Uncertainty in development cooperation due to freezing of USAID funds: ‘It is a racist measure’

On Monday, María had 90 minutes to finish any pending work before entering a period of uncertainty and fear. She sent emails so that her team members could return home as soon as possible from where they were deployed, from India to Ethiopia, sent invoices and expenses to the only person who would remain active processing them, closed her email account and deleted the company app from her phone. In less than two hours she was officially placed on administrative leave. It is not clear how long this will last, or how much she will continue to be paid, if she will receive any of her salary at all.

“It feels completely targeted at this industry. It feels racist because we’re basically helping brown people, and it’s like they’re saying ‘fuck you,’” María says, her voice cracking over a video call. She prefers not to use her last name for fear of reprisals from authorities. Until a few days ago, she led a team at an international cooperation company that relies almost entirely on U.S. government funding for international development. That funding is now frozen by executive order of President Donald Trump.

The domino effect that began on the day he took office with the pen signing the executive order that halted virtually all global aid and support spending — much of it administered by the agency USAID, with an annual budget of $42.8 billion — has quickly led to the halting of initiatives of all kinds around the world. From the funding and supply of health programs that practically keep health systems afloat in some poor and remote parts of the world, to others that support small and medium-sized businesses, and with a host of programs in between.

For millions of people in the developing world, it is a matter of life and death, as voices inside and outside the United States have already denounced, especially over the future of the PEPFAR program, which provides antiviral drugs to millions of HIV and AIDS patients around the world and which, according to the State Department, has saved the lives of 26 million people since its inception in 2001. And for much of the entire industry that makes it possible and employs tens of thousands of people in the country, it is a potentially devastating blow.

The nervous voices could already be heard on Monday, January 20, when, among a sea of executive orders, Trump signed the one that ordered a 90-day pause on “foreign development assistance to evaluate programmatic effectiveness and coherence with U.S. foreign policy.” This is what Hanna — who also does not want to use her full name for fear of repercussions against her or her company — experienced. “The executive order was very vague. We were all wondering for a few days what it was going to mean,” says this employee from the Washington area of a firm that works with USAID to carry out extensive field studies on health, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Then came Friday. Contractors who use USAID money to run countless programs around the world received communications saying that all agency-funded activities would be halted, though there was no word on when that would take effect. Less than 24 business hours later, on the following Monday, the order came. And with it the sudden halt of programs around the world, administrative leave, directives to take paid vacations, and other interpretations of the order.

According to CBS News, which spoke to several anonymous sources and was able to see some official communications, 60 USAID senior staff members were placed on administrative leave until further notice, while the contracts of hundreds of external contractors were terminated. On a personal level, for María, who is currently on temporary administrative leave but does not know whether or not she will be paid in February, the situation is a slide that returns her to the starting point of her career. “It is very difficult to get into this industry. It took me 10 years, I started this job a year ago. I applied for 476 positions and the one I got is only for one year. So it is not as easy as saying ‘I am going to look for another job.’ I made a conservative calculation based on the approximately 2,000 contracts that USAID has and the number of employees and consultants for each one, and it means that there are about 160,000 people without work who will be competing for the same positions.”

Hanna doesn't really know if she's employed or not either. Her company told her to take her paid vacation days, but since it's the beginning of the year, that's two or three days. After that, she doesn't know anything else, but she imagines she'll be placed on administrative leave without pay until further notice. It's another way of saying that she thinks she's about to cross the unemployment line.

But their main frustration stems more from the perception of being unfairly targeted by the Trump administration. “We are constantly being evaluated on our effectiveness, and now to come and say they are going to re-evaluate us and stop all our work in the meantime is very frustrating. We measure, for example, the prevalence of malaria in some countries and that can only be done at certain rainy times of the year. Stopping our work affects all the planning that is necessary.” Hanna is very aware of the fact that if her firm cannot do the studies it does, which also include other diseases as well as the prevalence and quality of maternal and neonatal care, it will not be possible to design effective public policies to address important health needs in some of the most needy places in the world.

In fact, it’s something that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, ultimately responsible for international development funding as America’s foreign affairs chief, tacitly admitted when he backtracked Tuesday afternoon and applied for an exemption to the order. In an internal memo reported by CBS News, Rubio said the exemption applies to “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” which he defined as “life-saving medications, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs necessary to provide such assistance.” However, the new exemption does not apply to “activities involving abortions, family planning lectures, gender ideology or ED programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life-saving assistance.” It’s not clear whether some programs are now automatically exempted as a result, or whether they must apply for that exemption to again be eligible for U.S. funding.

The original order declared a 90-day moratorium while the programs were reviewed and re-evaluated. But despite that, and Rubio’s exemption, there is already a sense of defeat among international development workers. Unlike the order that halted spending for domestic social programs and that Trump was forced to withdraw in the face of public outrage and a wave of lawsuits, the freeze on international development support has flown slightly under the radar and is within his constitutional powers.

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