Devex is taking a summer break this week, and instead of our regular Newswire, we are bringing you deep dives into some of this year’s key development issues. In this edition, we’re focusing on the U.S. Agency for International Development — and how over the last six months, the world’s largest aid donor was torn apart.
It all started on Jan. 20, the first day of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Within hours, Trump issued an executive order freezing foreign aid — one that claimed to do so until a 90-day review was complete. The aid sector was gripped with questions. Did this apply to just new programs, or did it stop everything in its tracks? What did this mean for lifesaving aid — and how many people could die as a result?
That review never surfaced, but what followed was an erratic but systematic gutting of U.S. foreign assistance — beginning with a stop-work order that halted both new spending and existing initiatives, followed by sweeping staff removals and cancellations that slashed programming across the world.
“It is important to emphasize that it is no longer business as usual,” wrote Ken Jackson, a new assistant to the administrator for management and resources at USAID, in a memo obtained by Devex in late January.
Development leaders described it differently.
“It feels like being in a boxing ring with multiple opponents, trying to figure out where the next blow is going to come from,” said the leader of one aid organization, who spoke to me back in January.
Seven days after the funding freeze began, organizations across the world began receiving notices to stop work. The panic intensified — and as nonprofits, contractors, and aid agencies scrambled to understand how to do their work, USAID’s more than 10,000 staff were next to pay the price.
On Jan. 28, the first set of USAID employees were placed on leave, allegedly for not complying with Trump’s executive order. That included nearly 60 senior executive staff, who were affected at the same time that institutional support contractors began to be severed from USAID’s bureaus of global health and humanitarian assistance.
“The aggregation of these actions seem to lead to no longer having a USAID,” Marcia Wong, the former deputy assistant administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, said back in January.
It didn’t take long for Wong to be proven right. USAID issued a blanket stop-work order on Jan. 29, instructing all its implementing partners to halt their programming, whether they had heard from the government or not. It still wasn’t clear whether PEPFAR, the country’s flagship global HIV/AIDS program, was exempt from the cuts — or whether it could fall under a waiver program announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the same day.
In theory, those waivers were said to apply to any sort of lifesaving humanitarian assistance — from food and shelter to medical services and health care. But in reality, very few organizations were ever able to access those waivers, and those who did still weren’t paid for the work those waivers allowed to continue. That was quickly made clear in the case of PEPFAR-funded organizations, which got clarity that they could continue through the waivers on Feb. 1, but no money to do so.
Read more: The mess inside Rubio’s ‘lifesaving’ waivers
Plus: ‘I don’t think anyone can survive for 90 days’ — aid’s grim new reality
The waivers, it turns out, had no teeth. But over that weekend, it became clear who did: Elon Musk. The richest man on Earth had been installed at the president’s side — and by the first weekend of February, Musk had made USAID his first target.
“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform that he owns, on Sunday, Feb. 2. “Time for it to die.”
At that point, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — a new office created to slash federal government spending — had already burrowed deep inside USAID. The same day as Musk’s post, at least 1,000 USAID contract workers were locked out of the agency’s internal systems without warning, leaving those in conflict zones with no line of contact to the U.S. Embassy, other USAID colleagues, or any type of support.
Hours later, USAID staff working at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters got an email telling them their offices would be closed when the week began.
Read more: Left in the dark — the human toll of USAID’s global recall of employees
“Like the house is on fire and we are inside it, being told to just stand and wait for it to burn down, with no access to a water hose,” said one USAID official, speaking to Devex on Feb. 3. “Many people feel dread, exhaustion, and also the fact that we know people will die as a result of this.”
The next day, the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID reached a climax: DOGE rebooted the defunct USAID website to tell the world that nearly all USAID direct hires would be placed on administrative leave by Friday, Feb. 7.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk posted on X just before 2 a.m. ET on Feb. 3, the very beginning of that tumultuous week. “Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
The first set of job loss numbers emerged later that week, with the Trump administration stating it wanted to slash USAID’s workforce to less than 300 people. The day after, the administration reversed course, doubling that figure to 600 in less than 24 hours.
Throughout the third weekend of the new Trump administration, cancellations began to hit organizations across the world. Even lifesaving programs were terminated for the “convenience,” and the ripple effects hit communities and employees alike.
Read more: How the USAID freeze hit the agency’s biggest partners (Pro)
See also: USAID’s largest partners report furloughs for thousands of staff
That included the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, or AVAC, and the Journalism Development Network — both of which took the Trump administration to court on Feb. 11. The next day, USAID’s biggest contractors followed suit, with DAI, Chemonics, and others filing a case of their own. Those two lawsuits were ultimately joined together.
Even so, it didn’t stop the cancellations from rolling in. By Feb. 12, more than 800 termination notices had been sent to USAID’s partner organizations. And even after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali reversed the stop-work order (and another judge barred the administration from firing USAID staff), it did little to change the government’s approach.
By Feb. 14, a “foreign aid review” officially began, despite the fact that hundreds of awards had already been cut.
“We are here today, very simply, because many of the people, many of the programs at USAID have literally betrayed America,” said Rep. Brian Mast, the Republican chair of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs, at a hearing in February. “The programs that USAID and the State Department have spent money on are indefensible.”
The lawsuits kept coming, but it wasn’t clear whether the administration was paying attention to the results. A week after Ali reversed the government’s stop-work order, nothing had changed, leading the judge to order the administration to restart its aid work and repay its bills again.
Read more: Court watch — the latest on the USAID docket
Not all courts backed USAID staff and partners. By Feb. 22, another judge ruled that the government could continue to put USAID staff on leave, saying that he no longer felt they were at risk of "irreparable harm.” Immediately, the government did just that, cutting 1,600 staff and placing nearly all direct hires on administrative leave.
Through it all, the cuts to programs continued. Trump also declared three small federally affiliated agencies — the U.S. African Development Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace — to be “unnecessary,” issuing an executive order to reduce them to the bare minimum. DOGE entered each of those entities one by one, installing Trump officials as their heads and canceling their grants and contracts.
In the meantime, Ali asked the government — again — to restore funding, this time giving the administration just 12 hours to do so. But instead, the government cut 10,000 programs, many of which had already been granted waivers to deliver lifesaving humanitarian aid.
Read more: God bless America and the death of 10,000 projects
See also: ‘Like a big funeral’ — USAID cuts leave local partners fighting to survive (Pro)
And don’t miss: The fall of USAID changed everything — even for those it didn’t fund (Pro)
By the middle of March, Rubio announced that just 1,000 USAID programs would remain — and that they would all operate under the State Department. The remaining 5,200 would be canceled — slicing away 83% of USAID’s programming. A pair of leaked documents shed light on those cancellations, with lists of terminated and retained programs at USAID and the State Department.
There were myriad errors, but the documents’ red and green highlights painted a picture of what was, mostly, lost.
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We’ve also recently added a limited-time special Saturday edition of our Pro Insider newsletter where Senior Reporter Michael Igoe digs into some of the biggest questions about the new realities of U.S. aid.
For weeks, it wasn’t clear if anyone — including those in the government — knew exactly what the future held for U.S. foreign aid. Leaked proposals filtered through Washington, but eventually, the administration revealed its plans: It would abolish USAID by the summer. The vast majority of the agency’s staff would be laid off, while select pieces of U.S. foreign assistance would be transferred to the State Department.
By April, the State Department had announced sweeping plans for a reorganization of its own, one that Rubio said would bring the State Department “into the 21st century.” It was starkly different from the one his team sent to Congress just weeks prior — with this version featuring a shuffling of bureaus, offices, and leadership across five undersecretaries and one new, “reimagined” Office of the Coordinator of Foreign and Humanitarian Affairs.
“From a foreign assistance point of view, it is an abomination,” said Rob Jenkins, a former senior USAID official, after the reorganization was announced. “If you need yet another portrait of the United States pulling back from the world, and pulling back from America’s values, this is it.”
Soon after, Trump came out with his 2026 budget proposal — one that asked for a nearly 85% cut to the U.S. foreign aid budget through a combination of budget cuts and clawbacks of previously approved money. And by mid-May, things were still — to put it bluntly — a mess.
Thousands of programs had been canceled, and thousands of USAID staff remained on administrative leave. But in his first pair of hearings with House and Senate lawmakers, Rubio insisted that “no children are dying on my watch,” despite numerous accounts of the opposite.
“We’re by far the most generous nation on earth on foreign aid,” said Rubio, speaking to lawmakers on May 21. “And we’ll continue to be, by far, with no other equal.”
This assertion wasn’t notably well supported by the data, which suggests that by 2026, Germany, with a quarter of the population of the U.S. and a significantly lower per capita income, may actually give more in dollar terms.
Nearly a dozen lawsuits were still making their way through the court system. But one thing wasn’t changing: Most USAID employees would be severed from the agency come July 1, and those who remained would be primarily involved with closing it out.
Ultimately, some 300 people at USAID were brought over to the State Department, with those selected being largely midcareer technical experts, contracting officers, and logistics managers. They were charged with shutting the agency down, but across Washington and the world, many were concerned with how quickly things were moving.
And even now, at this point, there isn’t a clear vision for foreign aid from the Trump administration.
“Everybody does a good job of telling you what [US]AID did wrong,” a former senior USAID official told Devex in June. “Nobody has been able to say what is it we do want.”
So where do we go from here? Stay tuned for next Monday's deep dive where my colleague Michael Igoe will explore the future of U.S. foreign aid.
+ To get updated with the latest news, tidbits, court updates, and other behind-the-scenes reporting on the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID and its plan for the future of U.S. aid, check out our dedicated page.
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