"The 5,200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States," Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted on March 10, 2025.
Rubio referred to the U.S. Agency for International Development, commonly referred to as USAID, the major conduit for federal foreign aid to underdeveloped countries. USAID offered a wide range of humanitarian activities, providing food in famine-stricken areas, distributing vaccines, and working to limit the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
USAID has also funded ‘secret schools’ that educate women in Afghanistan, has paid Ukrainian EMTs, and has enabled investigative journalists to uncover corruption in Mexico and San Salvador.
Yet the president has now dismantled the agency.
Christians in the past have supported such work, Nicholas Kerton-Johnson, professor of political science, said, particularly during the Bush era.
“These funds help millions of people around the world. PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), for example, saved tens of millions of Africans from AIDS and has branched into tackling other diseases,” Kerton-Johnson said. “As Christians, we can easily support these initiatives. U.S. evangelicals helped design the Bush Administration’s PEPFAR changes which dramatically increased the effectiveness of U.S. funding.”
Kerton-Johnson emphasized the importance of effective foreign aid and the need to ensure that foreign aid is being used well, and acknowledged the difficulty of the task at times. USAID has faced accusations of failing to effectively measure the impact of projects and unintentionally harming countries, most notably in Haiti, where the influx of aid harmed local rice producers and increased Haitian dependence on American industry, reporting from NPR found.
Despite such flaws, support for foreign aid has remained high: roughly 70% of Americans want to either increase foreign aid or continue funding it at the same levels, according to the Pew Research Center.
Nonetheless, the agency provoked the ire of the incoming Trump Administration in early 2024. Trump sought to cut what the administration termed “waste and fraud” through the Department of Governmental Efficiency, commonly referred to as DOGE. International aid, according to reporting by the BBC, was viewed as particularly useless.
The Trump Administration also argued in an executive order, “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
No evidence was provided to support such claims.
The United States was by far the world’s largest funder of foreign aid, investing $68 billion on it in 2023, $40 billion of which went to USAID. That constitutes roughly half a percent of annual government spending. For context, the total U.S. budget for 2023 was $6.7 trillion.
A recent study by medical journal The Lancet found that the ending of USAID will kill roughly 15 million people across the Global South by 2030. Five million of those deaths will be children under five years old.
Similarly, a model from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols estimates that the program’s dismantling has already caused 600 thousand deaths, 400 thousand which are children. Each hour, 88 people die from such cuts.
The Trump Administration claims to be Christian, most famously in an executive order claiming to end ‘anti-Christian bias’ in the U.S., stating “my administration will not target the anti-Christian weaponization of the federal government.” Such a sophisticated understanding of the consequences of government policy evidently does not extend to the millions of Christians USAID served in the Global South.
Kiplangat Cheruiyot Bii, director of Taylor World Outreach, said much of the crisis aid USAID funded is often interlinked, using the example of refugee aid.
“So, when you think about refugees, you think about HIV and disease prevention, you think about vaccines, you think about nutrition programs in places where there are refugees,” Bii said. “Now, in some places all of them are connected, in some places there is just what is specific. But in places where there are refugees, you could expect that there are all kinds of programs that are supported by USAID.”
While USAID can seem like one organization, it in fact funded multiple programs across several different sectors, Bii said.
In response, private aid organizations have tried to replace government funding with private donations with limited success, he said.
“Some people have tried, in reaction, to fill the gap or void, but it’s too big a shoe (to fill),” Bii said. “Like, giving support to different programs that were getting funding from USAID, you know, private donations to specific programs like food nutrition and to vulnerable populations. But we can only go so far.”
Responses to USAID vary by political viewpoint. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, with much of the left, condemned the gutting of the agency in a press release.
“Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will lead to millions of preventable deaths,” Sanders said. “The decision of the richest person in the world to destroy an agency that delivers life-saving aid to the poorest people on the planet is unconscionable.”
U.S. Senator Todd Young, R-Indiana, did not respond to a request for comment.
Students interested in aiding the crisis may direct their attention to aid agencies such as World Vision, an organization dedicated to helping those in poverty worldwide.
