May 1, 2025

Foreign aid cuts hurt me — and all of us

By Anya Levy Guyer >>

As has happened to thousands of Americans in the past two months, my job recently disappeared with a stroke of the White House autopen.

I had been working on a USAID-funded contract to a U.S. university; our project was to develop online training courses for the staff of humanitarian and emergency relief programs worldwide. Then, on January 20, 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid. This order lays out the new administration’s position that “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”

Four days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a directive to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to “pause” all funding of foreign assistance programs pending “a review…to ensure they are efficient and consistent with U.S. foreign policy under the America First agenda.” (Four days after that, in response to backlash, Rubio remembered to add a “waiver” to exempt “life-saving humanitarian assistance.”)

By the time the waiver was issued, my project’s leadership had already been notified of “a 90-day pause for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.” All work on the project abruptly stopped. Six weeks later, in mid-March, the contract was formally cancelled.

Apparently, ensuring that humanitarian workers understand how to adhere to international humanitarian legal frameworks and deliver aid using best practices no longer fits with U.S. values. Foreign aid was among the first of many U.S. government policy areas facing drastic changes and cuts under the second Trump administration. Foreign aid was likely used as the test case because, unlike domestic programs, foreign aid never directly affects the majority of American voters. However, the effects of these cuts will harm us all over the long-term.

The impact of cutting foreign aid (including the destruction of the agency that managed its distribution) will be invisible to most Americans. But the effects will be wide and deep, both domestically and internationally. They will result, literally, in the deaths of many human beings (whose deaths will not be accurately counted, because data collection was also defunded) and in profound suffering for many more.

As I have already noted, one immediate effect of these cuts is the loss of livelihoods for myself, the thousands of people who worked directly for USAID, and the tens of thousands of people who worked for one of the contracted implementers (including not-for-profit organizations, businesses, and universities in the U.S. and around the world).

It also goes beyond the people drawing salaries directly funded by USAID. All of the people working for businesses and industries that supplied goods and services distributed through USAID projects and used by USAID offices worldwide have also had their livelihoods cut off. Notably, this includes a domestic constituency of the American farmers and others who supplied the materials these programs distributed.

In 2020, the government purchased $2 billion worth of food aid from American farmers. (Meanwhile, nearly $500 million worth of crops were reportedly left to rot in warehouses and ships due to the abrupt cuts.) Other commodities and services purchased by USAID from American companies include food processing, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, transportation and shipping, office and industrial real estate, computers and technology, among others. This loss of income and stable employment creates significant difficulty for many of us.

And what about the impact on the literal millions of other people who were the intended beneficiaries of U.S. foreign assistance? The projections are still being honed, but the programs that have been axed go far beyond basic food aid. On the health docket, funding has been cut for routine vaccinations for measles and polio, among others, as well as for prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, mpox, and malaria. Other program areas included prevention of maternal mortality and cervical cancer, and supporting stronger public health systems around the world to monitor epidemics and provide preventive and curative health care.

The ripple effects of these cancellations will — probably sooner rather than later, if the current measles outbreak in the U.S. is any indication — come back to us. Diseases are transmitted across borders. Cuts to food aid, agricultural development and environmental protections will likely drive more desperate populations into conflict and violence as they seek to survive. Cuts to education, anti-corruption, and democracy building programs will undermine the stability and economic growth of low- and middle income countries. And destroying the organizations and institutions that have been implementing such programs undermines the existence of functioning civil societies.

Withdrawing USAID support also harms the global reputation of the U.S. at a time when many other countries (notably, but not only, China) are vying for global influence. The Washington Post editorial board noted that, “For many people around the world, aid is…the most visible symbol of U.S. power —soft power — and a tangible demonstration of America’s decency.” They conclude, “All in all, foreign aid is an extraordinarily effective policy tool…that makes the United States stronger.”

No one involved in foreign aid would deny that it is a complicated and fraught endeavor. (Indeed, my personal concerns about the way the industry operated drove me, over the last decade or so, to make career choices that felt more ethical but limited my personal professional opportunities and income.) But ending ongoing foreign assistance programs so hastily is the opposite of efficiency. One advocacy group cited a U.S. Government Accountability Office estimate that the shutdown of USAID alone created $3.34 billion in economic losses. Again, there are real arguments to be considered about whether and how to use U.S. government funds effectively and efficiently for foreign assistance, but this is patently not how it is happening.

It is also worth reviewing the methods by which foreign aid cuts have been implemented, as they served as one of the blueprints for the strategies used by the administration to demolish a wide range of domestic programs.

While the initial policy directives came from the Department of State, the newly created “Department of Government Efficiency” took the lead in executing the orders. (DOGE is led by “special government employee” Elon Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur with no government experience, but whose companies SpaceX and Tesla have received at least $18 billion in federal contracts in the past ten years.) Less than a week after the inauguration, DOGE staff invaded USAID’s headquarters, took over USAID’s systems, and began to shut down the agency. They fired the agency’s leadership, put most of the rest of the 10,000 staff on administrative leave and removed their access to all systems, and prevented the remaining staff from authorizing any payments (even for previously completed work for which payment was due).

DOGE deleted the agency’s website, removed its sign from the front of its headquarters, and instructed staff to shred or burn documents without following proper procedures. About 60% of USAID staff were living and working overseas — they were also told to halt work, and were then abandoned without guidance or financial assistance to return to the U.S.

The dust from this assault is still settling, as legal wrangling continues. But here is the situation as of March 27, 2025: according to a 281-page spreadsheet, 5341 previously approved USAID contracts have been summarily canceled. An additional 2100 State Department programs have also been axed. This means that the U.S. abruptly cut off funding for thousands of programs, like mine, that were in the middle of implementing carefully designed and approved programs. Management of the 898 remaining USAID contracts is being relocated to an office under the Department of State, placing foreign aid even more squarely in the political, rather than humanitarian, realm. Together with DOGE staff, this process was led by Pete Marocco, a controversial former USAID official who was fired in 2021 after expressing support for the January 6 insurrection. He has now been appointed to the State Department as director of foreign assistance.

The amount of money “saved” by the cuts is debatable — DOGE originally claimed it saved $12.4 billion, while others suggest it was closer to half of that. The total value of the terminated contacts is up to $75.9 billion. In 2023, the U.S. spent approximately $68 billion on (non-military) foreign aid. That sounds like a lot, but in fact it represents less than 1% of the entire federal budget. At that spending level, the U.S. ranked 25th among other donor countries in terms of the proportion of overall GDP spent on foreign aid.

Again, I concur that whether the U.S. government ought to be funding humanitarian aid, economic development, democracy-building, or health systems in other countries is a valid topic for debate — but no such debate was conducted before the administration acted unilaterally and indiscriminately.

Nor were the contracts carefully assessed for either consistency or efficiency. Indeed, the abrupt and indiscriminate cancellation of so many programs was patently inefficient (despite DOGE’s supposed aims). Furthermore, according to a U.S. District Court judge, these actions “likely violated” U.S. law “in multiple ways.” The judge ordered the government to reinstate certain functions and provide the remaining staff with access to the headquarters. However, despite the post facto judicial rebukes, and regardless of whether further appeals reverse the ruling, the infrastructure of the agency is already decimated.

It is not clear what will happen next with U.S. foreign assistance. As of this writing, the plan seems to be to dissolve USAID by the end of September 2025. Foreign assistance would then be handled by a U.S. Agency for International Humanitarian Assistance and the State Department. Some embassy-based aid positions would remain, but otherwise, foreign service officers would be responsible for administering assistance programs.

One more aside: while many organizations that received USAID funding were non-profit organizations or American businesses, I was working on a subcontract to an American university. The amount of government funding funneled to U.S. universities by USAID was exponentially smaller than that provided by the National Institutes of Health or the Departments of Energy, Education, Defense and Agriculture, among other federal agencies. But the cancellation of USAID-funded projects will have the same effects as these other larger cuts: undermining the U.S.’ ability to remain competitive in the world. Universities are already rescinding offers to newly accepted doctoral and medical students, meaning we are no longer training the next generation of researchers, leaders, and other professionals. Looking ahead, it seems probable that the deep cuts to the Department of Education will eventually reach federal student loan opportunities, on which the vast majority of students rely.

For years, American conservatives have argued that governments in low- and middle-income countries should be funding their own services and research, rather than relying on the U.S. and other donor countries to support them. Yet now, the U.S. is not even funding its own research and services. If universities receive neither research funding nor tuition, then these engines of education and innovation will grind to a halt, leaving the U.S. without the skills we need to build our own cities, grow and distribute our own food, provide healthcare to ourselves, our children, and our elders, and generally remain a leading global power. These effects will then reverberate globally.

Yes, I am freaking out about having lost my salary, and I’m devastated not to be able to make a contribution through the work I was doing. But I am even more concerned by what these cuts will mean for the U.S. and the world in the coming weeks, months, and years — and I think all Americans should be as well. The money the U.S. spends on foreign aid goes far beyond buying commodities, building infrastructure, or paying salaries. It buys us security through controlling threats and building good will for the U.S. This situation is the quintessential “cutting off our nose to spite our face” situation. Not only have we disfigured our national image by cutting foreign aid, I fear that in the end, we may be so badly wounded that we eventually end up bleeding out.