Secretary Marco Rubio meets with Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, February 17, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that the total cuts coming to the USAID budget amount to 83% of its former budget, some of which, he explains, was being spent harming America’s “core national interests.” Christian Lu reports in Foreign Policy:
After weeks of uncertainty, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 10 that the Trump administration has terminated 83 percent of programs at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the country’s top humanitarian and development agency.
The decision amounts to a purge of an organization that has long served as a tool of U.S. soft power and provided critical aid to millions of people worldwide, with programs focused on addressing humanitarian crises, disease, and malnutrition, among others.
“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio posted on X, adding that the decision followed a six-week review.
The surviving 18 percent—approximately 1,000 USAID programs—will now be “administered more effectively under the State Department,” in consultation with Congress, Rubio said. It is unclear exactly which programs remain.
Rubio’s announcement is the latest development in the Trump administration’s chaotic effort to dismantle USAID and the wider U.S. foreign aid infrastructure, alarming aid groups and officials, who warn that the purge will have disastrous consequences worldwide. But while the United States is the world’s biggest foreign aid donor, it only spends 1 percent of its federal budget on foreign assistance; 60 percent of that aid is administered by USAID.
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