The US State Department has notified Congress that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is closing. Despite this, USAID employees are still challenging the dismissal as illegal: the cessation of funding deprives the agency of the opportunity to continue most of its activities. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, approximately five thousand of the agency’s six thousand programs will be closed . In fact, the development of AIDS vaccines, the fight against malaria in entire regions, as well as the fight against child hunger are being stopped. Donald Trump is abandoning the traditions of American “soft power”. Millions of people in dozens of countries around the world will suffer from this.
One of Donald Trump’s first decisions at the start of his second term was to suspend all U.S. international aid for 90 days. In effect, aid was cut off completely. Numerous programs financed by the State Department and USAID are being eliminated. The latter recently accounted for approximately 40% of all international aid in the world.
USAID was created in 1961 by an executive order of President John Kennedy. Initially, the agency was subordinate to the US Secretary of State, but later Congress made it independent. Therefore, in an attempt to maintain the appearance of legality, the State Department notified Congress of the closure of USAID. It was specifically specified that, while dismissing the absolute majority of employees both in the US and in the agency’s foreign representative offices, all positions prescribed by law would be retained. In reality, this literally concerns several dozen positions out of the agency’s more than ten thousand employees.
Raider takeover
To achieve USAID’s closure, the new White House administration has used backdoors from the start. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on February 3 that President Trump had appointed him acting head of the agency. Along the way, Rubio accused USAID of disobeying State Department directives. The secretary insisted that many of the organization’s programs would remain in place, but they would need to be aligned with White House foreign policy.
Rubio named Pete Marocco, who had previously been promoted to head the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, as his deputy and de facto leader of USAID. Marocco held several positions in the first Trump administration, including at a division of USAID. His attempts to seize control of the agency and cut its funding prompted staff to file a 13-page complaint against him , after which Marocco resigned.
Returning to USAID in Trump’s second term, Morocco began cutting staff. He placed more than 50 senior agency staff on mandatory leave, accusing them of failing to implement the president’s orders. He followed that up with the firing of about 500 more staffers in the agency’s U.S. office.
Many of these decisions were envisaged by the Project 2025 program, which conservative NGOs developed for Trump before the 2024 presidential election. In particular, it was proposed to make USAID a pilot project for converting government officials into political appointees. This is one of the important points of Trump’s program, since in his first term he lost the battle with the “professional bureaucracy”, which is not subject to dismissal when the president changes in the United States. Trump and his entourage believed that the circle of officials who change with the head of state should be significantly expanded.
Morocco helped Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) gain access to USAID databases. Musk has called the agency “a criminal organization that needs to die” and “a viper’s nest of left-wing Marxists who hate America,” and accused USAID of funding biological weapons. In late January, DOGE employees tried to get into the agency’s Washington headquarters. They demanded to be allowed into the server rooms, but security refused because they did not have security clearance. An altercation ensued, with Musk himself demanding to be let in on the phone, threatening to call the U.S. Marshals.
Musk called the agency “a criminal organization that needs to die” and “a snake pit of left-wing Marxists who hate America.”
After the conflict with DOGE, USAID Chief of Staff Matt Hopson, appointed, it should be noted, by the Trump administration, resigned, and the then acting head of the agency John Gray was removed from his post. The agency’s security director John Voorhees and his deputy Brian McGill, who did not allow DOGE access to the servers, were sent on leave.
In February, USAID’s website was taken down . The agency’s Washington headquarters was closed, and its lobby was stripped of signs, logos, and other symbols. Soon, other USAID offices were closed as well.
The agency is closing
In announcing the suspension of international aid, Rubio specified that it was only to cancel certain programs that were inconsistent with the new administration’s foreign policy. The secretary of state initially authorized only emergency food programs and military aid to Israel and Egypt, but later agreed to resume assistance for life-saving medicine, medical services, and housing.
Against this backdrop, most of USAID’s programs were frozen . The White House administration insisted that the funds allocated to the agency were being spent inappropriately. However, the examples cited by Trump’s team, such as the purchase of contraceptives for residents of the Gaza Strip, turned out to be erroneous or falsified.
On February 7, the presidential administration announced that it was sending almost all of the agency’s employees, more than 10,000 people, on leave. About two-thirds worked in foreign missions in more than 60 countries. Almost all were ordered to return to the United States as soon as possible. Only 294 employees were allowed to continue working , of which only 12 remained in Africa , 8 in Asia, and 21 in the Middle East.
Only 294 employees out of more than 10,000 were allowed to continue working at USAID
In addition to USAID’s full-time employees, the massive layoffs also affected numerous contractors in the United States, who make up about a third of all those employed by the agency’s programs. More than a thousand people lost their jobs. According to the head of USAID’s largest provider of international aid, DT Global, several thousand more will have to be laid off because of the funding cut .
The subsequent collapse of the American international aid system snowballed. The halt in all contracts and subcontracts led to layoffs at organizations outside the United States. For example, the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh laid off more than 1,000 workers. Two-thirds of the staff of the President’s Malaria Initiative , a program launched under George W. Bush that plays a leading role in malaria research, distributing funding to teams of scientists working on, among other things, a vaccine for the disease, were also laid off.
An inevitable humanitarian crisis
Just a few years ago, Marco Rubio was praising the agency’s work and emphasizing that foreign aid, which accounts for less than 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget, was critical to national security and helping counter China’s influence. He praised the agency’s programs, from women’s education to combating drug addiction to supporting democracy promotion . But that hasn’t stopped him from now scaling back nearly $50 billion in aid.
Marco Rubio praised USAID’s work a few years ago, but that didn’t stop him from cutting nearly $50 billion in aid today.
Many of the cancelled grants were related to USAID’s largest program, PEPFAR, which provided antiretroviral therapy to more than 20 million people with HIV, including more than half a million children. PEPFAR was launched in 2003 by the administration of Republican President George W. Bush and is considered one of the most successful international medical aid programs, saving about 26 million lives, according to the World Health Organization.
PEPFAR, among other things, provided employment for more than 250,000 health workers in 55 countries. The end of funding disrupted the network of local organizations that provided HIV drugs in poor regions. In February, 275 organizations in 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa reported that they had stopped accepting patients. Contracts were terminated with the UN agency UNAIDS, which also promoted the fight against HIV and oversaw the Demographic and Health Surveys project, which collects data on child and maternal mortality, nutrition and reproductive health in 90 countries.
USAID programs have provided more than 50 million children with medications to prevent malaria. The agency has helped spray homes in areas where the disease is most prevalent before the rainy season. Over the past 20 years, such efforts have saved about 7.6 million people from the disease, which kills 450,000 children each year .
The REACH Malaria program, which has protected more than 20 million people in 10 African countries from the disease, was cut. A contract with Chemonics to supply 2.4 million mosquito nets, drugs, and malaria tests to 53 million people was stopped, as was the Evolve program to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes in 21 countries. Numerous other USAID initiatives were also canceled, from polio prevention and tuberculosis in Central Asia to treatment of tropical diseases (trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, and onchocerciasis) and rapid response to Ebola outbreaks in Africa.
USAID also supported the distribution of medical supplies. In many countries, such as Zambia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Malawi, and Haiti, these distribution systems are unavailable. In West Africa, USAID money supported female education and smallholder farmers. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, an agency-led project provided access to a single water source for 250,000 people in displacement camps at the center of the conflict in the east of the country.
In Sudan, where civil war has been raging since 2023, USAID operated more than 1,000 community kitchens and health clinics in the Kordofan region — now they are forced to close. In the United States itself, companies that produce high-calorie food packages for distribution to famine-stricken regions have lost their income.
Without these programs, the agency itself estimates that there will be 18 million additional cases of malaria, 166,000 deaths from it, millions more polio infections, which will paralyze hundreds of thousands of children, and outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola and Marburg that could become more frequent, potentially hurting the United States itself.
About a million children will go without treatment for severe acute malnutrition each year, which can often be fatal. And these are far from all the consequences of the USAID closure — some of them are completely unexpected. For example, the agency finances 70-90% of the work of camps in northeastern Syria, where about 40,000 Islamic State militants and their families are under the protection of Kurdish units.
The End of Soft Power
The cancellation of USAID programs inevitably entails political consequences, such as the strengthening of China’s influence, which since 2013 has spent more than a trillion dollars on infrastructure projects in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The United States has tried to counter it, including by increasing USAID funding in the Pacific region. An additional $15 million was allocated for this purpose in 2024. But now it seems that the fight against Chinese influence with the help of “soft power” will have to be forgotten.
Overall, the impact on global philanthropy will be monstrous, says Jennifer Gaspar, executive director of Araminta, an NGO specializing in civil society development and consulting for nonprofit projects. “Of course, the international aid system has long been in need of reform,” Gaspar tells The Insider. “People in this field have many complaints about the efficiency of spending and the results of spending. But you can’t break something without thinking about the consequences. After all, we are talking not only about the loss of jobs, but also about the fact that people will die without help, without medicine.”
“It’s not just about job losses, but also about people dying without help, without medicine.”
Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) leader Ruslan Leviev describes how the aid cancellation works in practice: “About 70% of our budget was provided by a grant from a partner fund, which, in turn, receives funds from USAID, among other sources. So, the fund was frozen in turn, and it was frozen those same 70% of our budget. So, it hit us very hard.”
CIT has launched a fundraising campaign but does not expect to find an alternative source of funding quickly, Leviev says:
“The world of non-profit projects is extremely bureaucratic, slow and inflexible. This sphere does not know how to react quickly to changing circumstances. If the instructions stipulate that an application for funding is considered within two or three months, then even in critical conditions it will be considered for the same amount of time.”
Jennifer Gaspard explains that The Insider’s attempts to obtain official comments from the affected companies have gone unanswered by “the climate of fear and uncertainty.” After all, many are hoping for funding to be resumed. Some are trying to achieve this through the courts.
Everybody to court!
Almost immediately after USAID was suspended, Democratic members of Congress, unhappy with the decision, staged an impromptu rally outside the agency’s Washington headquarters. Some tried to get into the building, but were turned away due to Elon Musk’s order to keep the offices closed. Congressman Chris Van Hollen announced the preparation of a lawsuit challenging the temporary closure of the agency at that time. His colleague Jamie Raskin promised that Congress would fight Elon Musk’s attempts to eliminate USAID, and emphasized that the businessman “is not the fourth branch of government.”
Democrats insist that the Trump administration has no right to make sweeping cuts to the agency and that withholding funds Congress has appropriated for USAID is illegal. Relying on these arguments, the federal employee union filed a lawsuit against President Trump, Secretary of State Rubio, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In the lawsuit, agency employees described how they were forced to evacuate their homes and belongings when ordered to immediately stop work and return to the United States.
One of them said he had to flee Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, by boat amid mass protests. The court blocked the suspension of 2,500 USAID workers, but they were not reinstated . The court eventually allowed the White House to continue the layoffs while the case is heard. But the plaintiffs are again seeking restrictions because of information about the destruction of agency documents.
Several other lawsuits seeking to resume international aid have been filed by USAID contractors and the American Bar Association. The plaintiffs argue that such actions cannot be taken without congressional approval and would result in the loss of American jobs and deaths for people who depend on the agency’s programs. A federal court has ordered the White House to resume grant payments, but the Supreme Court has stepped in and ordered the administration to pay only a small portion of the aid—about $2 billion.
The US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to pay only a small portion of the planned aid – about $2 billion
USAID officials also failed to argue that the agency’s current decisions violate the Constitution in principle. They insisted that the White House lacked the authority to even suspend USAID, let alone shut it down and fire its employees. But on March 29, an appeals court allowed DOGE to continue cutting staff.
The legal battles will probably end up at the US Supreme Court, where some of the already filed or later lawsuits from USAID defenders may eventually reach as they progress through other courts. But since the White House is only talking about “reforming” the agency, not shutting it down, it seems impossible to stop the process. And millions of people around the world are already falling victim to this decision.