The United States is officially cancelling 83% of USAID programmes, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has written on the X.
"After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID," he said in a statement.
He noted that the 5,200 contracts that are being cancelled have spent tens of billions of dollars in a way that "did not serve (and in some cases even harmed) the core national interests of the United States".
The remaining USAID programmes will be transferred to Elon Musk's DOGE. These are about 1,000 programmes.
- Back in February, US President Donald Trump criticised the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), claiming that it was run by "radical lunatics".
- Prior to that, the US State Department issued a shutdown order for all current foreign aid and suspended new aid to comply with President Donald Trump's order to freeze aid to foreign countries for 90 days.
- Due to the "attack on USAID", trade unions sued the Trump administration and later the court blocked forced furloughs for USAID employees.
- The White House fired the independent inspector general of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) a day after his office released a critical report assessing the impact of the Trump administration's efforts to significantly reduce the agency's mission.
- It also became known that the majority of USAID employees around the world have been furloughed, and at least 1,600 of them will be laid off.
- According to Politico, the freezing of international aid by US President Donald Trump will lead to increased Russian influence in Eastern Europe.
- And Reuters writes that the suspension of US funding is slowing down the investigation of Russia's war crimes in Ukraine.
- According to the Wall Street Journal, Ukraine has been the largest recipient of USAID funds since 2022.