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A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration likely violated the Constitution when it effectively shuttered USAID. But in the meantime, the decision to gut USAID has upended humanitarian work around the globe. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports on the cascading effects of U.S. policy in Washington.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Five Sudanese children died of malnutrition on the day we reached Hanin Ahmed and her colleague in Khartoum, Abdullah Mohammed.
ABDULLAH MOHAMMED: Yesterday too, we lost. Before yesterday. Every day we lost from Khartoum people.
HANIN AHMED: This is something really bad, actually.
KELEMEN: Hanin Ahmed, who's based in the U.S., founded the Emergency Response Room in Sudan. It's a network of local volunteers who support victims of sexual violence. It also runs soup kitchens.
AHMED: We have 800 soup kitchens around Sudan, and 580 right now are completely dry.
KELEMEN: She estimates that more than 70% of the funding comes from the U.S., not directly from USAID, but rather through nonprofit groups. Many of them receive money from the U.S. government. They were prepared for some Trump cuts, but no one expected this.
SAM WORTHINGTON: There was never a sense that the U.S. would completely withdraw from its global engagements this way.
KELEMEN: Sam Worthington used to run InterAction, an umbrella organization of American nongovernmental groups.
WORTHINGTON: It's as if it chose to somehow disengage globally with its army or something. The scale of disengagement was so large that there was no way to ever plan for that.
KELEMEN: Private nonprofits have had to cut back on services and staff around the globe. Worthington says this includes many faith-based groups, who have yet to speak up publicly, but are trying to use their influence with members of Congress and the Trump administration.
WORTHINGTON: They have been very candid behind closed doors about what is going on - that they're laying off, you know, 30-, 40% of their staff, that the - that individuals are starving to death because these programs are ending, that they cannot make up the slack.
KELEMEN: The top humanitarian official at the U.N. says it's hard to quantify just what all this means, but Tom Fletcher says one thing is clear - up to now, the U.S. has been a humanitarian superpower in the world, saving hundreds of millions of lives.
TOM FLETCHER: Now, I don't believe you build a golden age by retreating from the world, but we do have to recognize the context which governments are taking these decisions in. And, of course, it's not just the American government. I'm spending a lot more of my time than I'd expected in other donor capitals trying to shore up the case for what we do.
KELEMEN: And, he says, making brutal choices about where to focus resources when there are so many conflicts and disasters in the world.
FLETCHER: We have to save as many lives as we can with the money that we have, not the money that we would like to have.
KELEMEN: The U.N. says it is moving some offices out of New York and closer to the people they help, but the world body has been slow to react.
IRWIN LOY: The dependence on U.S. funding increased even after the last Trump administration. I think there was a sense of, oh, we weathered the storm.
KELEMEN: Irwin Loy is senior policy editor of The New Humanitarian, a nonprofit news room that focuses on this issue. He says the U.N. and private aid groups have relied too heavily on the U.S.
LOY: You know, U.S. funding increased through the pandemic - through the COVID-19 pandemic. Poverty rates soared around the globe and there was a need for aid, and the U.S. was the one that stepped up.
KELEMEN: And he doesn't see other wealthy nations filling the gaps in the system where, up to now, the U.S. has had the most influence.
LOY: If you're China, if you're Saudi Arabia, you don't give money to a multilateral system that you don't feel represents your interest.
KELEMEN: European nations, too, have been cutting back on some of their humanitarian aid because they're under pressure from the Trump administration to spend more on defense.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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