United States Agency for International Development

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    Pete Marocco, Who Helped Gut Foreign Aid for Trump, Leaves State Department

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    Pete Marocco, who worked with Elon Musk’s team to oversee the gutting of foreign aid and the dismantling of the main U.S. aid agency, has left the State Department, administration officials said on Monday.The abrupt departure comes in the middle of the department’s efforts to merge the remnants of that aid group, the U.S. Agency for International Development, into the department by mid-August.Mr. Marocco had been acting as the head of foreign aid at the department and would have overseen the remaining aid operations, which amount to only a fraction of those active before President Trump took office.Mr. Marocco is expected to take another job in the administration, U.S. officials say.The State Department did not provide official comment on Mr. Marocco’s departure. But a statement from the department’s press office that was attributed to a “senior administration official” praised Mr. Marocco for finding “egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars” during his tenure. The statement provided no examples of such abuses.Mr. Marocco’s critics said they planned to continue scrutinizing how he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have gutted foreign aid.“Pete Marocco’s tenure brought chaos to U.S.A.I.D., reckless and unlawful policy to the State Department, and dismantled longstanding U.S. foreign policy,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said in a statement, adding, “His actions deprived millions of people around the world of lifesaving aid and jeopardized U.S. credibility with our partners.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lawsuit Accuses Prominent Palestinian American of Supporting Hamas

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      The complaint against the businessman, Bashar Masri, does not say that he knew about the Oct. 7 attack in advance but does assert that he was aware of the Hamas military infrastructure at his properties.Families of victims of the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, sued a prominent Palestinian American businessman on Monday, accusing him of supporting Hamas by developing properties that were crucial to the terrorist group’s operations.According to the lawsuit, Bashar Masri, a wealthy developer, operated hotels and an industrial site in Gaza to “construct and conceal” a labyrinthine network of tunnels that allowed Hamas to “store and launch its rockets at Israel.”“The properties defendants developed with Hamas were not only part of the infrastructure Hamas used in connection with the Oct. 7 attack itself,” the lawsuit added. “Their development deliberately advanced Hamas’s false narrative that it was interested primarily in the economic development of Gaza and a grudging coexistence with Israel.”The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Washington, where Mr. Masri has a home. It does not say that Mr. Masri and the companies he controls knew about the attack in advance but does assert that they were aware of the Hamas military infrastructure at their properties.Mr. Masri, a respected entrepreneur, denied the allegations.Mr. Masri “was shocked to learn through the media that a baseless complaint was filed today referring to false allegations against him and certain businesses he is associated with,” a statement from his office said. “Neither he nor those entities have ever engaged in unlawful activity or provided support for violence and militancy.”The complaint comes at a politically sensitive time for Mr. Masri, who has been linked to the hostage envoy for the Trump administration who has been involved in efforts to free the remaining captives being held by Hamas in Gaza. Mr. Masri is expected to play a role in the reconstruction of Gaza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Millions of Women Will Lose Access to Contraception as a Result of Trump Aid Cuts

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      The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Appeals Court Allows Musk to Keep Pushing Steep Cuts at U.S.A.I.D.

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      A federal appeals court on Friday allowed Elon Musk and his team of analysts to resume their work in helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, clearing the way for them to continue while the government appeals the earlier ruling.The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit came as the Trump administration was taking its final steps to effectively eliminate the agency after steadily chipping away at its staff and grant programs for weeks.The appeals court panel said that whatever influence Mr. Musk and his team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had over the process, it was ultimately agency officials who had signed off on the various moves to gut the agency and reconfigure it as a minor office under the control of the State Department.Earlier this month, Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland wrote that Mr. Musk, in his capacity as a special adviser to President Trump who was never confirmed by the Senate, lacked the authority to carry out what Mr. Musk himself described as a campaign to shut down the agency.Judge Chuang pointed to public statements by Mr. Musk in which he described directing the engineers and analysts on his team, known as DOGE, to do away with U.S.A.I.D., previewing his plans and announcing their progress along the way.On X, the social media platform he owns, Mr. Musk wrote in February that it was time for U.S.A.I.D. to “die,” that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down, and at one point that he had “spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries

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      A 281-page spreadsheet obtained by The Times lists the Trump administration’s plans for thousands of foreign aid programs.The Trump administration intends to terminate the United States’ financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries, saving millions of lives over the past quarter century, and to significantly scale back support for efforts to combat malaria, one of the biggest killers globally.The administration has decided to continue some key grants for medications to treat H.I.V. and tuberculosis, and food aid to countries facing civil wars and natural disasters.Those decisions are included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress Monday night, listing the foreign aid projects it plans to continue and to terminate. The New York Times obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and other documents describing the plans.The documents provide a sweeping overview of the extraordinary scale of the administration’s retreat from a half-century-long effort to present the United States to the developing world as a compassionate ally and to lead the fight against infectious diseases that kill millions of people annually.The cover letter details the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. after the cuts, with most of its funding eliminated, and only 869 of more than 6,000 employees still on active duty.In all, the administration has decided to continue 898 U.S.A.I.D. awards and to end 5,341, the letter says. It says the remaining programs are worth up to $78 billion. But only $8.3 billion of that is unobligated funds — money still available to disburse. Because that amount covers awards that run several years into the future, the figure suggests a massive reduction in the $40 billion that U.S.A.I.D. used to spend annually.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.

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      <!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–>As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> […] More

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      Judge Orders U.S.A.I.D. and State Dept. to Pay Funds ‘Unlawfully’ Withheld

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      A federal judge barred the Trump administration on Monday from “unlawfully impounding congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds” that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development owed to grant recipients and contractors, requiring it to pay for work completed in the first several weeks of President Trump’s term.The ruling, handed down by Judge Amir H. Ali of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, was the latest step in a winding dispute over foreign aid payments since Mr. Trump has tried to vastly shrink the nation’s foreign assistance. While forcing the administration to pay for work completed before Feb. 13, Judge Ali said the limits of the case prevented him from ordering payments on future work or restoring canceled contracts.But he left no doubt that he believed that the administration had exceeded its authority in trying to block funding, a warning that could echo through a deluge of lawsuits over Mr. Trump’s efforts to unilaterally halt spending.“Here, the executive has unilaterally deemed that funds Congress appropriated for foreign aid will not be spent,” he wrote. “The executive not only claims his constitutional authority to determine how to spend appropriated funds, but usurps Congress’s exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place.”The order on Monday prohibited the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. from implementing much of a Jan. 24 memorandum outlining plans to reorient and shrink U.S. foreign aid. It further required them to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars still owed to a constellation of groups for work completed before Feb. 13, as Judge Ali had ordered last month.The order dealt with a broad freeze on foreign aid funding that Mr. Trump put into effect the day he took office. It stopped short of the much more significant step of invalidating the Trump administration’s decision to cancel thousands of contracts through what it described as an expedited line-by-line review, after the lawsuit was already underway. Judge Ali found that the court was restrained to addressing the specific harms laid out in the lawsuit, not “supervision of discrete or ongoing executive decisions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Ebola Spreads in Uganda, Trump Aid Freeze Hinders Effort to Contain It, U.S. Officials Fear

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      Two more people are reported dead from the disease, and dozens are in isolation, as the outbreak grows.The Ebola outbreak in Uganda has worsened significantly, and the country’s ability to contain the spread has been severely weakened by the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign assistance, American officials said this week.The officials, representing a variety of health and security agencies, made the assessment during a meeting with U.S. Embassy staff in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, on Wednesday. An audio recording of the session was obtained by The New York Times.There have been two more deaths, the mother and newborn sibling of a 4-year-old who died last week, an American official said. The mother and sibling died earlier than the 4-year-old, but were not identified as probable Ebola cases until after they were buried through belated contact tracing.Eighty-two people have so far been identified as close contacts of the mother and her two children, at high risk for infection, and 68 of them are now in quarantine while the others are still being traced. The officials said public health workers’ ability to trace their contacts and conduct surveillance for new cases is severely hindered without U.S. assistance.Two of the contacts are already symptomatic and have been admitted to an isolation hospital ward, an American official in Uganda said in the meeting. The 4-year-old was taken for treatment at four different health facilities before being diagnosed with Ebola, meaning that many of those who have potentially been exposed to the virus are health care workers.During the meeting Wednesday, American officials said that the Ugandan government also lacked sufficient laboratory supplies, diagnostic equipment and protective gear for medical workers and people tracing contacts. The termination of grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development was impeding the ability to procure those supplies, one official said. The meeting, conducted by video, was attended by representatives from the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the Defense Department, the U.S. Embassy in Uganda and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to Freeze Foreign Aid

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      The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected President Trump’s emergency request to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid as part of his efforts to slash government spending.The court’s brief order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. It said only that the trial judge, who had ordered the government to resume payments, “should clarify what obligations the government must fulfill.”But the ruling is one of the court’s first moves in response to the flurry of litigation filed in response to President Trump’s efforts to dramatically reshape government. The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal members to form a majority.Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the four dissenting justices, said the majority had gone profoundly astray.“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) $2 billion taxpayer dollars? “ he asked. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”The administration halted the aid on Jan. 20, President Trump’s first day in office. Recipients and other nonprofit groups filed two lawsuits challenging the freeze as an unconstitutional exercise of presidential power that thwarted congressional appropriations for the U.S. Agency for International Development.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More