Few foresaw the speed and magnitude of the world-spanning cuts pursued by Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service (the Department of Government Efficiency).
First came an executive order that paused all international assistance, followed by a stop-work order that ground aid projects to a halt. While some programs received limited waivers to continue, including those deemed to offer lifesaving assistance, funding for these was often disrupted.
Three months in, the Trump administration has axed more than 80 percent of programs funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development, removed all but a handful of about 10,000 employees and folded the agency into the State Department. Much of what remains faces an uncertain future.
The State Department is “continually evaluating” U.S. aid efforts “to ensure they make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” read a statement from the agency last week. USAID’s remaining programs “advance the core national interests of the United States,” the statement said. It highlighted work on the Ebola outbreak in Uganda, “lifesaving” HIV care and treatment services, emergency treatment in conflict zones, and support for “key American strategic partners.”
USAID and the State Department oversaw some 90 percent of the U.S. foreign aid budget as of 2023. Trump and Rubio plan to cut State Department funding nearly in half. The full extent of cuts has yet to be fully quantified, as Trump’s budget takes shape.
The United States accounted for 40 percent of all humanitarian aid the United Nations tracked last year. Aid groups around the world are navigating the new reality. It has been “enormously hard to communicate to staff, to clients, to people, in some cases, whose lives are at stake — the outcome of these deliberations that are happening in darkened offices somewhere in Washington, D.C.,” said Simon Adams, head of the Center for Victims of Torture, an organization that offers counseling to survivors of torture in Ethiopia, Jordan and elsewhere.
Here is how the first three months of Trump’s second term have affected aid organizations on the front lines of crises around the world.
Lifesaving care in South Sudan
South Sudan was already experiencing a spiraling humanitarian crisis — a confluence of hunger, conflict and disease — when the stop-work orders, program terminations and funding cuts hit.
“That’s why we are seeing people arriving really at the door of death at these hospitals — and some have died on the way,” said Christopher Nyamandi, the organization’s South Sudan director. On a recent trip to the country, he said, he saw hundreds of people crowded around admission ward tents meant to hold 25, with sick children and entire families lying in the open.
“What I saw on the ground was one of those things I did not believe I would see in 2025,” he said. At least five children with cholera died on a three-hour walk in over 100-degree heat to the closest hospital, after closer clinics shut down because of cuts, the organization said.
According to the U.N., three-quarters of people in South Sudan require humanitarian assistance, most of whom are also severely food insecure. Official development assistance from governments is equal to about one-quarter of South Sudan’s gross national income. The U.S. provides 40 percent of that share, according to the Center for Global Development.
The Trump administration has terminated around $13 million in funding for Save the Children in South Sudan, the organization said. That backing came from the State Department and U.S.-funded U.N. programs.
A State Department spokesman on Wednesday said the reorientation of foreign assistance focuses on “improving accountability and strategic coordination — not eliminating our commitment to vulnerable populations and allies. The United States continues to provide critical, lifesaving assistance in South Sudan.”
Survivors of torture, from Ethiopia to Jordan
For the Center for Victims of Torture, the sudden halt in U.S. funding felt like a “hand brake got pulled” and stranded the people in its care. Many had survived “the worst things human beings can do to one another,” said Adams, the organization’s president.
The U.S.-based organization provides counseling and rehabilitative care to survivors of torture, including in communities in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, in the aftermath of conflict; in Kenya, providing rehabilitative care with a specialization in LGBTQ+ survivors; and in Jordan, focused on refugees from Iraq and Syria.
But the pause, in many cases, “meant telling people who survived torture and fled from authoritarian regimes and from active conflict zones that the treatment that we were providing them was finished, without any advance warning,” said Adams. “Literally just shutting and locking doors and telling them we don’t know if and when we’ll ever be able to resume again.”
Solyana Gebru, a longtime counselor for the center in Tigray, who has been furloughed, said she worries for her clients. The people she serves have gone through imprisonment, torture, displacement, sex slavery and sexual torture. Some were children who witnessed their parents killed in front of them, or mothers whose children were killed.
Some clients were suicidal and found it “difficult to start to be hopeful and see the future” after the violence of war, she said.
The organization’s annual budget was around $36 million for global programs. After January’s announcement, more than 75 percent of that funding was immediately and indefinitely paused.
The organization furloughed some 430 staffers, including former refugees working in refugee camps.
Although some programs continue using non-U.S. funding, “it’s hard to see how we can come back,” Adams said.
HIV/AIDS in Tanzania, Eswatini and Lesotho
Some PEPFAR operations around the world resumed work under waivers for lifesaving aid after halting during the initial aid pause, but some did not. The State Department says PEPFAR’s care, treatment and prevention of mother-to-child transmission services are operational for 85 percent of beneficiaries. PEPFAR’s congressional authorization expired in late March, and its future remains uncertain.
Catherine Connor, vice president of public policy and advocacy at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF), a nonprofit that works to end pediatric HIV and AIDS in more than a dozen countries, said the stop-work order and project terminations were debilitating.
The organization, which has been a longtime PEPFAR implementing partner, supports treatment projects run locally, including in African countries that face significant challenges in fighting the virus such as Tanzania, Eswatini and Lesotho. The programs in those three countries alone supported 350,000 people, including nearly 10,000 children and more than 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant women.
The organization’s work in these three countries was paused by the stop-work order, but resumed under waivers for lifesaving aid, only to be suddenly terminated. Funding in Tanzania was eventually restored again, after communications that the organization said came mostly out of the blue, without discussion.
Caspian Chouraya, an Eswatini-based regional director for EGPAF, said, “It’s really been, you wake up and today this is on, tomorrow this is not on.”
In addition to implementing HIV and AIDS prevention care and services and strengthening local health systems, the organization ran dozens of peer-to-peer support groups for teenagers living with HIV in Eswatini. The teens would encourage each other to continue treatment and open up about their challenges living with HIV, said Chouraya.
Restricting funding to certain types of lifesaving aid ignores the interconnectivity of these programs, Connor said. For example, a woman may be administered an HIV test at a supported clinic, but if the contract with the receiving lab is cut, they can’t get results, she said.Food and nutrition in Afghanistan and Yemen
After stop-work orders halted food aid globally, the State Department restored emergency food aid programs. But it completely terminated awards in Yemen and Afghanistan — both facing severe hunger crises — out of concerns that the funding was “benefiting terrorist groups,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said at an April 8 news briefing.
More than half of Afghanistan’s population is in need of humanitarian aid, according to the U.N. That includes nearly 15 million people facing acute food insecurity.
The U.S. has long been the largest donor to Afghanistan’s humanitarian needs and response plan — funding around half of it in 2024.
The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization, operates across Afghanistan, addressing malnutrition and providing food and other key services.
Nearly 80 percent of the IRC’s programming in Afghanistan was funded by USAID grants that were terminated in the initial stop-work order. Some work was permitted to resume under lifesaving aid waivers, before U.S. funding for the entire country program was cut last month.
As a result of cuts, more than 700,000 people are at critical risk at losing access to essential humanitarian services from IRC programming, such as outpatient clinics, malnutrition services, protection and emergency cash assistance, said IRC communications officer James Sussman.
“When we one day tell them that there is food on the table, and the next day we tell them ‘You know, sorry, the donor has been suspended,’” said Sherine Ibrahim, IRC’s Afghanistan country director, “it’s not just disappointing. It puts people at greater risk and vulnerability and stress in an already very stressful environment, an already precarious situation for families.”
Few foresaw the speed and magnitude of the world-spanning cuts pursued by Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service (the Department of Government Efficiency).
First came an executive order that paused all international assistance, followed by a stop-work order that ground aid projects to a halt. While some programs received limited waivers to continue, including those deemed to offer lifesaving assistance, funding for these was often disrupted.
Three months in, the Trump administration has axed more than 80 percent of programs funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development, removed all but a handful of about 10,000 employees and folded the agency into the State Department. Much of what remains faces an uncertain future.
The State Department is “continually evaluating” U.S. aid efforts “to ensure they make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” read a statement from the agency last week. USAID’s remaining programs “advance the core national interests of the United States,” the statement said. It highlighted work on the Ebola outbreak in Uganda, “lifesaving” HIV care and treatment services, emergency treatment in conflict zones, and support for “key American strategic partners.”
USAID and the State Department oversaw some 90 percent of the U.S. foreign aid budget as of 2023. Trump and Rubio plan to cut State Department funding nearly in half. The full extent of cuts has yet to be fully quantified, as Trump’s budget takes shape.
The United States accounted for 40 percent of all humanitarian aid the United Nations tracked last year. Aid groups around the world are navigating the new reality. It has been “enormously hard to communicate to staff, to clients, to people, in some cases, whose lives are at stake — the outcome of these deliberations that are happening in darkened offices somewhere in Washington, D.C.,” said Simon Adams, head of the Center for Victims of Torture, an organization that offers counseling to survivors of torture in Ethiopia, Jordan and elsewhere.
Here is how the first three months of Trump’s second term have affected aid organizations on the front lines of crises around the world.
Lifesaving care in South Sudan
South Sudan was already experiencing a spiraling humanitarian crisis — a confluence of hunger, conflict and disease — when the stop-work orders, program terminations and funding cuts hit.
“That’s why we are seeing people arriving really at the door of death at these hospitals — and some have died on the way,” said Christopher Nyamandi, the organization’s South Sudan director. On a recent trip to the country, he said, he saw hundreds of people crowded around admission ward tents meant to hold 25, with sick children and entire families lying in the open.
“What I saw on the ground was one of those things I did not believe I would see in 2025,” he said. At least five children with cholera died on a three-hour walk in over 100-degree heat to the closest hospital, after closer clinics shut down because of cuts, the organization said.
According to the U.N., three-quarters of people in South Sudan require humanitarian assistance, most of whom are also severely food insecure. Official development assistance from governments is equal to about one-quarter of South Sudan’s gross national income. The U.S. provides 40 percent of that share, according to the Center for Global Development.
The Trump administration has terminated around $13 million in funding for Save the Children in South Sudan, the organization said. That backing came from the State Department and U.S.-funded U.N. programs.
A State Department spokesman on Wednesday said the reorientation of foreign assistance focuses on “improving accountability and strategic coordination — not eliminating our commitment to vulnerable populations and allies. The United States continues to provide critical, lifesaving assistance in South Sudan.”
Survivors of torture, from Ethiopia to Jordan
For the Center for Victims of Torture, the sudden halt in U.S. funding felt like a “hand brake got pulled” and stranded the people in its care. Many had survived “the worst things human beings can do to one another,” said Adams, the organization’s president.
The U.S.-based organization provides counseling and rehabilitative care to survivors of torture, including in communities in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, in the aftermath of conflict; in Kenya, providing rehabilitative care with a specialization in LGBTQ+ survivors; and in Jordan, focused on refugees from Iraq and Syria.
But the pause, in many cases, “meant telling people who survived torture and fled from authoritarian regimes and from active conflict zones that the treatment that we were providing them was finished, without any advance warning,” said Adams. “Literally just shutting and locking doors and telling them we don’t know if and when we’ll ever be able to resume again.”
Solyana Gebru, a longtime counselor for the center in Tigray, who has been furloughed, said she worries for her clients. The people she serves have gone through imprisonment, torture, displacement, sex slavery and sexual torture. Some were children who witnessed their parents killed in front of them, or mothers whose children were killed.
Some clients were suicidal and found it “difficult to start to be hopeful and see the future” after the violence of war, she said.
The organization’s annual budget was around $36 million for global programs. After January’s announcement, more than 75 percent of that funding was immediately and indefinitely paused.
The organization furloughed some 430 staffers, including former refugees working in refugee camps.
Although some programs continue using non-U.S. funding, “it’s hard to see how we can come back,” Adams said.
HIV/AIDS in Tanzania, Eswatini and Lesotho
Some PEPFAR operations around the world resumed work under waivers for lifesaving aid after halting during the initial aid pause, but some did not. The State Department says PEPFAR’s care, treatment and prevention of mother-to-child transmission services are operational for 85 percent of beneficiaries. PEPFAR’s congressional authorization expired in late March, and its future remains uncertain.
Catherine Connor, vice president of public policy and advocacy at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF), a nonprofit that works to end pediatric HIV and AIDS in more than a dozen countries, said the stop-work order and project terminations were debilitating.
The organization, which has been a longtime PEPFAR implementing partner, supports treatment projects run locally, including in African countries that face significant challenges in fighting the virus such as Tanzania, Eswatini and Lesotho. The programs in those three countries alone supported 350,000 people, including nearly 10,000 children and more than 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant women.
The organization’s work in these three countries was paused by the stop-work order, but resumed under waivers for lifesaving aid, only to be suddenly terminated. Funding in Tanzania was eventually restored again, after communications that the organization said came mostly out of the blue, without discussion.
Caspian Chouraya, an Eswatini-based regional director for EGPAF, said, “It’s really been, you wake up and today this is on, tomorrow this is not on.”
In addition to implementing HIV and AIDS prevention care and services and strengthening local health systems, the organization ran dozens of peer-to-peer support groups for teenagers living with HIV in Eswatini. The teens would encourage each other to continue treatment and open up about their challenges living with HIV, said Chouraya.
Restricting funding to certain types of lifesaving aid ignores the interconnectivity of these programs, Connor said. For example, a woman may be administered an HIV test at a supported clinic, but if the contract with the receiving lab is cut, they can’t get results, she said.Food and nutrition in Afghanistan and Yemen
After stop-work orders halted food aid globally, the State Department restored emergency food aid programs. But it completely terminated awards in Yemen and Afghanistan — both facing severe hunger crises — out of concerns that the funding was “benefiting terrorist groups,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said at an April 8 news briefing.
More than half of Afghanistan’s population is in need of humanitarian aid, according to the U.N. That includes nearly 15 million people facing acute food insecurity.
The U.S. has long been the largest donor to Afghanistan’s humanitarian needs and response plan — funding around half of it in 2024.
The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization, operates across Afghanistan, addressing malnutrition and providing food and other key services.
Nearly 80 percent of the IRC’s programming in Afghanistan was funded by USAID grants that were terminated in the initial stop-work order. Some work was permitted to resume under lifesaving aid waivers, before U.S. funding for the entire country program was cut last month.
As a result of cuts, more than 700,000 people are at critical risk at losing access to essential humanitarian services from IRC programming, such as outpatient clinics, malnutrition services, protection and emergency cash assistance, said IRC communications officer James Sussman.
“When we one day tell them that there is food on the table, and the next day we tell them ‘You know, sorry, the donor has been suspended,’” said Sherine Ibrahim, IRC’s Afghanistan country director, “it’s not just disappointing. It puts people at greater risk and vulnerability and stress in an already very stressful environment, an already precarious situation for families.”