By Annie Gowen
Feb. 23, 2025
Despite a federal judge’s order for U.S. foreign aid to resume, humanitarian groups said this week that global response efforts to countries in need are in chaos, with millions of pounds of food still undelivered and a government payment system barely functioning.
As the Trump administration pushed back in court Tuesday on U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali’s Feb. 13 order blocking a blanket freeze on foreign assistance, officials continued dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development — the nation’s chief foreign assistance arm, which Trump adviser and billionaire Elon Musk has declared must “die.”
This week, more than 200 contractors with key functions such as serving in war zones and vetting food distribution received notice that they were being terminated, said Sarah Charles, the former head of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance.
“It seems like they’re stalling until the agency is in fact destroyed,” she said Thursday. With immediate aid held up and future foodprocurements in limbo, “it certainly feels like this is going to cause a global catastrophe.”
In a separate case, another federal judge cleared the way Friday for the administration’s plan to place hundreds of USAID staffers on leave and recall them from posts abroad.
Republicans in Congress and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have previously supported foreign assistance. But Peter Marocco, the Trump loyalist now overseeing USAID, and others “are not taking the steps necessary for these programs to continue,” Charles said.
Aid agencies say they are racing against the clock in some war-torn parts of Africa teetering on the edge of famine where mere days of delays in food and grain deliveriescan result in widespread illness and death.
USAID’s former inspector general warned in a report released Feb. 10 —shortly before the president fired him — that more than $489 million in food assistance was languishing in ports, in warehouses or in transit. In recent days, the U.N. World Food Program is one of the few entities that has been able to resume its operations.
One humanitarian official said Thursday that her organization has 22 metric tons of USAID nutrition supplies — such as peanut paste and high-energy biscuits — waiting in a warehouse in Tigray, Ethiopia, with more than5,000 highly vulnerablechildren just 30 miles away. Other food is stranded in facilities that could either be looted — because so many staffers have been furloughed, no one is left to guard it — or soon will spoil.
“They are deteriorating every single day as these supplies are lying in waste,” she said.
Most aid officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears of retribution by the Trump administration and further disruption of programs.
“Letting food aid rot instead of feeding hungry children isn’t just morally indefensible, it is a blow to our farmers who feed the world and hurts our fights against extremism and disease,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) said in a statement Friday, stressing that the administration “must comply” with the court orders to resume the aid delivery.
The Trump administration ordered a pause in all foreign assistance in late January, issuing stop-work orders and moving to place more than 90 percent of USAID workers on paid leave. In the face of intense criticism, the administration then issued a waiver for programs deemed lifesaving — exemptions that aid groups say have been unevenly applied and added to the turmoil.
A State Department spokesperson said late Friday that the humanitarian waiver was put in place to assist those in greatest need while the administration reviewed USAID programs. Some of that assistance, she indicated via email, “in reality involved DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] or gender ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life-saving assistance and efforts that explicitly go against the America First foreign policy agenda set forth by the President.”
Those activities “do not reflect American interests and cannot, and will not, continue,” she added.
In a private meeting at the State Department last week, Marocco assured some of those organizations that a key USAID payment system would be up and running again by Tuesday. He said a review of the agency’s remaining programs was underway, adding that projects that do not “give the president real influence” will be cut, according to a readout of the event obtained by The Washington Post.
The aid groups say their teams have spent the past several days fruitlessly trying to access the payment system, still getting various messages that it was down for maintenance or under review.
This comes against the backdrop of the ongoing court action. In his order last week, Ali cited the “shock wave” caused by Trump’s suspension of foreign aid. The judge said the assistance should resume.
But this week, Trump administration lawyers argued in court that they had the legal authority to freeze foreign aid even without the president’s executive order — and would continue to suspend aid programs unless the court offered clarification.
Ali wrote in his directive late Thursday that his previous order was “clear” and that the government’s blanket suspension of congressionally appropriated aid would continue to cause “irreparable harm.”
“The [order] does not permit Defendants to simply search for and invoke new legal authorities as a post-hoc rationalization for the enjoined agency action,” he wrote.
In a filing, Marocco said that 498 USAID contracts had been terminated because they were related to diversity and equity, climate change, “democracy promotion” or were deemed wasteful. More than $250 million in payments had been issued since the judge’s order, he noted.
Elisha Dunn-Georgiou of Global Health Council, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement that disbursement of funds “does nothing to reverse the damage already done.”
Aid workers say they are steeling themselves for a deepening crisis. Even if the short-term wrangling over the funding freeze is resolved, they expect many development projects to be canceled in the long run. Those include projects that provide feed and fertilizer to farmers abroad.
USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network, or FEWS NET, which uses NASA satellite imagery with climate and other data to forecast famine, is also offline.
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
