Projects in 130 countries—from Kenya to Vietnam to Ukraine—ground to a halt. Staff on the ground, many with Christian organizations, were adapting to new information by the hour, trying to find alternatives for patients seeking help from clinics that had closed. Halted projects were addressing famine, lack of electricity in rural health facilities, and malaria outbreaks.
What initially appeared to be a temporary freeze in funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) turned out to be an effort to permanently close the 64-year-old humanitarian agency, the single biggest source of relief and development in the world. USAID became a target of Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE).
Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated Monday that USAID, an independent agency, would be absorbed into the State Department. It’s unclear how that would work when the administrative infrastructure of the agency has been gutted and projects halted midway through. Former officials in US foreign aid who spoke on background with CT are hopeful that Rubio can find a way for the aid to continue in a restructured form.
But over the weekend, Musk announced on his social media platform X that the agency would be closing permanently and that Trump supported the closure. Musk has publicly accused USAID of being a “criminal organization.”
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk posted on X on Sunday night. The Wall Street Journal reported that DOGE staffers forced their way into the USAID offices over the weekend and gained access to classified information
Most of USAID’s budget goes to grants for specific development projects, including at Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and many other faith-based groups. It supports local Christian health clinics in Malawi and groups providing orphan care.
In Kenya, PCEA Chogoria Hospital, a historic mission hospital now run by Kenyan churches, provides comprehensive healthcare to HIV patients through support from USAID. On Jan. 24 the hospital received a stop-work order for that care and has had no indication of a return of funding despite Rubio’s promises that life-saving HIV care could continue.
The hospital has 3,162 HIV patients in that USAID-funded program, and 42 staff caring for those patients. Chogoria had a plan to gradually take on the funding obligation of HIV patients itself over the next three years.
“However, the abrupt nature of this funding halt was unforeseen and has left both staff and patients facing uncertainty about the future of their care,” said Dr. Elijah Mwaura, the CEO of Chogoria, in a statement to CT. “We acknowledge and sincerely appreciate the invaluable support provided over the years, which has significantly improved health outcomes for many individuals living with HIV. While this development presents a considerable challenge, we remain hopeful that a timely solution can be found to sustain these critical services and minimize disruptions to patient care.”
On Monday, Democratic lawmakers who tried unsuccessfully to access the locked agency headquarters protested that Trump does not have constitutional authority to shutter the agency.
Trump on Monday said he did not need congressional authority to shut the agency down if there were fraud, though he did not have concrete evidence of any fraud at the agency. The administration and Musk have repeated that USAID funded $50 million worth of condoms in Gaza, which is not true. The contract the White House cited funded zero dollars’ worth of condoms to Gaza.
“It is exceptionally painful to watch all this,” said Kent Hill, a former top official at USAID who also worked at World Vision and in Christian higher education as the president of Eastern Nazarene College. If USAID has specific problems, shutting the whole agency down instead of addressing the problems is a “tremendous overreaction” and “inhumane,” he said.
“Few American investments, if any, bring such a remarkable return,” Hill said. “To talk about shutting USAID down is callous and represents a tremendous a lapse in judgment which ought to call forth bipartisan condemnation.”
Groups on the ground have reported to CT an ongoing freeze in USAID funds, like those used for critical healthcare, even after the State Department issued a waiver for life-saving care.
“The total closure of USAID would cause irreparable damage to a number of Christian mission institutions across Africa, and I’m sure across the world,” said Matthew Loftus, a missionary doctor in Kenya. “A lot of what USAID is funding is critical infrastructure that everyone relies on to keep their programs running every day, like medicines.”
One example is Mission for Essential Drugs and Supplies (MEDS), a Christian medical organization that manages the supply chain and quality control of medications in Kenya. MEDS does its work with USAID funding. Loftus said MEDS is a “lifeline” for mission hospitals in Kenya, and it’s how his hospital gets most of its medication.
“This is how the missionaries that you support do their job every day,” Loftus said.
USAID supports health measures like malaria treatment and HIV treatment and prevention. It manages nonmilitary aid for Ukraine, the biggest chunk of its budget. It helps local governments with logistical and technical support as they build health infrastructure. Other than Ukraine, most of its budget goes to health care. It forms less than 1 percent of the US government’s budget, so it provides small savings for DOGE compared to its impact. But officials over the years have discussed a need for USAID reforms.
Here’s how USAID projects work: USAID staffers outline a need (like lack of water in a community) and a solution (like building a well) and form that into a project. An organization—faith-based, secular, for-profit, or nonprofit—applies to implement that project. Project-based funding is where most US foreign assistance goes. The stop-work order on foreign assistance halted these projects.
Even if the administrator of a project is not religious, a local church or religious organization might be implementing it on the ground. USAID supports local faith-based organizations, it said on its now-shuttered website, because it considers them to be “the backbone of local communities.”
USAID staffers read the administration’s actions in the last week as a more permanent ending of USAID as an agency than as a 90-day pause for a review. USAID’s website is offline. Hundreds of USAID employees have been fired—not simply furloughed—including top administrators. The Associated Press reported Monday that remaining employees received a notice not to come to the office.
Recently fired USAID employees told CT that even before their firings last week, they had been barred from talking to partners in the field or from holding any meetings with other staff. They knew of projects that were stopped midstride, like a project bringing electricity to rural health facilities in Sierra Leone. They worried about the breaking of trust with people all over the world. One recently fired employee said USAID supplies say on the outside, “From the American people,” so people know where aid is coming from. Now they’ll know who is at fault for it stopping, too.
Hill, the former USAID official, said that the Trump administration had overreached its constitutional powers.
“The Republican Party, if it is to retain any degree of credibility with the American people and with serious, principled conservatives, must courageously resist all examples of overreach in the new administration, and it must defend USAID from destruction since USAID had been funded and supported by Congress since its inception,” Hill said.
Annē Linn is one of those who was recently fired; she worked on the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), an initiative started by President George W. Bush, since 2019. She was an institutional contractor, which means she worked for a contractor but functioned as a USAID employee. She saw her job at USAID as a Christian calling.
The assertions Musk spread online about USAID, like that it was a “criminal organization,” were a “gut punch,” Linn said, for people who have been doing dedicated work.
“It’s one thing to say that it’s not a good use of taxpayer money, but to be targeted in such a grotesque way was beyond anything I could have ever imagined,” she said.
Before she started working for USAID, she and her husband worked in Senegal, where her neighbor died of malaria. She saw USAID’s work on malaria and knew she wanted to be part of it.
Now she is in shock over the sudden stopping of all USAID projects.
“It is nothing short of cruel,” she said. She said already-purchased malaria medications are not being distributed.
Some organizations, she knew, would find a way to continue providing services, but many would not.
“I want the church to know what’s happening,” said a former USAID employee and Christian who was laid off last week and was concerned about sharing his name in part because of the DOGE’s access to personnel files. “Pray for what’s happening. People are dying every day because of this.”
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