Washington, DC – With each day comes more harrowing reports of the harm being caused by the Trump administration’s reckless pause on existing foreign assistance programs: soup kitchens in Sudan shut down, war refugees in Thailand turned away from hospitals, and the suspension of HIV treatments and mpox surveillance across Africa.
Although courts have stopped President Trump’s broader attempts to freeze federal funding, the stop-work order on foreign programs appears to still be in place. As a result, humanitarian organizations working to save lives around the world with the support of the U.S. government are now left scrambling to mitigate the damage, with little to no guidance. Many won’t be able to survive the Trump administration’s imaginary “90 day” review period; those that remain, will never again fully trust the U.S. government to uphold its end of agreements. Once again, the Trump administration has pushed our international partners into the hands of our adversaries.
“The Trump administration’s halt on foreign assistance programs is not just causing chaos in partner countries around the world—people are going to die,” said Andrew Albertson, Executive Director of Foreign Policy for America. “Children will go hungry, diseases left unchecked will flourish, and women and girls who counted on the American people will have nowhere left to turn. At a time when we should be competing with China and Russia for influence in the world, this absurd freeze is destroying key tools in our toolkit.”
Meanwhile, Elon Musk and his political allies in the administration have wreaked havoc on foreign assistance programs, gutting the nonpartisan workforce of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), including placing top security officials on leave in order to bulldoze rules around accessing classified spaces.
The next step in Musk’s takeover of U.S. foreign aid could come via executive order to dissolve USAID. Over the weekend, he obsessively railed against the agency, calling it a “criminal organization” that must “die.” USAID is a statutorily created independent organization that makes Americans safer and more prosperous by promoting stability and economic opportunities around the globe. Attacking it and our development professionals does nothing to advance our interests and only harms our ability to lead in the world.
Congress must immediately press the administration to reverse this dangerous course, including through leveraging the Senate’s advice and consent role over administration nominees.
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