How Trump's first 100 days have meant chaos for US foreign aid

It has been 100 days since Donald Trump came to power — and set in motion a series of events that have paralyzed foreign aid. It first came in the form of an executive order, one that paused all U.S. foreign assistance until a 90-day review was complete. Then, there was a stop-work order, one that halted programs in their tracks. Over the next few weeks, the administration turned to the U.S. Agency for International Development — and an aid agency that was once the world’s largest lost nearly all its programs, staff, and funding in just two months. Projects were canceled, un-canceled, and re-canceled again. The foreign aid review was declared complete by mid-March, then switched back on in mid-April. And today, more than 80% of USAID’s programs have been terminated — leaving at least 36 million people without urgent humanitarian support, according to a recent analysis from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, or SIDA. For many, the last 100 days have changed everything — especially for those in countries most affected by conflict, crisis, and disaster. Before Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the U.S. funded 40% of the world’s health and humanitarian programs. Now, the hollowing out of USAID has left a gap — and it’s not clear who, if anyone, will be able to pick up the pieces. “It hasn’t just been a temporary funding gap,” said Aliona Pashchenko, a project manager at Ukrainian nonprofit organization The Tenth of April. “It’s been a systems-level disrupture.” The destruction At first, the blows came quickly. The country’s foreign aid freeze, stop-work order, and dismantling of USAID — which was once the world’s largest bilateral donor — happened in dizzying succession. USAID staff were placed on administrative leave and then fired; programs were given waivers to deliver humanitarian aid, but no funding. A flurry of termination notices hit the world’s organizations, all of which stated that their programs were being cancelled “for the convenience” of the U.S. government. And by early March, nearly 40% of nonprofits had just three months of cash or less, according to a survey of more than 800 organizations by the Accountability Lab and Humentum. “We were helping people every day, every month. And all of a sudden, it all had to be stopped,” said Sara Savva, the deputy director-general of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East’s humanitarian arm, GOPA-DERD. “We were shocked because we had no idea what to do — and how to act — overnight.” At the end of last month, the Trump administration sent a list to Congress that illustrated the depth of those cuts. The foreign aid review was complete, the government said, and just under 900 programs at USAID would be retained while another 5,341 would be sliced away. The State Department had also suffered massive cuts of its own — but because the list compiled by the Trump administration is riddled with inconsistencies, the true number of terminations remains impossible to ascertain. At that point, it seemed, the administration was done cutting. But two weeks later, it seemed to change its mind. More than 40 programs initially slated to survive the government’s cull were retroactively canceled, although the government admitted shortly afterwards that some of those cuts were actually a mistake. Halfway through April, Jeremy Lewin, the new head of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, said he was extending the review another 30 days. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had also previously said the review was complete, celebrated additional cancellations in mid-April. “We are cleaning up the mess the previous administration left and rebuilding an agency that's focused on putting America First,” Rubio posted on X, while announcing the State Department had canceled another 139 grants worth $214 million. Today, it’s not clear whether the administration will continue slashing U.S. foreign assistance or whether the 30-day extension of the review will be the last. Throughout the last several months, the Trump administration has also attempted to dissolve the U.S. African Development Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Inter-American Foundation, all of which have now been taken over by the Department for Government Efficiency, the budget-slashing agency run by billionaire Elon Musk. That’s meant thousands more layoffs and thousands more program cancellations, along with three separate battles for survival in U.S. federal court. And just last week, attention shifted toward the Millennium Challenge Corporation — an agency which, for years, has been known for attracting bipartisan support. “There’s a fundamental unmooring here,” said Madeleine Ballard, the head of the Community Health Impact Coalition, a nonprofit network of community health workers. “And there’s the sense that the moral compass that has guided all of our work, collectively, is being challenged.” The fallout For Pashchenko, the last few months have meant her organization — which provides legal aid, protection programs, and emergency shelters across Ukraine — was forced to shutter countless projects. While The Tenth of April struggled to survive, they watched as other organizations did the same. And every time a nonprofit collapsed, the people those groups were once supporting turned to Pashchenko’s team instead. “We’ve been asked to do more with less,” she added. “But we can’t help them, and that eats us inside.” In Ukraine, nearly 2 million people were relying on humanitarian support funded by the U.S. government, according to the SIDA analysis. But over the last three months, the impact has extended far beyond that Eastern European country. SIDA estimates that there are more than 4.4 million people relying on U.S.-funded support in Sudan, another 4.2 million in Afghanistan, and an additional 3.1 million in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those are just three of the 25 countries hardest hit by conflict, many of which received the bulk of their humanitarian support from the U.S. “We are an emergency response organization, but we have never seen anything like this massive disruption to global health and humanitarian programs,” said Avril Benoît, the head of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières USA, in a statement. “The risks are catastrophic, especially since people who rely on foreign assistance are already among the most vulnerable in the world.” MSF doesn’t take U.S. funding, so its programs haven’t been affected directly by the cuts. But just like The Tenth of April, MSF has had to double its efforts for at-risk communities. One MSF-supported hospital in Somalia, for example, has begun to receive patients traveling from as far as 120 miles away for treatment, the result of clinics closer to those patients shuttering. But even so, those patients were lucky. Soon after the aid cuts were announced, Save the Children said that at least five children and three adults with cholera died searching for treatment in South Sudan, as first reported in The New York Times. After halts in funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, more than 41,000 adults — and nearly 4,400 children — are estimated to have died as a result, according to the Boston University-supported PEPFAR Impact Tracker. Another projection from the Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, found that USAID was saving an average of 3.3 million lives through its humanitarian and global health programming every year. Such figures mean that every day, around 6,000 people are dying from the loss of those programs — accounting for 612,000 deaths since the foreign aid freeze began. “When big actors exit suddenly, like in this situation, the system doesn’t just pause. It breaks,” said Pashchenko. “And the humanitarian funding pause didn’t just delay aid. It fractured the foundation of how humanitarian support functions.” Despite that, many organizations have tried to push ahead. Ballard said some health workers in the nonprofit’s network have attempted to continue their work anyway — doing whatever they can to help those who needed care. But with the system crumbling around them, she said that’s felt “like sending firefighters into a blaze with water guns.” “Their hands are tied behind their backs in so many ways,” Ballard told Devex. “They’re being absolutely crippled in their ability to do their jobs.” The future By now, the foreign aid review was meant to be complete. But 100 days into Trump’s second presidency, foreign assistance remains in the balance — not just in the U.S., but around the world. Just last week, Rubio announced a sweeping reorganization plan for the State Department, one that would put “America First” by reducing the agency’s bureaus and offices by 17%. While Rubio didn’t release budgetary figures, an earlier plan outlined cuts to the State Department by nearly 50% — and slashes to foreign aid alone by $21.5 billion. The State Department’s spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, has repeatedly told reporters that the extent of the cuts won’t be made public until Trump releases his budget request for fiscal year 2026, which is expected in the coming weeks. “Our commitment to foreign aid hasn’t changed,” Bruce said at a press conference earlier this month. “It is in our nature as Americans.” Daryl Grisgraber, the humanitarian policy lead for Oxfam America, said she is expecting cuts to the United Nations next. Today, the U.S. funds more than a quarter of the U.N.’s collective budget, according to the Council on Foreign Relations — but in the plan noted above, the Trump administration would cut that funding by 89%. “The next logical choice would be, well, don’t worry, the U.N. will fill the gap,” Grisgraber told Devex. “But if you take away the U.N., there’s not a whole lot left.” U.N. agencies have taken note. Late last week, the World Food Programme stated it would be cutting up to 30% of its staff, according to an internal email obtained by Devex. The UN Refugee Agency — which also said it would be slashing thousands of jobs late last month — has made cuts too: the agency recently told Savva it would be closing six of the 18 community centers it funds through GOPA-DERD, all of which are located in earthquake-devastated areas in northeast Syria. That means between 150 to 200 staff are going home, Savva explained, many of whom are part of those communities themselves. “It reminds me of when you’re in a hospital, and suddenly, there’s no more electricity,” she added. “What happens to the incubators? What happens to the people in the ICU? This is exactly what people are facing.”