The Dismantling of USAID

Since 2016, a BGR project with Helen Keller Intl has trained health workers in Côte d’Ivoire to reduce the incidence of malnutrition in children in the first three years of life, benefitting hundreds of thousands of pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children.

By BGR Staff

On February 27, 2025, longtime BGR partner Helen Keller Intl reported that the Trump administration had canceled all of the U.S. government’s funding for the nonprofit’s international aid work. “Our team estimates that 121 million children and family members in the countries we support are now at dire risk,” Sarah Bouchie, Helen Keller Intl’s president and chief executive officer, wrote in an article on the nonprofit’s website.

The terminated projects at Helen Keller Intl were among an estimated 5,200 international aid projects eliminated by the Trump administration in the first months of the president’s second term.

On March 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X that the Trump administration had completed its dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This action, according to BGR partner Oxfam America, will “have deadly consequences for millions of people living in dire humanitarian emergencies and extreme poverty.” The list of canceled aid projects runs to 368 pages.

“There is not a single area of development and humanitarian assistance USAID has not been involved in,” said Oxfam America President and CEO Abby Maxman, who has been working in international development for 30 years. “People at USAID have been thought leaders implementing ideas at scale, in wide ranging areas—I don’t think there is a major area of the development system in which USAID did not bring its technical know-how, research, and evidence.”

—What USAID does, its impact, and what Trump’s cuts mean

Established in 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, USAID is the United States’ primary aid agency, disbursing more than $40 billion in international humanitarian aid each year. In eradicating USAID, the Trump administration is cutting more than 80 percent of the American government’s funding for international aid. Rubio indicated that those contracts that survive the cuts will be funded through the State Department.

On March 3, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, distributed a memo detailing the likely impacts of these cuts. These include:

• 16.8 million pregnant women will lose access to essential maternal health services;
• 11.2 million newborns will not be reached by postnatal care within the first two days of life;
• 14.7 million children will lose access to treatment for pneumonia and diarrhea, two of the leading causes of preventable death among children under 5 years of age;
• 1 million children suffering from severe acute malnutrition will not receive life-saving nutrition;
• 71,000 to 166,000 people will die from malaria;
• 200,000 children will be paralyzed from polio, among hundreds of millions of new infections.

News sources report that Enrich was placed on administrative leave following the distribution of the memo. Hours after Rubio’s announcement on X, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to resume payment of approximately $2 billion owed to organizations carrying out existing contracts. However, the fate of the $60 billion allocated by Congress to support international aid is still uncertain.

BGR is monitoring this situation as it continues to unfold and will respond once we determine where our funds can have the greatest impact.