One month ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration had completed its purge of foreign assistance, keeping only a small portfolio of lifesaving humanitarian aid programs in place.
But in the past several days, the Trump administration has slashed many of the programs it had pledged to preserve, according to lists compiled by government officials and aid workers. The cuts threaten to leave some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people without access to adequate supplies of food, clean water and medicine.
In countries like Afghanistan and Yemen, where millions of people do not have enough food, U.S.-backed humanitarian aid was completely cut off. Several countries where conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, such as Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, lost millions of dollars in support for critical food assistance.
The United Nations’ World Food Program, which distributes aid and coordinates shipments, said on social media that the termination of these programs “could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation.”
The cuts are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to erase the U.S. Agency for International Development, which for decades has been the government’s main outfit for distributing foreign aid. The State Department has said that it will take control of U.S.A.I.D.’s remaining functions by Aug. 15, and that Pete Marocco, who presided over the agency’s initial gutting, will oversee them.
Like many of the Trump administration’s recent moves to decimate federal agencies, the latest rollbacks have been drastic and, at times, erratic.
Last week, some U.S.A.I.D. officials were given lists of contracts and awards that remained active. But by the weekend, many of those projects had been axed, leaving government workers and outside organizations that carry out many of the programs reeling.
Then on Tuesday, some of the programs were restored, with little explanation.
The World Food Program was one of the largest implementing organizations to experience whiplash.
The funding cuts that were rolled out over the weekend would have crippled programs in 14 countries: Afghanistan, Chad, Congo, Ecuador, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. On Tuesday, funding for Ecuador, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia and Syria was restored.
In the countries that remain blacklisted, however, the impact of the cuts could be devastating.
The World Food Program estimates that the loss of U.S. funding in Afghanistan will end food assistance that about two million people rely on — including approximately 400,000 malnourished children and mothers. In Yemen, food aid for 2.4 million people would come to an end, while in Congo, all food assistance in the eastern part of the country would cease.
The Trump administration has also cut funding for the U.N. Humanitarian Air Service, which is managed by the World Food Program and transports aid workers and supplies to remote areas.
The cuts are not being carried out through any regular process, according to current and former U.S.A.I.D. employees, who said that the officials who would usually be responsible for terminating awards are learning which programs have been ended from organizations that provide aid.
President Trump appears to have ordered some of the cuts. In an email reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Marocco told colleagues on Friday that the White House wanted to know “whether we’ve complied yet with the president’s order to stop all payments to Afghanistan.”
The White House did not respond to a question regarding Mr. Trump’s role in ordering the cuts to Afghanistan.
Other cuts seem to have been orchestrated by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old lawyer who was recently picked to run U.S.A.I.D. and who has been working on the cost-cutting task force assembled by the tech billionaire Elon Musk.
On Tuesday, in an email he sent to staff members announcing that certain World Food Program funds would be restored, Mr. Lewin apologized for the back and forth, according to people familiar with its contents.
On Tuesday, Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokeswoman, struggled to answer questions about whether Mr. Rubio had been involved in approving the latest round of cuts.
“We know, of course, of his full involvement in the beginning. We know that the review had officially ended. We also know of his schedule,” she told reporters, ultimately concluding: “My goal is to have a more comprehensive answer regarding the process now on the ground for us.”
Mr. Trump issued an executive order in January requiring a “pause” on all foreign aid pending a review. Later that month, Mr. Rubio promised that lifesaving humanitarian assistance would continue unabated.
But at a meeting of the World Food Program’s executive board in mid-February, the Trump administration issued a statement signaling a serious caveat to that exemption.
“President Trump has stated clearly that the United States is no longer going to dole out money with no return for the American people,” it read. “W.F.P. should not be advancing political ideologies while conducting its lifesaving work,” added the statement, which referred to “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Food aid is not the only form of assistance that the Trump administration has continued to scale back, despite Mr. Rubio’s promises. Over the last several days, the administration has fired the few remaining health officials overseeing H.I.V. prevention and treatment for children and pregnant women through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
Some of PEPFAR’s funding remains intact, but staff members, including whole divisions within U.S.A.I.D. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which together carried out the H.I.V. prevention and treatment, have been laid off. Employees in PEPFAR-funded programs in Africa say they still do not know which services they will be able to continue.
On Wednesday, the administration made further cuts in global health, ending funding for a program that was working to end neglected tropical diseases including river blindness and intestinal worms in seven of the poorest countries in West Africa.
The fate of funding for other major health programs, such as Gavi, an organization that helps to procure vaccines for children in developing countries, remains unclear.
Stephanie Nolen contributed reporting from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Amy Schoenfeld Walker from New York and Ryan Mac from Los Angeles.
