Tributes are placed beneath the covered seal of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) at their headquarters in Washington on Feb. 7.MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Humanitarian groups around the world are reeling in shock from the latest massive cuts in American foreign aid after U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration announced the abrupt termination of more than 90 per cent of programs at its leading aid agency.
The permanent halt in aid contracts, disclosed in U.S. court filings on Wednesday night in a dramatic escalation of an earlier 90-day funding freeze, has eliminated an estimated US$54-billion in global programs by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
By Thursday morning, many of the thousands of humanitarian organizations that will lose their funding had already received immediate termination notices from USAID. The cuts will affect everything from food aid in war zones to health programs for millions of impoverished people, including programs to fight malaria and tuberculosis, as well as to provide emergency nutrition packages for malnourished children.
In South Africa alone, the cuts to HIV programs could trigger as many as 600,000 deaths over the next decade, according to health groups at a briefing on Thursday. But the terminations went far beyond HIV programs, affecting thousands of groups in about 130 countries worldwide.
“Women and children will go hungry, food will rot in warehouses while families starve, children will be born with HIV – among other tragedies,” said a statement by InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based aid groups.
“This needless suffering will not make America safer, stronger, or more prosperous. Rather, it will breed instability, migration, and desperation.”
Opinion: Scrapping USAID doesn’t just hurt the world’s poor – it harms the West
Health groups in South Africa, which has the world’s largest population of people with HIV, said they were stunned by the sudden announcement of terminations after they had earlier received U.S. assurances that lifesaving programs would be exempted from the cuts.
Dozens of groups received termination letters from USAID on Thursday, declaring that their funding had been ended “for convenience and the interests of the U.S. government.”
According to the letters, U.S. officials had determined that the funding “is not aligned with agency priorities” and that “continuing this program is not in the national interest.” No further explanation was provided.
“It is not hyperbole to say that I predict a huge disaster,” said Linda-Gail Bekker, chief operating officer of a leading South African health group, the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation.
“We stand to lose all the investment of the past 25 years,” she told a media briefing on Thursday. “We’re going to see this epidemic walk back as a result of this.”
Dr. Bekker was among the authors of a study, published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which forecast that the number of HIV-related deaths could increase by 315,000 to 600,000 in South Africa over the next 10 years, depending on the eventual extent of funding cuts in HIV programs.
Sibongile Tshabalala, chairperson of South African advocacy group Treatment Action Campaign, who has been living with HIV for the past 25 years, said she is already hearing reports of people with HIV finding it more difficult to get access to lifesaving medicine.
“More people will die – we are anticipating that,” she told the briefing. “How am I going to survive?”
The U.S. provides almost one-fifth of all funding for HIV programs in South Africa, including prevention programs and the supply of medicine. The U.S. programs have saved an estimated 25 million lives around the world over the past two decades.
“This is one of the worst days of my career,” said Kate Rees, a South African public-health physician. “We’re being pushed over a cliff.”
Even before the latest announcement of permanent terminations, the U.S. aid cuts were projected to force an additional 5.7 million Africans into extreme poverty over the next year, according to a study by the University of Denver.
A major humanitarian agency, the Norwegian Refugee Council, said on Tuesday that the earlier American aid cuts had forced it to suspend programs for hundreds of thousands of people in critical need, from Sudan and Congo to Colombia and Myanmar.
One of the NRC’s suspended programs had been helping 700 bakeries supply affordable bread to people on the brink of starvation in the war-ravaged Darfur region of western Sudan. Other suspended programs had provided water and sanitation to about 100,000 people who faced the threat of cholera in Sudan and Congo, it said.
The Trump administration had promised last month that it would provide waivers to protect lifesaving programs from the funding suspensions. But no such waivers were included in the latest terminations – and even groups that had earlier applied for waivers had their funding cancelled.
Mr. Trump’s billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, said on Wednesday that the administration had “accidentally cancelled” funds for Ebola prevention and had then reversed the move.
“We will make mistakes,” he told a cabinet meeting. In the latest USAID cuts, however, Ebola programs are again affected.
In a move that compounds the global aid funding crisis, the British government announced its own cuts to foreign aid this week. To find money for its increased defence budget, the government cut Britain’s aid budget by US$7.7-billion – about 40 per cent of current aid spending – bringing the allocation to its lowest level in 13 years.
“The cut in foreign assistance globally is a dark and difficult moment,” Inger Ashing, chief executive officer of humanitarian group Save the Children, said in a statement on Thursday.
“This withdrawal of support will have a direct and deadly impact on some of the world’s most vulnerable children.”