(Washington, DC) – The Trump administration’s termination of over 90 percent of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) programming and thousands of State Department foreign assistance programs will undermine human rights globally and imperil millions of people, Human Rights Watch said today.
On February 26, 2025, the State Department announced that a review of all US foreign assistance, ordered after a sudden suspension of all programming in January, had been finalized on February 25. The department stated that it had terminated 5,800 USAID contract awards and 4,100 State Department grants.
“The Trump administration’s abrupt elimination of so many vital human rights and humanitarian programs is reckless, cruel, and will wreak havoc on efforts to promote democracy and rule of law around the world,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “There are plenty of responsible ways to tailor foreign aid to an administration’s agenda without needlessly causing deaths and suffering.”
The State Department’s “review process” leading to the terminations was rushed, lacked necessary internal guidance, featured no methodology for review or public comment, and, most important, lacked any risk mitigation process to consider the dangerous consequences of stopping programs abruptly or in their entirety, Human Rights Watch said.
The decision follows President Donald Trump’s executive order on January 20, his first day in office, pausing “foreign development assistance” for the duration of a review of all assistance programs. On January 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a stop-work directive on foreign assistance by all US government departments and agencies for an 85-day review period.
The aid freeze has already been catastrophic, stopping the provision of medicines to avoid mother-to-child transmission of HIV for hundreds of thousands of newborns, ending online university classes for Afghan women and girls, and stripping funding from emergency food kitchens in famine-stricken Sudan. Despite humanitarian waivers for lifesaving aid programs, including parts of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), most programming remained suspended due to massive staffing disruptions at USAID and newly imposed restrictions on its payment systems.
Cuts have been causing other devastating human rights consequences around the globe. Those facing closure or staff reductions include human rights fact-finding groups, independent media working to expose human rights abuses and corruption, and organizations providing legal services for victims of politically motivated prosecutions in authoritarian countries like Russia, Belarus, and China.
“No member of Congress, regardless of their party, should be comfortable allowing the State Department to unilaterally terminate tens of billions of dollars that Congress specifically appropriated for human rights and humanitarian assistance,” Yager said. “The House and Senate need to stand up for the rule of law and demand answers from the administration.”
