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Almost 10,000 organisations receiving aid dollars from the US will have their grants permanently axed as President Donald Trump pushes ahead with his plan to dismantle the country’s wide-ranging foreign assistance programme.
Letters are being sent out to nearly 5,800 organisations that receive funding from the US Agency for International Development telling them to “cease all activities”, according to filings in a US district court. A further 4,100 state department recipients will be slashed.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, had reviewed the grants “on an individualised basis”, according to the filing. About 3,200 of them, worth more than $50bn, would be left in place.
It is the latest chapter in the global fallout that began last month when Trump signed an executive order freezing foreign aid, pending a 90-day review period into hundreds of contracts that he said were “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values”.
USAID, a 10,000-strong agency that has long been a centrepiece of American soft power through its $43bn worth of development programmes, was run by “a bunch of radical lunatics”, Trump added. The Supreme Court on Wednesday paused a lower court order to start paying out some frozen funds.
This week the Trump administration told all but a few hundred staff that they were on leave as of Monday and moved to fire at least 1,600 people. The US is moving ahead with an effort to relocate voluntarily USAID staffers overseas.
The freezing of US largesse comes as other European donors also scaled down assistance. The UK announced on Tuesday that it would cut aid spending to 0.3 per cent — down to £9.2bn — from 0.5 per cent annually by 2027 to fund a rise in defence spending.
US cutbacks have particularly hit the fight to end the Aids pandemic, triggering two court cases by advocacy groups to compel the administration to release funds for Pepfar, an initiative that distributes antiretrovirals to some 20mn people around the world daily.
Several healthcare organisations and research universities in South Africa, whose 7.6mn people living with HIV make it the epidemic’s global hotspot, received emails asking them to stop their programmes immediately. Rubio had determined that funding them was “not aligned with agency priorities and made a determination that continuing this program is not in the national interest”, according to the emails seen by the Financial Times.
“This award is being terminated for convenience and the interests of the US government,” added the email.
Linda-Gail Bekker, a professor of medicine and the chief executive of the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation at the University of Cape Town, said the abrupt timeframes had made it all but impossible to put contingency plans in place.
“The big question mark is: will governments be able to pick up some of the slack?” she said. “This kind of instantaneous, chaotic stopping of resources has the propensity to do more harm than good. Lives will be lost, needless infections will occur.”
Some US funding continues to health organisations through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but workers who run NGOs across southern Africa said a mood of despair had taken hold.
“It feels like we are being abandoned and there is no understanding that the work we are doing benefits” the broader global community, said a healthcare worker in Mozambique who is no longer able to drive ambulances as a result of the funding freeze.
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