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The dominoes fell really fast. On Monday, Jan. 20, shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that called for a 90-day pause on new foreign-aid programs for efficiency and “consistency with U.S. foreign policy.” The order got less attention than some of the others he signed that day but may have much more far-reaching effects.
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By the evening of Friday, Jan. 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued a directive that went even further, effectively freezing operations at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. government’s lead provider of nonmilitary foreign aid. No new projects were to be started, no contracts were to be extended, and work was to be stopped on most existing programs. By Monday, Jan. 27, at least 56 of USAID’s top brass were sent home on paid administrative leave for 90 days, reportedly cut off from their email, and, in case the message was not clear, the photos from the walls of their office were removed.
Chaos and confusion began to spread through the ranks of USAID, both in Washington, D.C, where there are about 15,000 employees and abroad, where there are thousands more. It also spread among the many nongovernmental organizations and religious groups that receive funds from it, and the small businesses the agency contracts to provide services. Some of them had to guess whether their programs had to be paused under the terms of their agreement with the State Department and others received suspension notices and memos from a variety of different channels.
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TIME spoke to several current and former senior officials at USAID and others who head up organizations it supports about the impact of the move on their activity. Almost all requested that TIME not use their names because they didn’t want to jeopardize their future funding or employment.
On Tuesday morning one of those aid organizations, which runs dozens of child nutrition clinics in several extremely impoverished countries, had an emergency meeting to try to decide whether to close them. “Those kids have to be fed every three to four hours with therapeutic feeding products in order to reverse the effects of malnutrition, prevent long-term harm, and basically keep them alive,” says an official at the NGO. “We had to make a decision: Do we close those centers? Or do we keep them open at the risk of being in violation of our suspension notice or stop-work order?”
Later that day, after the NGO opted to keep the clinic open by repurposing some non-USAID funding, Secretary Rubio released a clarification that “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could proceed. The organization believes, but is not sure, the clinics fall under that heading.
Charitable groups around the world told TIME they were making similar agonizing choices. One had to decide whether to abide by a stop-work order or deliver lunches to schoolchildren in impoverished communities, as it has for years. It decided to obey the order, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of perishable food. Another is figuring out whether to close health clinics for pregnant mothers in Haiti, leaving them with scant alternatives for a place to give birth. Yet another was forced to pause a program that helped migrants fleeing Venezuela stay in South American countries (rather than continuing north to the U.S. border), through work training, housing, and support of the host community.
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The U.S. plays an outsize role in responding to international crises, providing 40% of the world’s humanitarian assistance. Most people in the humanitarian sector acknowledge that Washington has the right to review how the more than $40 billion it spends doing so every year is used. “The government has the prerogative to conduct a review of spending and programs against their priorities,” says an executive of a major aid organization. “But the ways in which they’re going about it, in my mind, would undermine the likelihood of them actually having an aid sector to work with as they go forward.”
Questions emailed to the Department of State went unanswered by press time, but a media note posted online says that a pause is the only way to really “scrutinize and prevent” wasteful spending. (Foreign aid represents about 1% of the federal budget.) “It is impossible to evaluate programs on autopilot because the participants—both inside and outside of government—have little to no incentive to share programmatic-level details so long as the dollars continue to flow,” the note said.
Here’s what foreign-aid experts are saying about the outsize impact of the temporary pause.
It’s Unprecedented
New administrations customarily have a period of review of government-funded programs. Every incoming government wants to save money and be more efficient, and to be seen doing it. But nobody TIME spoke to could recall the agency’s funding being almost entirely frozen while such a review is taking place. “The scope of the Trump Administration’s freeze of USAID programs is unprecedented,” says Tim Rieser, foreign-policy aide to former Senator Patrick Leahy, who chaired the Appropriations Committee. Many of the programs will cease to be effective if they’re not consistent. If a medical clinic closes, infectious diseases can spread quickly. If security guards don’t show up at a Syrian refugee camp because they’ve been told not to, it leaves an opening for local thugs to step in. “We stop work all the time as a result of the ends of contracts or the ends of our grant agreements,” says the head of one aid organization. “So there’s an orderly way of reinvesting U.S. foreign assistance. It’s just not this.”
The Agency Was in Need of Reform, But Not Dismantling
Most of the people TIME spoke to about USAID, both from within and outside the agency, agreed that it would benefit from a bit of a shake-up. “There’s real reform needed in the sector,” says the official at the NGO. “Many of us have been advocating for that.” Programs are duplicated. Some initiatives have outlived their usefulness or have led to dependency rather than the development outcomes that were intended. There is waste, and oversight is often difficult. The system tends to favor bigger Western organizations and not smaller, more nimble local agencies. “If there was a process through which all of these programs could be reviewed, I think that everyone would be rolling up their sleeves to have the programs reviewed,” says one former senior USAID official. “But there is no such process.” Others were more damning. “There are certainly things that could be done to improve USAID,” says Rieser, “but these people, who know next to nothing about USAID’s programs or dedicated personnel, are not the ones to do it.”
It’s Chaotic
It’s unclear from the government’s directives which programs are affected by the freeze on funding and which are exempt. And it’s difficult to ascertain whom to ask about it. Initiatives that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion are obviously disfavored, and collaboration with the World Health Organization is a no-go area. Emergency food programs and “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance” are supposed to be exempt, but it is unclear what programs fall under that description. School lunches are sometimes the only food a child reliably gets in a day, but are they “core lifesaving food,” for example?
Individual programs have to apply for a waiver to the pause, and thousands have, which according to TIME’s sources, has caused a backlog, exacerbated by the absence of executives with the most knowledge of the programs. The media note from the State Department says, “The process was used successfully dozens of times in the first several days; however, many requests failed to provide the level of detail necessary to allow a thorough evaluation.”
Because of the method by which USAID funds are disbursed, the only way to pause all of the funding was to issue a legion of individual stop-work orders, which came from various sources, some of which were foggy as to the degree or type of work that had to be paused. “I wish [current USAID leadership] would either make a more blanket statement, or that they empower their teams to interpret this, so that, say, a project in Nepal gets to hear from the mission in Nepal that this is what you should do and this is what you can’t do,” says the aid-organization head.
It’s Provoking Fear
It’s unclear what the USAID leaders did to provoke the ire of officials who enforced a sudden ejection. The stated reason from USAID acting director Jason Gray was that he had “identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people,” but former USAID officials say none of the departees knows what action any of them took that would fall under that category. USAID’s labor-relations director said he found no evidence of misconduct and was withdrawing this decision, but then he was put on leave himself hours later, a series of developments previously reported by the Washington Post and ProPublica.
Their unceremonious removal and the arrival of new unknown personnel in leadership has unnerved the employees who remain while at the same time increasing their workload. “People are scared, and whenever people are scared, they are on the side of being conservative, keeping their head down,” says a former USAID executive. After the freeze one current employee reported receiving just one email in an entire workday. “People are going to work and they’re just sitting there,” says the same executive. “People are afraid to write emails, because all the work is stopped. And the U.S. taxpayer is paying for all this.”
It’s Wasteful
Leaders of organizations that have received USAID funding in the past have to guess whether their budgets will be affected long term and plan accordingly, so they are axing employees and closing programs just in case. “The kind of catch-22 that all organizations are in is if we advance the work by trying to understand and interpret what is meant, then we could be facing the risk of financial outlay of millions of dollars that wouldn’t be reimbursed,” said an NGO chief. “If we don’t advance the work, then we potentially have perishable lifesaving support that is stranded and wasted. And so it’s an impossible kind of paralysis that we face.”
It’s Against American Interests
Foreign aid is often said to be the third leg of the national-security stool, alongside defense and diplomacy. When people in difficult situations can be given assistance, it makes them less likely to want to leave, or destabilize a government, or try to use force to gain resources. “Foreign aid is one of the tools in your toolkit, and by destroying that toolkit, you’re making America less safe, and you’re also not achieving the goal of peace,” says Susan Reichle, a former senior executive at USAID. Others point to the perils of removing a stable source of relief in an increasingly destabilized world. Among them was Sen. Chris Coons (D-Conn.) who told the Senate on Thursday, Jan. 30, just shy of a week after Secretary Rubio’s first memo was released, that the real beneficiary of the move was China. “Our biggest global competitor and adversary is delighted that we’ve handed them an opportunity to say to communities and countries around the world that we are not a reliable partner,” he said. “The administration may be claiming that this pause is temporary, but its effects will not be.”
