The skinny on Trump’s very big first 100 days

U.S. President Donald Trump has been busy. In just 100 days, he’s managed to decapitate most of America’s foreign aid apparatus. More than 85% of USAID programming eliminated, the majority of its 10,000-strong workforce hollowed out, and the remaining rump set to be folded into the State Department, which itself is undergoing a massive restructuring and layoffs. Basically, an entire decades-old agency is gone — poof, just like that. How could this happen so fast, and what’s next? Devex reporters Adva Saldinger, Elissa Miolene, and David Ainsworth broke down the lightning-fast collapse of the U.S. Agency for International Development during a Devex Pro briefing on Tuesday, offering insights into what we know and what no one seems to know. We do know, based on the fiscal year 2026 budget that Trump recently sent to the U.S. Congress, that the president has no intention of letting up on his campaign to dramatically diminish foreign assistance. Known as a “skinny” budget because it’s only a rough blueprint, Saldinger explained that it’s a “sort of a Cliff Notes version” of a plan that lacks detail. It won’t be until Congress weighs in that those details are filled out — “and Congress can always decide to ignore the president's budget,” she said. “It's typically a guide, and we've seen that in the past. In the first Trump administration, they recommended pretty steep cuts, not this steep, and Congress rejected that,” Saldinger added, while cautioning that the dynamics today are very different in this Congress, where Republicans have been far more deferential to the administration. Even if Trump’s skinny budget doesn’t fully materialize, the numbers are still staggering. “Essentially, the Trump administration for FY 2026 has budgeted $9.6 billion in new spending. If that's the only money that's spent, that's roughly an 84% cut to the foreign affairs budget,” Saldinger said. “But what they've also indicated is that they intend to rescind, or claw back, about $20 billion from prior-year funding — so likely 2025 funding, but it could also be 2024 funding.” That more than $20 billion dollars in foreign aid programming would actually bring the total spend for fiscal 2026 to about $31.2 billion. “That's still a 47.7% cut from what we have seen. So it's still a steep cut,” Saldinger said. In terms of winners and losers, Saldinger noted that funding to the United Nations would effectively be gutted, while humanitarian funding would be halved. Potential winners include the private-capital-mobilizing U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, and, interestingly enough, the World Bank’s International Development Association, or IDA. Saldinger said that despite fears that the Trump administration would nix the U.S. contribution to the World Bank’s fund for the world’s low-income countries, it’s kept that funding relatively intact, albeit with some cuts. But “a number of programs are slated for elimination, including Food for Peace and the McGovern-Dole program,” Saldinger said. “And those are sort of two flagship food security-hunger programs, and that I think also begs the question of: If there is a focus on food security, how is it going to be delivered if you're eliminating these programs?” “I think [that] is the biggest thing that jumped out to me,” Miolene said, pointing out that food security and global health were ostensibly supposed to be two priority areas that survived the culling of foreign aid programs. “What is this new vision that throws that into question?” “The most interesting thing to me is, again, how these priorities have shifted and changed. I mean, there's a brand new fund which is called the America First Opportunity Fund that's … kind of a discretionary pot for the president to spend with various priorities,” Miolene said. That fund, abbreviated as A1OF, is intended to “focus on strategic investments that make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.” It would support partners, including India and Jordan, counter China, and fund new activities to bolster national security priorities. In the meantime, as Trump’s budget winds through Congress — where we’ll see if past aid-supporting Republicans stand up for aid this time around — the State Department will be undergoing a major reorganization, USAID operations will be formally shut down, and a slew of lawsuits will continue to make their way through the courts. On the latter, “it’s been kind of a dizzying back and forth,” Miolene said. “Going through all these court cases, I did a little bit of note-taking last night and saw that basically from mid-March to today, the government has been kind of paying organizations in increments.” She said that as of late April, the government said it had 79 payments remaining, but implementing partners said it's a very different set of numbers. “So what is the reality here? I think that remains to be seen.” Likewise, it remains to be seen whether Congress will exert its authority to fund the government, Saldinger said, noting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is likely to testify before lawmakers in the coming weeks. “I think some time this month we'll likely see a set of Rubio hearings on the Hill, and I think that will be a key moment for people to question some of these things and potentially get some further answers. And then obviously there's the budget discussion,” Saldinger said. “Fundamentally, there is a question about how much Congress is going to … claim — or reclaim — its power of the purse and its ability to sort of make decisions on how funding will be spent, and I think we don't know the answer to that entirely yet.”