'God Bless America' and the death of 10,000 projects

Every day, the staff members at half a dozen medical clinics in Sudan do their rounds. They go crib to crib, connecting 100 babies on the brink of starvation with the IVs, oxygen, and emergency feeding they need to survive. They do that work as conflict spirals — and in a country that the U.S. government recently declared was home to a genocide. But on Wednesday, the Trump administration terminated that program sustaining those efforts — despite having granted the Minnesota-based nonprofit Alight a waiver earlier this month to deliver lifesaving humanitarian assistance. “We have anywhere between 15 and 30 infants and children in these stabilization centers at a time, and if they do not have care, within about a four to eight-hour period, they will die,” Jocelyn Wyatt, the chief executive officer of Alight, told Devex on Thursday. It’s something the organization can’t stomach, Wyatt said. So now, Alight is scrambling to raise money from other donors to keep the centers afloat. But this is just one of nearly 10,000 programs terminated by the Trump administration in recent days, many of which had already received waivers exempting them from a blanket foreign aid freeze. It happened in Lesotho, Eswatini, and Tanzania, where a program supporting more than 350,000 people on HIV treatment — including 10,000 children and 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant mothers — was terminated on Wednesday. It happened in Somalia, where nearly 1 million children were receiving treatment for severe malnutrition. And it happened across Pakistan, India, and 22 other countries, where programs working to prevent the spread of tuberculosis were canceled. Each of those programs had been granted waivers, and several others had received exemptions just days before the Trump administration changed its mind — with one tuberculosis prevention project in Bangladesh getting a waiver on Tuesday, only to be slashed by the government on Wednesday. “What you now have are a lot of communities with very significant needs, needs that were once being met by a trusted partner,” said a humanitarian official at the latter organization, who noted that the Trump administration had terminated nearly 50 of its programs — accounting for 90% of the USAID-funded work. “All of a sudden, that partner is gone with no explanation. That creates fear, that creates frustration, and that creates anger. And people become desperate.” The execution For over a month, U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign aid freeze has paralyzed the aid sector. Thousands of programs were suspended while hundreds were terminated entirely — leaving food rotting in ports, medicine expiring on shelves, and global communities waiting in limbo. On Feb. 13, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reverse the funding freeze. But after nearly two weeks, he found “no evidence” that it had complied. “I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” U.S. District Judge Amir Ali asked the Trump administration’s attorney at a hearing on Tuesday. “We’re 12 days in, and you can’t answer me [on] whether any funds that you’ve acknowledged are covered by the court’s order have been unfrozen.” Soon after, the judge told the Trump administration it must comply with his order by midnight on Wednesday — mandating the government release nearly $2 billion in foreign aid to partners across the world. Instead, the government slashed nearly 10,000 awards, causing a flurry of termination notices to hit organizations’ inboxes on Wednesday night. “Defendants are committed to fully moving forward with the remaining awards and programs that USAID and Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio have determined to retain,” stated a court filing on Wednesday. Many of the termination letters had the same impersonal introduction (Dear Implementing Partner) along with the same stinging sign-off: “Thank you for partnering with USAID and God Bless America.” By Wednesday afternoon, nearly 6,000 awards had been cut from USAID, along with another 4,100 from the State Department. The move left just 500 awards at USAID alone, slicing away more than 90% of the agency’s contracts and grants. Rubio had “individually reviewed” each one of those awards, the Trump administration said in a court filing, determining that each canceled program was “inconsistent” with the United States’ interests and priorities. As a result, the emails went out en masse, hitting many organizations in the double digits. But by Thursday night, it became clear that many of the contracting officers assigned to those awards were left out of the process, with an email circulating across USAID partners asking organizations to send the agency copies of their termination notices. “Nobody knows what the programs that were spared from execution are,” said the head of one global health organization, who spoke to Devex on the condition of anonymity. “There was no recognizable process, no criteria. They just said: We made these determinations.” Exceptions for lifesaving aid? U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, on Wednesday repeated assertions made by Rubio earlier this month, claiming the administration had made exceptions in the foreign aid freeze for programs delivering lifesaving humanitarian support. “If it’s emergency lifesaving aid — food, medicine, whatever — they have a waiver,” said Rubio, speaking in Costa Rica on Feb. 4. “And if they’re not applying it, then maybe they’re not a very good organization and maybe they shouldn’t be getting money at all.” At a Department of Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing, Greene said much of the same. But for weeks, organizations were caught inside a bureaucratic mess — with most hearing nothing about their waiver status, and those receiving waivers unable to access the funds to support the programs. But later Wednesday afternoon, even the theory behind the waivers was stripped away: Awards were terminated regardless of whether they had received an exemption weeks, or even days, before the Trump administration began to cull awards. More of Alight’s programs fell into that category. Back in Sudan, the organization was forced to close a field hospital that focused on women with complicated pregnancies — shuttering a clinic that previously delivered 50 babies every week. The hospital served women living six hours from the next-closest health facility, Wyatt explained. Due to the war raging across the country, these women lack the income, transportation, or ability to seek alternative care. “Now that we have to close this field hospital, the mothers and babies that would be delivering there will die,” she added. The devastation isn’t limited to Sudan. In northeast Syria, a program providing water, sanitation services, and food assistance to more than 100,000 has ended. In Liberia, a school feeding program that reached 25,000 children — and had previously increased attendance by 40% — has been terminated, too. And in Washington, D.C., Chemonics, one of USAID’s biggest partners, has seen nearly every one of its agency-funded programs shut down. That includes its task orders within the U.S. Agency for International Development’s $9.5 billion Global Health Supply Chain Program, an initiative that was once the U.S. government’s flagship to build stronger health systems around the globe. Now, major portions of that program — including the procurement and delivery of commodities related to malaria, maternal, child, and reproductive health — have been canceled, according to a source familiar with the initiatives. “The intent continues to be: asphyxiate the aid enterprise,” said the global health leader. “All of the implementing infrastructure that’s there will die if we just — through a series of steps that are either malicious or incompetent — prevent it from ever getting money again.” The national interest In each termination notice, organizations got the same explanation: Peter Marocco, USAID’s acting deputy administrator, and Marco Rubio, USAID’s acting administrator and secretary of state, determined the awards were “not in the national interest.” But for Shamil Idriss, the chief executive officer of Search for Common Ground, that explanation runs contrary to what his team has been trying to do for years. “It’s very bizarre to see that this funding ever — under any administration — has been provided out of a purely charitable impulse,” said Idriss. “It has always been provided on the basis that greater stability and security is in America’s national security and economic interests.” By Thursday, half of Search for Common Ground’s USAID awards were canceled. Those included a program in Niger working to stabilize a region torn apart by terrorist activity; another in Sudan, where the organization brought the only delegation of women to U.S.-led peace talks — ultimately leading to the opening of a humanitarian corridor in Darfur; and yet another in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supported 80 radio stations along the east of the country. “Those radio stations were providing vital information in terms of which areas were safe to flee to, and countering the hate radio that’s trying to turn this conflict into an ethnic war,” said Idriss. “It reflects a rejection of what I think is a fundamental truth, which is that American security, economic and other interests, are not bound up in the stability and well-being of other parts of the world.” Another organization — whose representative spoke on condition of anonymity — warned that the cancellation of its programs contrasted with what they felt were American values. One now-terminated program had been at work across Central America, protecting human rights defenders at risk of being killed by guerilla groups by providing safe houses and legal support. Another had focused on monitoring forced labor among China’s Uyghur community and holding the government accountable when cases of abuse were identified. “Support for liberty, for freedom, for human rights — these are the American values that we believe in, and that people around the world are aspiring to,” the representative told Devex, speaking after 19 of their awards were cut. Despite that, critics of USAID have repeatedly characterized the agency as doing the opposite. Trump has stated the agency funnels “massive sums” of money into the “pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats.” The agency has been repeatedly rebuked for waste, fraud, and abuse, along with pushing a “radical social agenda” across the world. And just yesterday, Rep. Greene called USAID the Democratic Party’s “piggy bank.” “USAID has been transformed into an America-last foreign aid slush fund to prop up extremist groups, implement censorship campaigns, and interfere in foreign elections to force regime change around the world,” Greene said, speaking at the DOGE subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill. “That is the dark truth about USAID.” Despite this, it seems even organizations in line with Trump’s priorities — faith-based groups, for example, and those in the private sector — have been swept up in the storm. “We’re going to do this work with or without the U.S. government, but we’re going to be much less capable of doing it at the scale we were doing just a month ago, at least for the foreseeable future,” Idriss said. “And that’s going to mean more violence, and everything that comes along with more violence: more disease, more forced migration, and other things that at the end of the day, will directly impact American interests.”