In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down.
In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers.
In Ukraine, residents on the front line of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter.
Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling US president Donald Trump’s sudden cut-off of billions of dollars in US aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced.
In a matter of days, Trump’s order to freeze nearly all US foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised profound questions about the United States’ reliability and global standing.
“Everyone is freaking out,” Atif Mukhtar of the Emergency Response Rooms, a local volunteer group in the besieged Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said of the aid freeze.
Soon after announcing the cut-off, the Trump administration abruptly switched gears. Secretary of state Marco Rubio said “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could continue, offering a respite for what he called “core” efforts to provide food, medicine, shelter and other emergency needs.
But he stressed that the reprieve was “temporary in nature”, with limited exceptions. Beyond that, hundreds of senior officials and workers who help distribute US aid had already been fired or put on leave, and many aid efforts remain paralysed around the world.
Most of the soup kitchens in Khartoum, the battle-torn capital of Sudan, have shut down. Until days ago, the US was the largest source of money for the volunteer-run kitchens that fed 816,000 people there.
“For most people, it’s the only meal they get,” said Hajooj Kuka, a spokesman for the Emergency Response Rooms, describing Khartoum as a city “on the edge of starvation.”
After the US money was frozen late last month, some of the aid groups that channel those funds to the food kitchens said they were unsure if they were allowed to continue. Others cut off the money completely. Now, 434 of the 634 volunteer kitchens in the capital have shut down, Kuka said.
“And more are going out of service every day,” he added.
Many of the aid workers, doctors and people in need who rely on US aid are now reckoning with their relationship with the United States and the message the Trump administration is sending: The United States is focusing on itself.
“It feels like one easy decision by the US president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a US-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border.
Nah Pha, who fled Myanmar in 2007 to escape the fighting there, said the staff gave him a week’s supply of medicine and told him that was all they could provide. “Once my medicine runs out, I have nowhere else to get it,” he said.
The public health implications of the aid freeze are broad, health workers say. In Cambodia, which had been on the cusp of eradicating malaria with the help of the United States, officials now worry that a halt in funding will set them back. In Nepal, a $72 million (€69 million) programme to reduce malnutrition has been suspended. In South Africa and Haiti, officials and aid workers worry that hundreds of thousands of people could die if the Trump administration withdraws support for a signature US programme to fight HIV and Aids.
Some programmes that don’t fit the category of life-saving aid remain frozen, while others are explicitly barred because they fall outside of the administration’s ideological bounds, including any help with abortions, gender or diversity issues.
The UN Population Fund, a sexual and reproductive health agency, said that because of the funding freeze, maternal and mental health services to millions of women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gaza Strip, Ukraine and other places had been disrupted or eliminated. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban has banned women from working, 1,700 Afghan women who worked for the agency would no longer be employed.
At stake is not just the goodwill that the United States has built internationally, but also its work to promote US security interests. In Ivory Coast, a US-sponsored programme collecting sensitive intelligence on al-Qaeda-related incidents has been interrupted.
In Congo, some of the funding to UN agencies supporting more than 4.5 million people displaced by a rapidly growing conflict in the country’s east has been frozen, according to a US humanitarian official on the continent.
Even with Rubio’s announcements that life-saving efforts could resume, much of the US aid system in Africa remained paralysed by confusion and disruptions, including in conflict-hit areas where every day counts.
“When they issue these broad orders, they don’t seem to understand what exactly they are turning off,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior official with the US Agency for International Development under the Biden administration who is now the president of Refugees International. “They’re pulling levers without knowing what’s on the other end.”
Some of the roughly $70 billion in annual foreign aid approved by Congress has been directed at supporting civil society in countries with authoritarian regimes, especially in places where the United States sees democratic gains as furthering US security or diplomatic interests.
In Iran, where the work of documenting detentions, executions and women’s rights abuses is done by outside entities funded by the United States, activists say the US pullback now means that there will be few entities holding the Iranian government accountable.
A Persian-language media outlet funded by the US government said its employees were working on a voluntary basis to keep the website going for now, but it had fired all its freelancers. Without money, it said it could not keep going.
“While Trump campaigned on a promise of maximum pressure on the Iranian government, his decision to cut funding for dozens of US-supported pro-democracy and human rights initiatives does the opposite – it applies maximum pressure on the regime’s opponents,” said Omid Memarian, an expert on Iran’s human rights issues at Dawn, a Washington-based group focused on US foreign policy.
The fallout from the aid freeze is likely to reverberate geopolitically, giving US rivals such as China a window of opportunity to present themselves as a reliable partner.
“That will set China apart from the US to win the hearts and minds of many of the global south countries,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s China and Asia Security programme.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times
