One month ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration had completed its purge of foreign assistance, keeping only a small portfolio of lifesaving humanitarian aid programs in place.
But in the past several days, the Trump administration has slashed many of the programs it had pledged to preserve, according to lists compiled by government officials and aid workers. The cuts threaten to leave some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people without access to adequate supplies of food, clean water and medicine.
In countries like Afghanistan and Yemen, where millions of people do not have enough food, U.S.-backed humanitarian aid was completely cut off. Several countries where conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, such as Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, lost millions of dollars in support for critical food assistance.
The United Nations’ World Food Program, which distributes aid and coordinates shipments, said on social media that the termination of these programs “could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation.”
The cuts are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to erase the U.S. Agency for International Development, which for decades has been the government’s main outfit for distributing foreign aid. The State Department has said that it will take control of U.S.A.I.D.’s remaining functions by Aug. 15, and that Pete Marocco, who presided over the agency’s initial gutting, will oversee them.
Like many of the Trump administration’s recent moves to decimate federal agencies, the latest rollbacks have been drastic and, at times, erratic.