Foreign aid: The human toll of drastic cuts

The assault has 'stunned' nonprofits whose efforts to fight hunger, disease, and instability are now shuttering

(Image credit: AP)

published 10 March 2025

Cuts to U.S. foreign aid have “slammed humanitarian projects worldwide,” said Gerald Imray in the Associated Press, and will inflict suffering on untold millions. Having ordered a 90-day freeze and review of all foreign assistance in January, the Trump administration announced last week that it was terminating 90 percent of USAID’s contracts and cutting $60 billion in U.S. assistance. The assault has “stunned” nonprofits whose efforts to fight hunger, disease, and instability are now shuttering. Among the 10,000 contracts canceled was funding for a nutrition program run by U.S-based NGO Alight, which fed 1,700 malnourished children daily in Somalia. Some “absolutely” will die, said Alight head Jocelyn Wyatt. Food assistance for more than 1 million Ethiopians has been halted, as have maternal health-care programs in Syria, refugee assistance in Thailand, and HIV-prevention efforts that have saved millions of lives in Africa. “We are being pushed off a cliff,” said an HIV doctor in South Africa.

When aid was frozen, Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised waivers would be granted for “lifesaving” programs, said Jennifer Hansler in CNN.com. But that didn’t happen, according to senior USAID official Nicholas Enrich. He was put on leave this week after releasing a 20-page memo detailing the “intentional and/or unintentional obstacles” put in place by the Trump administration that stopped waivers from being approved. The blocks will result in harm “on a massive scale,” Enrich wrote, including an extra 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually; severe malnutrition untreated in a million children; and up to 166,000 additional malaria deaths. Ebola prevention is another casualty, said Dan Diamond and John Hudson in The Washington Post, no matter what Elon Musk claims. The DOGE head recently said Ebola programs had been “accidentally canceled,” then restored. But current and former USAID officials report teams have been dismantled and programs gutted; “capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” said one.

The cuts are vulnerable to legal challenge, said Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy in ProPublica. Rubio and a top aide had told a federal judge that all canceled grants and contracts would be reviewed “case by case.” But internal documents and the “breakneck pace” of the cuts point to a “cursory and haphazard” effort, raising “fresh questions about the legality” of the administration’s evisceration of the aid system. Lawsuits will continue, but irreversible harm is being done, and it’s not only the world’s most vulnerable who will suffer. America “is losing its influence,” a laid-off USAID worker said through tears. “We’re now more unsafe as a country.”