WASHINGTON (AN) — In fewer than 10 words, U.S. President Donald Trump’s top diplomat signaled the new administration’s retreat from the world stage and its transactional approach to global cooperation and international organizations.
“The U.S. government is not a charity,” said U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, defending Trump’s broad-stroke executive order suspending foreign and humanitarian aid, much of it paid for and already in the pipeline.
The impact has been quick and harsh: Drug supplies to many HIV/AIDS clinics have stopped. Hospitals in developing nations are closing. Women are losing reproductive health care. People in Ukraine are going cold and hungry, without fuel to heat their homes and to cook what food they have.
Trump doubled down on Friday, calling directly for shuttering the U.S. Agency For International Development, or USAID, the government’s primary provider of humanitarian and development assistance to millions of the world’s most needy.
“CLOSE IT DOWN,” Trump wrote on social media. USAID has long been a target of critics in Trump’s Republican Party who say it is wasteful and run by leftists. Without producing any evidence, Trump maintains the agency is corrupt and overrun with fraud.
Elon Musk – a billionaire businessman and immigrant from South Africa with no government experience who Trump has put in charge of shrinking the U.S. government – said on his social media platform that USAID is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”
But a federal judge on Friday ordered a temporary halt to the Trump administration's plans to put 2,200 USAID employees on paid administrative leave and recall almost all of the agency's workers abroad within 30 days. The restraining order by Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia came in a lawsuit on behalf of unions for federal workers and Foreign Service officers.
The judge, a 2019 Trump appointee, said the unions established "irreparable harm" would result. He said the executive order exposed the employees and their families to undue risk and expense, and temporarily reinstated 500 employees already put on administrative leave.
"It's not a takeover. It's a destruction of the agency," Andrew Natsios, the administrator of USAID in the George W. Bush administration, told PBS NewsHour. He called the agency "one of the great powers in the world to protect the American people and our national interests and to protect the people in the developing world from disease, from hunger, and to advocate and to change policies to encourage economic growth and investment."
"The most powerful thing we have going for us in the developing world are the USAID missions, two-thirds of whom are local people" with advanced degrees who are longtime employees and help run the programs, he said.
Right-wing influencers have been churning out mis- and disinformation about USAID to justify the Trump administration's moves, posting videos with false claims that the agency is "Marxist" and paid millions of dollars to actors to travel to Ukraine or gave millions of dollars in government funding to Politico – which its top managers said was money received from professional subscriptions by federal agencies that went through a standard public procurement process.
Shutting down USAID makes no sense at all because it is "the most pro-business and pro-market of all aid agencies in the world," said Natsio, adding "the notion that the agency is Marxist – they made the accusation that the agency is a Marxist organization – that's utterly ridiculous."
A 'self-inflicted wound'
Samantha Power, the administrator of USAID in the Biden administration, called the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID "one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history."
"In so doing, they have imperiled millions of lives, thousands of American jobs and billions of dollars of investment in American small businesses and farms while severely undermining our national security and global influence — all while authoritarians and extremists celebrate their luck," Power wrote in a guest essay in The New York Times.
USAID spending represents "less than 1% of the U.S. government's overall annual spending," Power noted. "Yet for much of the world population, the investments and work of USAID make up the primary (and often only) contact with the United States."
With programs that function largely on a local level, the agency has been instrumental in promoting U.S. interests through humanitarian assistance, development projects and the advancement of democratic values. Dismantling the agency creates a soft power vacuum that competing nations are eager to fill.
“The damage to the U.S. reputation and image is so great that China and Russia do not have to do anything to benefit from this self-inflicted wound,” said George Ingram of the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
Reactions among world leaders and heads of international agencies to the shutdown of USAID and their uncertainty about the implications of the 90-day pause have been largely muted for fear of retaliation.
U.N.'s work is crucial
In a letter this week to his staff, U.N. chief António Guterres said the organization would do all it can to mitigate the impact of Trump’s actions.
“Now, more than ever, the work of the United Nations is crucial,” Guterres wrote. “Together, we will ensure that our organization continues to serve people in need around the world with unwavering commitment.”
The head of UNAIDS, the U.N. program to combat HIV/AIDS, says Trump’s spending moratorium has created confusion in international efforts to treat and control the disease, despite a waiver that is supposed to allow “life-saving humanitarian assistance” to continue.
UNAIDS heavily relies on money from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plans for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which finances about 70% of its AIDS response. The program was created in 2003 under President George W. Bush, a Republican, and has reportedly saved more than 26 million lives, primarily in Africa. Conservatives in recent years have opposed PEPFAR, alleging it promotes abortion.
Some of the programming under PEPFAR, which provides lifesaving HIV medication, was granted a waiver last week for tuberculosis, malaria, acute risks of maternal and child mortality, severe acute malnutrition, and other life-threatening diseases and health conditions, according to Devex, which obtained a copy of the waiver guidance.
Trump makes no secret of his disdain for global cooperation and considers the United Nations a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy that is biased against the United States, its major financial supporter. Project 2025, the Republican guidebook for the second Trump administration, calls on the president to “initiate a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations.”
Among his first actions after regaining the presidency, Trump ordered the United States to cancel its membership in the World Health Organization and terminate its adherence to the Paris Climate Agreement.
Trump further roiled the international community with imperialistic threats to seize the Panama Canal, acquire Greenland and fold Canada into the U.S. as the 51st state. He says he wants to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and transform it into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Trump told reporters on Friday that Gaza “will be given to us by Israel” and the plan “would lead to great stability in the area” for “very little money."
