Aid groups around the globe that were assured lifesaving humanitarian assistance would be safe from White House budget cuts have received notices that those programs will be ended because they are “inconsistent with the Administration’s priorities.”
The groups said they began learning Friday and over the weekend that officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development — itself slated to be closed completely July 1 — were immediately curtailing key food and emergency medical assistance work across Africa and the Middle East.
“The harm is going to be horrendous,” Jeremy Konyndyk, head of Refugees International, said Monday.
For two months, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials had repeatedly said the programs would be exempt from budget cuts because they save thousands of lives in war-torn or impoverished countries.
But the contracts were terminated for the “convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old Harvard Law School graduate on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. Lewin was recently elevated to USAID’s chief operating officer and deputy administrator for policy and programming.
Officials determined that the awards were “inconsistent with the Administration’s priorities,” according to an excerpt from the notice obtained by The Washington Post.
“Ensuring we have the right mix of programs to support U.S. national security and other core national interests of the United States requires an agile approach,” a State Department spokesperson said Monday night. “We will continue to make changes as needed.”
Sarah Charles, the former head of USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, was harshly critical. “This was a massive cut to that system in the dark of night over the last several days,” she said, and included all assistance in Yemen — impacting 14 million people — and Afghanistan, plus the majority of assistance to countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Somalia.
Trump made shutting down the $40 billion aid agency a top priority after taking office in January, alleging it was rife with “radical left lunatics.” Musk, the tech billionaire acting as Trump’s right-hand adviser, celebrated the end of “the most gigantic global terror organization in history” in a repost on his social media platform, X.
Since then, the administration’s moves to lay off thousands of USAID staffers and withhold more than $1 billion in aid funding authorized by Congress have been the subject of multiple court actions.
The latest cuts were first reported by the Associated Press.
Rubio said in March that officials were canceling more than 80 percent of USAID programming based on an agency review — which aid groups blasted in court as slapdash and hasty. About 1,000 grants would be preserved for humanitarian reasons and administered by the State Department, he added.
Now, many of those programs will also be gone. They include the U.N. World Food Program’s main food assistance grant to Somalia, where war and drought have left more than 6 million people lacking sufficient food. WFP said in a statement on X that it is “deeply concerned” such funding has been terminated in 14 countries. The action, it warned, “could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger.”
For Konyndyk, a former USAID official in both the Biden and Obama administrations, the fact that Lewin’s actions have overridden Rubio’s assurances to Congress “creates some serious questions whether Marco Rubio or Jeremy Lewin is running the State Department. Whose word matters?”
“It further explodes the talking point that they are trying to preserve lifesaving assistance,” he said. “The way this has been done is totally haphazard, with no rhyme or reason.”