The USAID closure leaves a vacuum. What will fill it?

With thousands of employees on indefinite administrative leave and over 90% of its contracts terminated, the United States Agency for International Development is effectively closed. The Trump administration says the cuts to USAID not only will save $60 billion in taxpayer money but also eliminate waste and corruption in U.S. foreign aid programs.

USAID employees and contractors have challenged the closure in court, arguing that the abrupt changes put diplomats in danger and halt lifesaving work. The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that the Trump administration can proceed with canceling the bulk of its contracts.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said the USAID employees union that sued did not prove that layoffs would cause irreparable injury to the workers.

USAID employees whose careers span multiple White House administrations say that the abrupt pause could cause irreparable injury to the United States’ foreign aid apparatus.

But conservatives in Washington generally support the Trump administration’s move to hold USAID accountable. They also want to see the United States continue to provide foreign aid for humanitarian and strategic reasons.

Reason for reform

The cuts to USAID have come at the suggestion of billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, which was formerly U.S. Digital Services. Trump initially put Musk in charge, though this week the White House said Musk is simply an unpaid, special government employee, and a different acting administration runs DOGE. Musk has been the DOGE spokesperson for a month now at public events and the first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday. With access through the digital services, Musk and DOGE employees have accessed payment systems throughout the federal government, viewed staffing and contract details, and advised how to make cuts to save money.

USAID receives about $50 billion in congressional appropriations each year, less than 1% of the overall federal budget. Fred Fleitz, the vice chairman of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security, said that even though foreign aid is a tiny portion of the total budget, USAID was using its funds for ideological purposes at odds with American interests. He cited reports of a $70,000 USAID contract that funded a musical promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in Ireland.

“When this money is being weaponized for far-left causes to change governments to push DEI and political correctness and other radical nonsense, it ruins a program that has a very good purpose that’s very noble,” Fleitz said.

On Feb. 3, Musk said in an X spaces call that Trump agreed with him that USAID should be shut down. Later that day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt read from a bullet-point list examples of alleged fraudulent and wasteful spending by USAID. It included $1.5 million to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbian workplaces, $25,000 for an opera featuring a transgender character in Colombia, and $32,000 for a comic book with a gay protagonist in Peru. While federal records show American money funding those projects, only the grant to Serbia came from USAID. The State Department funded the other listed programs.

“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap, and I know the American people don’t either,” Leavitt told reporters. “And that is what Elon Musk has been tasked by President Trump to do. To get the fraud, waste, and abuse out of our federal government.”

At a hearing for the House DOGE subcommittee on Wednesday, an expert with the Middle East Forum cited reports that at least $122 million in USAID funds had gone to groups with ties to terror organizations. In places like Gaza, charities are often staffed by locals who also have affiliations with terror groups such as Hamas. According to the Middle East Forum, the now-fired USAID inspector general had raised concerns about taxpayer money funding Islamist groups, particularly since the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack in Israel.

At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, keynote speakers were highly critical of USAID. Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss accused American taxpayers of funding anti-Western ideology. Mike Benz, a former State Department official and director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said on Friday that the Trump administration is in a “radical restructuring” period, during which agencies can either reform or terminate. Michael Knowles, a conservative political commentator, said the United States does not owe the world charity.

“It’s not that we don’t wish to help people around the world … but it is perverse for our political elite to constantly prioritize the whims and desires of foreigners over the needs of citizens,” Knowles said during his speech. “Our uniparty elite have told us we have two options when it comes to charity and the common good: We can either erase our national borders or we can try and fail to build democracies in the Middle East, or we could do both, I guess. There’s a third option: … We can rebuild our own country and we can help our own citizens. Charity, after all, begins at home.”

Refresh or reboot?

Musk has said that the entirety of USAID is rotten and must be entirely removed. On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order that already placed foreign assistance on pause for a 90-day review. The State Department, now in charge of USAID, appears to be reviewing programs without input from diplomats overseas, according to termination notices WORLD viewed. In Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, Musk said that DOGE has made some mistakes in its haste to cut spending, including temporarily canceling an Ebola prevention program. The administration announced this week it will terminate around 5,800 USAID contract awards, which amount to $54 billion. Another 4,100 State Department grants have also been eliminated.

“This mess is not the Trump administration’s fault. They’re cleaning up a mess that was left to them by a prior administration,” Fleitz said. “I think this can be fixed and we can have a rational foreign aid program that helps people who need it and advances American interests and is devoid of politics, but that’s not going to be done in a couple of days.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month that food assistance and medical programs would continue during the 90-day review period. State Department guidance instructed USAID staff to apply for waivers for programs that performed lifesaving work. In Ethiopia, an American USAID manager WORLD interviewed prioritized waiver requests for food distribution programs but struggled with a lack of direction.

“Does that include emergency food aid as well as those who are chronically poor and need food aid? What about food programs that also have livelihood training? Are we allowed to pay support staff?” the manager asked. “I know that sounds in the weeds, but that’s a very important distinction. And nobody wants to be out of compliance with Rubio and Elon Musk.” WORLD agreed not to use the manager’s name or the names of other USAID workers who serve in conflict zones to protect their safety and because they feared they could lose their jobs permanently if identified.

According to emails viewed by WORLD, remaining USAID officers in Washington, at the instruction of the State Department, are terminating contracts. The emails say contracts were reviewed for “efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy.” Prior to the shutdown order, an internal cable placed a gag order on USAID employees, telling them not to discuss changes with other members of their team, contractors, or government entities like Congress or the State Department.

“I welcome audits by actual auditors,” the Ethiopian manager said. “Go ahead, look under every single program that we do. But the inspector general complained and got fired,” he said, referencing a report published earlier this month. The former inspector general said the stopwork order and funding freeze “degraded” the agency’s ability to effectively and safely administer congressionally-appropriated money.

Other programs that have received waivers are still not getting funding, according to sensitive but unclassified documents WORLD viewed. In Ethiopia, the delay has left more than 1.1 million people without expected food distributions for February. Most employees are now on administrative leave. The ones remaining have been asked to notify the ambassador’s office when money is released for the excepted programs: “We do not have good visibility on this and need to stay apprised of the status of these payments,” the meeting notes read.

The future of foreign aid

The United States’ foreign aid strategy first emerged after the end of World War II as the Cold War began. In 1949, President Harry Truman outlined a vision for helping developing nations benefit from American progress in hopes of turning them away from communism. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy, frustrated with State Department red tape, consolidated U.S. foreign aid operations under USAID. He said the United States had not only moral and economic imperatives to support developing countries but also “political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.”

“Foreign aid isn’t about, necessarily, other people. It’s about preserving the United States dollar as a World Reserve currency and really reflecting who we are as a people,” Mark Wallace, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told WORLD at CPAC last week. “So we do it for us and them.”

A USAID employee stationed in Northern Africa told WORLD he worked on projects that boosted local economies to block Russian and Chinese influence in the region. He described conflict zones in West Africa where the military left but USAID stayed to combat human trafficking. He said he disagreed with an emphasis in the Biden administration around gender ideology in developing nations, and he was looking forward to being able to make some changes under the Trump administration. Now, he is on administrative leave.

“DEI was a big thing under President Biden. That was not a USAID thing,” the employee said. “I have, in good conscience, only been involved in human rights programs. If they defend every human being, then that is worth the while. If a president doesn’t like the policy, they can reform it. Why take out one of your best foreign policy tools and cede the ground to our worst competitors?”

The international contractors who run USAID-funded programs hope to continue their humanitarian work, though they do not yet know how they will do so without U.S. support. In Zambia, the Alliance for Children Everywhere is the only government-approved emergency foster care nonprofit in the country. The Christian agency has worked on poverty reduction and family-based care in Zambia for 26 years and in Malawi for three. In October, the group received a five-year, $10 million contract through USAID to scale up operations and expand to Uganda. On Wednesday, executive director Gabriel Walder received a termination notice.

“This was a huge percentage of our work, so it was going to scale up to be about 45% of our total budget,” Walder told WORLD. “We had already hired and I’ve had to repurpose local [Zambia and Malawi] staff that were 100% on USAID funding under other funding mechanisms in our organization. We won’t be able to maintain that beyond the next six to 12 months.”

Walder also said that one of his agency’s new partner organizations in Uganda had to lay off much of its staff. He is concerned that scaling back the work now will result in more family separations, and he said the termination is damaging relationships with local contractors in Malawi. He also said the U.S. government owes the nonprofit roughly $75,000 for work in December and January before the USAID stopwork order.

In Ethiopia, tens of thousands of tons of food are sitting in warehouses and ports waiting for distribution, according to spreadsheets WORLD viewed. The USAID manager in Ethiopia said some health programs received waivers, but the payment system went down and he could not pay local contractors, including nurses. According to the former USAID inspector general’s report, the funding pause left $489 million worth of food to spoil in various parts of the world.

In Nigeria, authorities have launched a committee to develop a transition plan for USAID-funded health programs. Lawmakers are also considering more domestic financing, since the country’s annual budget only allocates about 4 percent of funding to healthcare. This month, the Federal Executive Council approved $3.2 million to finance 150,000 HIV treatment packs for the next four months. An additional $1 billion would also go toward healthcare reforms, such as strengthening primary healthcare centers and training more workers.

While Republican lawmakers applaud DOGE’s cost-cutting measures, some are starting to ask for moderation when it comes to programs that affect Americans. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., has introduced a bill to resurrect the Food for Peace program under the Agriculture Department after Kansas farmers complained that their grains are sitting in silos without buyers. Since 1954, Food for Peace, a USAID contractor, has bought American grain and distributed it to 150 countries for the price of about $2 million.

Fleitz with the America First Policy Institute said foreign aid should continue in a way that benefits other countries and U.S. interests.

“There is some self-interest in foreign aid,” he said. “We do buy influence when we send aid to foreign countries. Nations are grateful when they get aid. We know our adversaries are buying influence. That’s not the main reason I would send aid, I think we should do it because it’s the moral thing to do, but there’s also self-interest involved.”