Feb. 28 (UPI) — Foreign aid organizations are in turmoil after the Trump administration cut several million dollars of funding and fired nearly 1,600 employees of the United States Agency for International Development.
United States is the world’s largest foreign aid donor, accounting for 40% of assistance worldwide. In fiscal year 2023, the aid was $71.9 billion for humanitarian, economic development and democracy-promotion efforts, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For military purposes, it was 11.4%.
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.