• On February 4, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that USAID was now under the direct authority of the State Department, and the administration froze U.S. foreign aid. Rubio placed Pete Marocco in charge of USAID; he served in the agency during Trump’s first term and has been accused of attempting to dismantle it during his tenure. [CNN, 2/3/25]
• Following Rubio’s takeover, 10,000 USAID employees were placed on administrative leave, and a couple days later the Trump administration announced plans to leave fewer than 300 workers in place to carry out the organization’s work. A judge put a temporary pause on some of the Trump administration’s job cutting, resulting in 2,200 employees being reinstated but with uncertain futures at the agency. [USA Today, 2/4/25; The Associated Press, 2/6/25; NBC News, 2/7/25]
• USAID workers in high-risk locations have reported being cut off from communication and were left unsure of how to access evacuation protocols. Employees of USAID are also facing interruptions to medical care and housing insecurity. [Bluesky, 2/7/25]
• Rubio claimed he had issued a blanket waiver for lifesaving programs, but workers on the ground have said that operations have come to a halt. While some programs have been granted a waiver to continue under Rubio, many have lost access to supplies, and payments to contractors that are covered by the waiver have not come through. That has affected emergency food aid in Ethiopia, a refugee camp in Syria, a resettlement program for victims of the Islamic State group, and more. One USAID worker told CNN, “That work is grounded to a halt because there’s no staff to manage it, and there’s no staff in DC to answer questions from partners.” [The Washington Post, 2/10/25; CNN, 2/8/25]

• The freeze impacted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has been credited with saving more than 25 million lives and reducing AIDS-related deaths by 68% since 2004. Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, told The Associated Press that even short interruptions in care could have negative outcomes, as “HIV viral loads rebound in about three weeks if you go off antiretrovirals.” The initial freeze to USAID has already sparked confusion among PEPFAR workers and local partners as appointments are canceled. [The Associated Press, 2/3/25; AVAC, 2/8/23; The New York Times, 1/27/25]
• As a result of the USAID freeze, thousands of people in medical trials for dealing with HIV and other illnesses have been left adrift, with their treatments suddenly stopped or with medical equipment in their bodies. [The New York Times, 2/6/25]
• The freeze will also impact millions of dollars in aid that is being used to help those in war zones dealing with infectious diseases. The Associated Press reported that 1.2 million people in Congo could lose lifesaving support and 600,000 people in Sudan will be at risk of catching and spreading cholera, malaria, and measles. [The Associated Press, 2/3/25]
• Defunding USAID also hurts American farms that sell products to the organization for disbursement via its nutrition programs. According to The Washington Post, “Purchases and shipments of U.S. food aid worth over $340 million — including rice, wheat and soybeans — have been paused during Trump’s foreign-aid freeze.” The Post also reports that the aid freeze “disrupted more than 507,000 metric tons of American food aid.” [The Washington Post, 2/6/25]
• The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a USAID program that helps aid programs determine where to send resources, has also been shut down. An analyst specializing in food insecurity told Reuters, “Famine was disappearing from the world in the 2000s, and now its return will likely accelerate as we become increasingly blind to it, even as it becomes a more common tool of politics and war.” [Reuters, 2/6/25]

• Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy claimed USAID is “not aid like you would imagine,” like “setting up soup kitchens in Africa.” She claimed it’s a “slush fund for Democrat donors, the Clinton Foundation, George Soros, all of the NGOs who have been doing stuff that American people never voted for them to do.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends’ Weekend, 2/9/25]
• Fox News contributor Ben Domenech claimed USAID has “not been acting in the interests of the American people or the United States for a very long time” and is instead enacting a “woke agenda.” [Fox News, Sunday Night in America, 2/9/25]
• Podcast host Megyn Kelly dismissed USAID as an organization that seems to give money to “woke” projects like “LGBTQ and that kind of promotional stuff.” Kelly also said it “appears” that USAID employees are “overwhelmingly hard left.” [iHeartRadio, The Megyn Kelly Show, 2/5/25]
• On Fox, former podcast host Vivek Ramaswamy claimed USAID funds are “not even going to help starving children in Africa,” adding that it was a “smokescreen.” He claimed that instead foreign aid is being used to push “progressive ideas, LGBTQ+ agendas, woke and DEI agendas, onto foreign countries.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 2/5/25]
• Newsmax’s Finnerty ran a chyron reading “USAID funded some ridiculous causes.” Guest and former Trump deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley criticized USAID’s operations, calling them “crazy, ridiculous programs.” [Newsmax, Finnerty, 2/5/25]
• Fox’s Sean Hannity said everything USAID does is “radical DEI, woke, transgender, you know, leftist, Green New Deal madness.” [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 2/4/25]
• On Fox News’ The Five, Jesse Watters claimed USAID is a “slush fund for social justice warriors and permanent Washington to bribe people, staff people at NGOs, and just create hell.” [Fox News, The Five, 2/4/25]

• Jesse Watters claimed saving babies from getting AIDS in Africa is “still going to happen once they look at everything and get this thing streamlined.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 2/7/25]
• Fox News anchor Bret Baier claimed that Marco Rubio is not against critical foreign aid, but he is going to “scrub what is real and what is not.” His guest, Republican strategist Matt Whitlock, agreed and said that “so much of what we have seen” is “exporting a social agenda.” [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 2/7/25]
• Fox News anchor John Roberts claimed that Marco Rubio will “continue with the good that USAID does.” Roberts: “The Democrats are literally losing their minds over all of this, saying that Elon Musk is gutting U.S. foreign policy. But Rubio is saying, ‘No no, we’re going to continue with the good stuff that USAID does. We’re just going to get rid of what we think is the wasteful spending that has been engaged in and the insubordination of the entire agency.’” [Fox News, America Reports, 2/7/25]
• Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner falsely claimed, “No one is talking about taking the food and taking the things for people who actually need those things away.” She added, “Who doesn't audit? It’s been years. We need to know where that money is going. And some of it is going to terrorist organizations.” [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 2/6/25]
• OutKick columnist Mary Katherine Ham claimed the frozen funds were just getting “audited.” Ham: “We're told that waste, fraud, and abuse is such a small percentage of the federal government's budget, and should be easy to deal with, given that. And yet we're also told that that small slice of the federal government is the end of democracy if you start auditing it.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 2/5/25]

Editor's note (2/11/25): This piece was updated with additional information that was removed due to an editing error.