Please Do Not Be Part of Our Crisis:
The impact of the U.S. foreign aid cuts on local organizations and communities
On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order, directing the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to implement a 90-day pause on all U.S. foreign aid and to review all existing programming. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suspended all foreign assistance on January 24, 2025, immediately cutting off $58.4 billion of aid planned for the 2025 fiscal year. By March 10, Secretary Rubio announced that 83 percent of USAID programs had been formally terminated.
To better understand how the U.S. foreign aid cuts are being perceived and are affecting communities and organizations with whom we work, PAEMA conducted an Aid Impact Survey with our local partners and their networks in our areas of focus: Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burma, and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Our principal findings are included in the report below, presented wherever possible in the words of local organizations and community members. Because we expect the impacts of the aid cuts to be felt increasingly and in different ways over time, PAEMA will conduct this survey again in three months and for a third time in six months.
