Which USAID offices saw the most cuts?

As the development community awaits further clarity on how U.S. foreign assistance will be restructured under the planned absorption of the U.S. Agency for International Development into the Department of State, this Devex analysis examines which parts of the agency were hit hardest by recent award terminations. This analysis offers early signals of which offices may face the sharpest downsizing or potentially disappear altogether. The data comes from the most recent batch of award termination records that the Trump administration has submitted to the U.S. Congress. In this analysis, Devex ranks USAID issuing offices — as they are labeled in the dataset — by the percentage of funding that remained unobligated at the time their awards were terminated. In other words, how much of their projected funding pipelines were effectively erased? To do this, we calculated the share of unobligated funding out of the total estimated cost, or TEC, for each office’s terminated awards. Check out our guide to navigate the jargon and the math behind our analyses. The TEC reflects the maximum potential value of an award — a ceiling, but not a guarantee of funding. If a portion of that ceiling was never obligated — meaning it was committed, but it’s unknown whether it was disbursed to the awardee — and the award was later canceled, that amount is considered lost. This percentage-based ranking offers a relative view: rather than highlighting where the largest cuts occurred by dollar amount, it pinpoints which offices saw the deepest proportional losses to their expected portfolios. In other words, where future programming was most disrupted. It’s worth noting that the dataset comes with limitations. Several awards — totaling over $192 million in unobligated funding — were attributed to blank or undefined issuing offices, making them impossible to assign with certainty. In other cases, potential duplicates appear to exist: for instance, the Middle East Regional Platform, or MERP, is listed twice under slightly different naming conventions, each with distinct figures. These inconsistencies underscore that while the dataset offers a valuable lens into USAID’s internal distribution of terminations, it may not capture the full picture. USAID’s Planning, Learning, and Resource Management, or PLR, office has seen nearly 87% of its potential portfolio vanish. The Global Development Lab, or LAB, once a flagship hub for innovation, lost over 84% of its award ceilings. Furthermore, USAID field missions such as Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, West Africa Regional, and Nepal have seen nearly half their portfolios disappear — a significant shock to on-the-ground operations. The list that follows highlights the 12 most affected offices that lost more than 60% of their total projected award value — measured as the share of their TEC that remained unobligated at the time of termination. In other words, these are the offices that saw the deepest proportional losses to their expected funding ceilings: 1. USAID PLR: $148.8 million unobligated, representing 86.7% of its total potential award ceiling. 2. USAID LAB: $164.5 million unobligated, or 84.1% of its TEC. 3. Latin America and the Caribbean Bureau, or USAID LAC: $27.9 million unobligated, or 79.4% of its total potential award value. 4. USAID Asia Bureau: $27.6 million, or 78.8%, unobligated. 5. Office of Transition Initiatives within the Conflict Prevention and Stabilization Bureau, or USAID CPS/OTI: $411.2 million unobligated, or 71.2% of its global projected award value. 6. USAID Africa Bureau: $63.9 million unobligated, or 70.8% of its estimated total award value. 7. Management Services Office, or USAID M/MS: $12.6 million unobligated, or 70.4% of its prospective funding ceiling. 8. Office of Acquisition and Assistance Risk Management, or M/OAA/RM: $84 million unobligated, or 69.8%. In addition, the Office of Acquisition and Assistance itself, or M/OAA — which was counted separately in the dataset — had the major cut in absolute terms across offices with $8.2 billion, representing 47% of its terminated portfolio. 9. USAID/Timor-Leste: $11 million unobligated, or 67.4% of its TEC. 10. Conflict Prevention and Stabilization Bureau, or USAID CPS: $2.5 million, or 63.5%, unobligated. 11. USAID/Brazil: $19.8 million unobligated, or 62.6% of its total potential award value. 12. USAID/Uzbekistan: $52.8 million unobligated, or 61.5% of its global projected award value. While smaller and regional offices dominate the top of the list by percentage, some of USAID’s largest and most strategic bureaus also saw significant losses. The Global Health Bureau — historically one of the most influential within USAID — lost over $4.4 billion in unobligated funding, roughly 37% of its total potential portfolio. USAID/Ethiopia, one of the largest field missions on the African continent, saw nearly $541 million in planned funding cut, accounting for nearly 43% of its ceiling-level funding. The Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security, or USAID REFS, lost over $108 million, or 20% of its total estimated award value. USAID/Ukraine, a key geopolitical mission, saw $737 million in planned funds cut, amounting to 21% of its terminated award ceiling. Meanwhile, the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance had one of the lowest relative impacts — with just 9.3%, or $256 million, of its terminated portfolio left unobligated. On the other end of the spectrum, 16 USAID offices had zero unobligated funding, according to the termination data — meaning their award ceilings had already been fully obligated. As mentioned in previous analyses, whether that obligated funding has actually been fully disbursed remains uncertain. While it remains unclear exactly how these office-level cuts will shape the future U.S. aid architecture, the data points to potential shifts. Offices tied to planning, innovation, and regional coordination — many of which absorbed some of the highest percentage cuts — would face elimination, consolidation, or realignment under the restructure plans the administration has shared with Congress. At the same time, global health and humanitarian response, while not unscathed, appear to retain stronger funding footholds — possibly foreshadowing future priorities.