where treatment has also halted, aid workers estimate that forty newborns contract the virus every day. In Yemen, Norwegian People’s Aid has paused demining activities. In Thailand, the International Rescue Committee has turned refugees from Myanmar away from its closed hospitals. In northern Haiti, Konbit Sante, an American NGO, has stopped administering prenatal and newborn care. In Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, community-organized Emergency Response Rooms have closed over two-thirds of their soup kitchens, which fed almost a million civilians. 

It’s difficult to know how many starving people will be affected by the Trump administration’s gutting of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), since the Famine Early Warning System, a US-funded program that monitors global food crises, has been taken offline. But in dozens of interviews with humanitarians and development workers, I heard the same refrain: thousands of people, if not tens of thousands, will die.

The assault began on inauguration day, when the president signed an executive order pausing all foreign assistance for three months. During this period, projects were to be reviewed to see if they were consistent with his “America First” agenda. Secretary of State Marco Rubio then sent a cable to all US diplomatic and consular missions putting Trump’s order into effect. It contained a stop-work order on nearly all foreign assistance, with exemptions for military aid to Egypt and Israel, and a carve-out for emergency food programs. 

While in 2023 just over 1 percent of the federal budget was assigned to USAID, the agency funded approximately 40 percent of global humanitarian activities and a substantial proportion of development work. (Humanitarianism and development, while related, are separate enterprises. The former deals with emergencies; the latter concerns long-term economic and social planning.) On January 28 Rubio issued an exemption for “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” but it was as vaguely worded as the earlier carve-out for food relief. Humanitarians told me it wasn’t clear what the exemption covered or how they could acquire written authorization for programs. No one at USAID was picking up the phone. On February 11 the agency’s inspector general, Paul Martin, warned that $500 million in food aid was stuck in ports and on ships. He was fired the next day.

Rubio’s cable was drafted by Peter Marocco, a former marine with no experience in the aid industry, whom Trump appointed to head the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance. On February 3 Rubio also designated him as the deputy administrator of USAID, putting him in charge of reviewing the agency. Marocco had cycled through a number of positions during Trump’s first administration. As Assistant to the Administrator of USAID’s Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, he cancelled dozens of programs and tried to bring the bureau’s policies in line with his idiosyncratic understanding of national security—opposing programs in Ukraine, for instance. In an internal dissent channel memo to the USAID leadership, staffers in the bureau complained that Marocco’s actions had led to plummeting staff morale. In 2023, now out of office, he appeared at a Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary and denounced foreign aid for funding abortions, gay pride parades, and terrorism. 

On January 27 Marocco walked into the headquarters of USAID surrounded by members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to a USAID staffer, Marocco intended to finish a task he had started during Trump’s first administration: dismembering the agency. That day later nearly sixty senior officials, much of the agency’s institutional memory, were put on leave. This purge would seem almost amiable given what was to follow. After they tried to prevent DOGE from accessing confidential files, USAID Director of Security John Voorhees and one of his deputies were placed on administrative leave. On February 3 the agency’s headquarters was shuttered. Its website, which had been taken offline over the prior weekend, later flickered back to life, only to show a single page announcing that almost all USAID personnel would be placed on leave and that staff working abroad would have to return home. A roughly ten-thousand-person workforce would be reduced to a few hundred. Outside the closed headquarters, someone placed a painting of a gravestone: RIP-USAID. 1961-2025.

Rather than conducting its own development or humanitarian operations, USAID funds a variety of implementing partners, including UN agencies, NGOs, and for-profit firms. Those groups submit invoices once they have finished contracted work, often months after the fact. In mid-February the NGO Humentum noted that three quarters of the nearly hundred organizations it surveyed had not been paid for tasks completed before the stop-work order went into effect. 

On January 20, after the USAID payment system was shut down, many organizations were forced to lay off staff. The Norwegian Refugee Council has halted operations in twenty countries, including Afghanistan and Sudan; Norwegian People’s Aid has let go of half of its employees; the Danish Refugee Council has cut around a quarter of its workforce; the Catholic Relief Services anticipate similar cuts. Around half of the 568 implementing partners that Global Aid Freeze Tracker surveyed reported losing half of their income.

UN agencies are also affected. USAID funded more than 40 percent of the respective budgets of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the International Organization of Migration (IOM), and the World Food Programme. The IOM administers the US Refugees Admissions Program (USRAP)—which was also halted as part of the freeze—and terminated the contracts of three thousand people who worked for it, leaving in limbo a hundred thousand refugees who had already been vetted and were preparing to come to the US. 

Eighty percent of the world’s humanitarian organizations are made up of local NGOs. These groups are often subcontracted by larger aid agencies, doing the lion’s share of the labor for a fraction of the funding. Largely lacking the capital to pay salaries without USAID support, they were hardest hit by the stop-work order. In Nairobi and Kampala, where this article was written, I spoke to shellshocked humanitarians who had lost their jobs. “Does Trump realize what he has done?” asked one South Sudanese friend, who had worked for an agency that was entirely funded by USAID. “My salary kept my children in school in Uganda and fed twelve of my relatives. There are no jobs here. There is nothing I can do to replace what was taken from me.” 

A carve-out for emergency food aid and waivers for “life-saving humanitarian assistance” should have allowed some programs to continue. The purge of USAID, however, meant that many of the staffers who could have restarted the relevant programs had lost their jobs or had been put on administrative leave. A gag order in relation to the imbroglio prevented even those still employed from responding to partners asking for clarification about waivers. Humanitarians told me of e-mails that got no response and phone calls that went unanswered. Even some programs that received waivers cannot resume operations, because the agency’s payment system is still frozen. 

Projects funded by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)—which supports HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research in more than fifty countries—were authorized to receive limited waivers to “implement urgent life-saving HIV treatment services.” Yet not all PEPFAR waivers have been approved, and, according to The New York Times, employees were directed to cease issuing them. The International Aids Society estimates that this has put the lives of twenty million people at risk. Decisions since then have made the question of waivers rather academic: on February 27 USAID sent out letters to PEPFAR-funded organizations in South Africa announcing that their grants have been terminated.

This deliberate chaos has created an atmosphere of terror that I am more accustomed to encountering when dealing with dissidents who have survived dictatorial regimes in Sudan and Syria—places where USAID typically funds programs. One staffer I spoke to said that photographs of those who had died on the job were pulled down from the walls at headquarters. The purges have left people paranoid and fearful of retribution. None of my interlocutors would speak on the record. 

On February 7 Carol J. Nichols, a federal judge in D.C., blocked USAID from placing 2,200 employees on administrative leave and suspended the recall of all employees serving abroad—an order that he later extended. But Nichols lifted the block after Marocco demonstrated to the court that his decisions were not irreparably harming staffers. On February 23 a new note was posted on the USAID website, announcing the firing of 1,600 personnel and the placement of almost all staff on administrative leave. The same day USAID employees began receiving termination letters signed by Marocco. 

In response to another legal challenge, Amir Ali, a district judge in D.C., ordered the administration to unfreeze foreign aid, on the basis that a blanket suspension of funds was financially harming the plaintiffs, a group of implementing partners. On March 5 the Supreme Court narrowly upheld Ali’s ruling, ordering the administration to release almost two billion dollars for work already carried out. The judgment provides relief to some USAID partners, but it will not change the shape of the agency’s future. On March 10 Rubio took to X to announce that the review of USAID was now complete. Five thousand two hundred contracts were cut, comprising 83 percent of the programs funded by the agency.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Trump administration has imperiled the very existence of the humanitarian and development industries. Without support from USAID, the large-scale projects of the last three decades are unlikely to continue. They will probably be replaced by a more transactional model of foreign assistance, already in evidence in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the Gulf’s development loans—which are made to countries, not to NGOs, often as part of a political quid pro quo. 

For some, this is an overdue correction. “The humanitarian project was always undergirded by American unipolar hegemony,” one analyst told me. “The transactional forms of development aid we shall now see represent the more multipolar world in which we live.” Perhaps. But such prognostications do not answer the catastrophe of the present: in the coming weeks and months, no one will step in to replace the US government, and thousands who depended on USAID-funded programs will suffer. 

To grasp the full implications of Trump’s policy, one must understand a contradiction at the center of USAID’s history. While it was always a tool of American soft-power that emerged in a world of cold-war-realpolitik, the agency also contained a dream, at which Rubio has taken aim. That dream was to develop postcolonial nations. It never came anywhere close to being realized, and it largely died during the misadventures of Afghanistan and Iraq. But it nevertheless helped create projects that have improved the lives of millions of people. The more transactional world announced by the decisions of the Trump administration has no place for such relics. 

USAID was founded at the height of the cold war in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy folded the Development Loan Fund and the International Cooperation Agency into one organization. He intended the agency to be part of the struggle against the Soviet Union, which was supporting anticolonial movements and sending aid to newly independent nations. In a special message addressed to Congress on March 22, he observed that Third World nations needed American help: “Without exception they are under Communist pressure.” But USAID was not intended merely “negatively to fight Communism.” Its task was rather to “help make a historical demonstration that in the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth—in the southern half of the globe as in the north—economic growth and political democracy can develop hand in hand.” As Kennedy told the first group of mission directors in 1962: “We do not send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be under attack, we send you.”

From the beginning, there was a tension between the diplomatic and developmental aspects of his vision. In fact the two frequently worked at cross purposes. Carol Lancaster, in her study Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics, notes that the US often provided foreign aid to authoritarian regimes for political reasons, making them even less democratic and propping up their rulers.¹ Aid dispensations tracked America’s cold war priorities, declining in the 1960s in Latin America as the threat of communist revolution receded, rising in Vietnam and Cambodia. In the 1970s and 1980, dictatorships in Zaïre, Indonesia, and the Philippines were given lavish programs as rewards for opposing communism. Much of this largesse disappeared into the pockets of the elite. But development also became an end in itself, as USAID instituted long-term country programs, implemented by for-profit development firms and NGOs. In the 1970s USAID made large-scale investments in agricultural technology in Asia.

These development schemes soon showed signs of failing. Rather than overseeing projects that raised living standards, USAID found itself trying to stave off total disaster. Humanitarian relief increasingly took up more of the agency’s budget, as it responded to famines in the Sahel (the late 1960s to the early 1980s) and Bangladesh (1974). Between 1974 and 1975 the amount of food aid distributed by USAID-backed projects doubled, to the applause of farmers in the Midwest, from whom much of the produce was purchased. 

Humanitarianism was no more successful than development aid. The growth of NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa was propelled by state collapse, after the oil shock of the 1970s tanked demand for African commodities. While NGOs stepped in to provide services such as health care and food aid, they were often more responsive to foreign donors than to the people they served. CARE—an American NGO almost entirely funded by USAID from 1970 to 1980—decided that its priorities in that period included building schools across the Sahel, as part of “disaster relief.” The Malian government initially opposed the project because it did not reflect the needs of its people, but eventually relented. Rather than address the political roots of the famines in the Sahel, such as the displacement of pastoralists and small-hold farmers and the debt crises gripping African governments, organizations like CARE initiated stop-gap relief measures. From 1945 to 1983, CARE delivered $2.8 billion in food aid to six-five countries, almost all of it American grain.²

In Africa, foreign aid—both development and humanitarianism—simply didn’t work. During the 1970s the continent was awash in foreign assistance (some $36 billion), much of it from America, yet at the end of the 1980s it was poorer than it had been ten years earlier.³ This period has come to be known as Africa’s “lost decade.”

In the aftermath of the cold war, USAID took on a new role. As Bush père moved to support Poland, Hungary, and their neighbors, funding for “democracy assistance”—which included things like drafting new constitutions and training political parties—went from $165 million in 1991 to $635 million in 1999. As Michael Ignatieff has observed, a band of weak or failed states stretching from North Africa through the Balkans and the Middle East to South Asia became choice ground for nation-building efforts. The most prized territory was Eastern Europe, where US diplomats hoped to foster new states and liberalized markets. 

In the 2000s USAID continued to expand, even as its politics shifted back to a war footing. After the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the agency’s budget skyrocketed, as the government alternated bombing civilians with building schools. Aid was once again deployed to combat an ideology—this time, Islamism. By 2010 the US government was spending $106 billion a year in Afghanistan, more than the country’s GDP. Almost four years after the fall of Kabul, there’s little to show for the billions spent, except for the houses the elite have built in Dubai. 

Amid the fiascos of “war on terror”-directed development, there were some bright moments. The period produced USAID’s two greatest successes, both initiatives of Bush fils. Over two decades, PEPFAR, at a cost of $110 billion—less than Musk’s net worth increased in the month following Trump’s election—is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. The President’s Malaria Initiative, which delivered medicine and mosquito nets around the world, is arguably even more influential. Since it began in 2005, malaria mortality has fallen by 60 percent. These projects, at little cost to the American taxpayer, have radically transformed the world, and are exemplary of the idealistic impulse at the heart of USAID, even as they were shoehorned into imperialist strategies. The contradiction with which agency began would continue through to the present.

USAID supporters like Andrew Natsios, who administered the agency under George W. Bush, aver that it unequivocally benefits America. In addition to the evident moral good achieved by programs like PEPFAR, USAID-funded projects were the best, cheapest advertisement that the government could buy. Democracy initiatives produced politicians and journalists who often looked favorably on the US. Children across the globe used school textbooks stamped with the words “From the American People.” Conversely, as USAID collapses, China, with its infrastructure funding and Russia, with its mercenaries, may gain the upper hand in the Global South. Last month, at the Munich Security Conference, the Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama noted that his government had needed to cut spending by $156 million because of Trump’s aid freeze. His warning to the US was clear: “As bridges are burning, new bridges are being formed.”

If Natsios has praised USAID as a tool of American power, scholars on the left have critiqued it for a similar reason. In 1994 Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar coauthored a report, “Humanitarianism Unbound,” that portrayed what they called the humanitarian industry as a marketplace, in which firms were more interested in expanding budgets and expatriate salaries than in preventing famine. (Their case studies included Sudan and Ethiopia.) The aid industry has also harmed local economies. In the 1980s USAID flooded Haiti with subsidized American rice while the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which the agency funded, pushed the Haitian government to reorient production toward export crops. National rice production collapsed, leading to protests in 1987, when Haitians attacked imports of “Miami rice,” so-called because of the stamp on the sacks. 

Bill Clinton publicly apologized in 2010, stating that his policy “may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked.” Worse was to come. That year, immediately after the earthquake, humanitarian organizations distributed forty million pounds of food aid in Haiti. For local farmers, it was a death sentence. Over the next three years USAID spent $485 million: less than 1 percent went to Haitian organizations, while 67 percent went to companies in and around D.C. As Jack Johnston has argued in Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti, USAID-funded projects have eroded Haitian sovereignty and undermined local businesses.⁴ In 2025 nearly half the Haitian population will face acute food insecurity.

In the last decade, as many USAID-funded projects failed on their own terms, they also came under fire from the center. After Afghanistan and Iraq, few in the State Department still believe that westerners can build nation-states for other people. As the Council of Foreign Relations has noted: “Nation-building abroad has become a neuralgic term in American politics.” Even those of my interlocutors who back development projects in principle thought that many of them were wasteful. This is certainly true in South Sudan, where USAID has spent over $10 billion since independence in 2011—though the country is poorer and more violent than ever. Schemes to “build the capacity of vulnerable youth” and “improve access to credible, accurate, and reliable media” have improved neither the prospects of youth employment nor those of independent media organizations. The agency’s projects have consistently failed to engage with the country’s principal challenge: a kleptocratic elite that has violently displaced its own citizenry. Far from improving the South Sudanese government, foreign money has sustained it. 

Some interviewees told me the USAID budget should be stripped back and focused on core humanitarian activities: food, water, and shelter. The bulk of funding in South Sudan indeed already goes to such projects, but they are consistently manipulated by the government, which blocks resources to putative opponents and diverts them to allied communities. Moreover, as the regime has ceased providing services, humanitarians have stepped into the gap. Over 60 percent of South Sudan’s population is now reliant on humanitarian aid. Similar numbers exist elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. 

My interlocutors conveyed a sense that the aid system has failed. Development did not transform economies, and in its wake humanitarianism became a life-support system for places like South Sudan. This arrangement prevents an absolute catastrophe, but creates a permanent emergency; it keeps people alive, but props up the very regimes that exploit them. These are all reasons for a radical rethinking of USAID-funded programs—but this is not what Trump is doing. 

The president claims that USAID is run by “radical lunatics.” Elon Musk describes it as “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” The Center for Renewing America (CRA), a think tank run by the new director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, published a brief arguing that the agency is introducing “an unsuspecting world to woke ideology.” In an interview with Fox News, Rubio said: 

They have basically evolved into an agency that believes that they’re not even a US government agency…they’re a global charity…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… One of the most common complaints you will get if you go to embassies around the world from State Department officials and ambassadors and the like is USAID is not only not cooperative; they undermine the work that we’re doing in that country; they are supporting programs that upset the host government for whom we’re trying to work with on a broader scale.

The administration’s leaders emerge from a right-wing ecosystem that is deeply skeptical of Kennedy’s vision for USAID. In Foreign Policy, Joshua Meservey, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, pointed out that countries like South Africa, which receive large amounts of US foreign assistance, still routinely align with Russia at the UN Security Council. They treat aid as something that is owed to them, he contended, rather than something they must reciprocate. Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the CRA, told me that USAID has become “a vanguard of a transnational class of liberal ideologues, only financially benefiting a class of NGOcratic middle managers.” Rubio has proposed merging the agency with the State Department, pending Congressional approval, to bring it more directly under the Trump administration’s control.

Such arguments overstate USAID’s independence. Congress allocates resources to the agency, and it has long commanded cross-party support. At a hearing on the USAID cuts, Natsios stated bluntly: “USAID was more aligned with President Bush’s foreign policy than the State Department was, and sometimes even than the Defense Department was…. I’m a conservative Republican and the notion that USAID is some kind of Marxist institution is absolutely ridiculous.” He firmly opposed the move to merge the agency with the State Department, noting that staffers of the latter, without expertise in development, will struggle to run complex multimillion-dollar projects.

The cancellation of DEI grants has become a circus display for Trump’s base. On social media, Musk circulates lists of the absurd, disturbing activities on which US money has been spent: a grant to support the Haitian LGBTI community; another for a transgender comic book in Peru; $50 million to provide condoms to Hamas in Gaza. (This claim, much circulated on social media, turns out to be false. The Gaza in question is a province in Mozambique, and the money—which was not fifty million—was for a broad range of services to prevent HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, but did not include cash for condoms.) In February Musk was pressed on this error at a press conference in the White House. He was nonchalant. “I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million of condoms to anywhere.”

The war against USAID is not merely, or even primarily, a question of foreign policy, even if its global consequences are catastrophic. It is rather an initial attack on the federal government—an attempt to see how far the system can be pushed, before DOGE takes on mightier quarries, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency. USAID, which lacks a domestic constituency—other than farmers, who have already lodged complaints about the cuts—was an easy target, and one that contained many enemies. As Quinn Slobodian recently noted in these pages, Vought’s assault on the OMB and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was part of a campaign to take over a state ostensibly dominated by leftists. Vought believes that USAID was a crucial part of the leftist armory; the state used foreign assistance to win a cultural war for the woke. The very efficacy of the agency’s soft power, in other words, made it a target for the politicians reconfiguring America. 

The gutting of USAID is part of a trend: over the past decade, countries in the Global North have scaled back their aid programs. This transformation has its origins in the crunch of austerity that followed the 2008 financial crash, and the emergence of right-wing, isolationist political movements. In 2023 the European Union moved more than 2 billion euros from its development portfolio to support for Ukraine and migration management. This year Germany cut its humanitarian assistance budget in half; France has made a similar plan. Since Trump suspended foreign assistance, other countries have jumped on the bandwagon: in February the UK slashed its aid budget and Switzerland announced it would dial back funding for UN agencies. In 2024 the UN humanitarian proposal was less than half funded.

But the problem is larger than funding. My interlocutors felt that the Global North has grown increasingly skeptical of the aid system’s underlying principles. Foreign assistance is taking on a more transactional character—as the Trump administration indicated when it threatened to halt all aid to South Africa and to admit Afrikaner farmers as refugees unless the country abandons policies hostile to white landowners and drops its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. 

A few humanitarians surveyed the new state of affairs and concluded that it was excellent. US withdrawal from a position of global leadership, they suggested, will allow for more Global South–to–Global South collaboration. Local organizations will work with their constituents, without having to please donors. There will be less money for repressive regimes to steal. UN agencies and large NGOs will slim down and refocus on humanitarian services, not democracy initiatives. One NGO program director was going to fly to Saudi Arabia to seek funds.

Notwithstanding these optimistic projections, the future is likely to be bleak. Some of my interlocutors hoped that BRICS would take the lead in organizing South-South humanitarian assistance, but it has shown no sign of doing so. It’s also not clear that the Gulf or China will step into the space left by America. The former’s foreign assistance programs have tended to be state-focused, and more transactional even than Trump’s proposals. For instance, the United Arab Emirates’s recent $1.5 billon development loans for Chad and Kenya are designed to buy support for its ally, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. USAID’s decline might not mean a less imperialistic world but rather one with more varied imperialisms. 

In a press statement issued on January 26, Rubio identified three questions that would organize American foreign assistance going forward: “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Already USAID staff have been attacked in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By interrupting food aid in Somalia and the Sahel, the US has played into the hands of Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda, which use hunger as a recruitment tool. Canceling medical trials and terminating supplies of life-saving medicines has probably soured a generation against America. The US is not stronger, safer, or more prosperous that it was two months ago. 

The project Kennedy heralded when he created USAID was to enable economic development and political democracy in the Global South. It did not come to pass. Since the late 1970s China’s internal policies have lifted many more people out of poverty than USAID’s various schemes. Africa today has a larger proportion of the world’s poor than at any time in its history. Countries in the Sahel that received significant US assistance form part of a coup-belt that has decisively rejected the slim rewards of American and French influence in favor of Russian support. 

Meanwhile humanitarian needs are only growing. The United Nations estimates that 305 million people will need humanitarian assistance in 2025, six million more than last year, and 180 million more than in 2016. Few still embrace Kennedy’s ideas, as evidenced by the collapse of aid funding worldwide. America is not special in this regard. Trump’s uniqueness, here as in so much else, is in how cruelly he brought the curtain down.