A sweeping freeze on foreign aid by the Trump administration has put in jeopardy scores of climate-related projects, including an early warning system for famines that’s been in place for decades.
The new pause on foreign aid is separate from a broader freeze order on federal assistance that the Trump administration issued Monday — and then rescinded Wednesday.
Newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday put in place a 90-day freeze on foreign development assistance to give agency officials time to determine whether the programs are aligned with President Donald Trump’s America First agenda.
It was unclear Wednesday how the decision to rescind the broader freeze order on federal assistance applied to foreign aid, if at all. A statement from the State Department indicated it was proceeding.
No matter the determination, foreign policy experts said U.S.-funded climate projects abroad were doubly at risk with the new administration — given Trump’s antipathy toward both climate action and overseas aid. With that vulnerability, they added, comes a real danger to U.S. humanitarian outreach and the global drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is going to have extremely consequential implications for years, if not decades, to come,” said Gillian Caldwell, former chief climate officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Biden administration.
The directive from the State Department, which also applies to USAID, calls for groups to stop their work immediately — forcing them to contemplate layoffs, widespread furloughs and other program cutbacks.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said Tuesday on social media that the pause already has prevented $12 million in support services to USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security.
The State Department took a similar tone with a press statement released Wednesday.
“Without the pause, U.S. taxpayers would have provided condoms (and other contraceptive services) in Gaza, climate justice marketing services in Gabon, clean energy programs for women in Fiji,” according to the media note. “We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests.”
The rules around U.S. government spending are strict. Even if funding has gone out to implementing partners or nongovernmental organizations, they must spend it on things that are allowable or the money could get pulled back.
That’s according to a representative from a U.S.-based humanitarian group who was granted anonymity due to concerns that speaking out publicly could affect the group’s future funding. The representative added that most groups don’t have the funding reserves to keep operating without permission.
“A 90-day pause is essentially the same thing as canceling a program,” they said.
Local organizations in countries in line to benefit from U.S. funding are likely to face the greatest impacts. They also are the least likely to survive even a temporary shutdown.
Plus — if the funding doesn’t resume after the review period — it could halt any progress those programs had been making, said Caldwell, who also served as deputy assistant administrator in USAID’s resilience, environment and food security bureau.
“For right now, all the work we’ve done for decades is at stake,” she said.
Climate and environment programs are likely targets.
Those include efforts to combat wildlife trafficking in Africa and Asia, develop clean energy in Indonesia and $29 million in support for people in Somalia displaced by devastating flooding in 2023.
It also covers activities such as renewable energy auctions and climate-smart investment programs that aim to make countries less reliant on foreign aid.
Last November USAID committed nearly $40 million to strengthen protection of an expanse of the Brazilian Amazon the size of California through activities such as regenerative agriculture and forest fire management. Then-President Joe Biden announced the funding during his visit to the world’s largest rainforest.
In 2024, USAID also put another $11 million into Servir, a joint program with NASA that uses satellites to deliver real-time information on extreme weather. Former USAID Administrator Samantha Power said in a speech last January that the system provided advanced notice of cyclones in Malawi, helping save lives and preventing $40 million in losses.
Then there is the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a U.S.-funded program that delivers real-time information to governments and aid agencies in food-insecure countries, alerting them of impending famine and drought shocks. The program’s website was down as of Wednesday evening.
The loss of these and other services “would severely restrict development and exacerbate the consequences climate change has on Ethiopia,” said Yomif Worku, a senior consultant at the Ethiopian Humanitarian Fund, part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Rubio issued a waiver to the funding pause for lifesaving humanitarian assistance, such as medical services, food and shelter, in addition to some limited exceptions. Cuts to climate work may not meet that criteria but could have longer-term implications for how countries develop and whether they’re able to rein in planet-warming pollution and harden their defenses against worsening natural disasters.
“If you look at what USAID actually does in the energy space, it’s so far from being a leftist climate agenda,” said Katie Auth, policy director of the Energy for Growth Hub and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is predominantly energy access for people who do not have power and who are struggling to access kind of basic energy services.”
USAID funding also includes support for U.S.-based universities that conduct research into subjects such as drought-tolerant seeds and other forms of resilience.
The aid freeze is a double whammy for countries that have looked to the United States to help lead the global effort to tackle rising temperatures fueled by fossil fuel burning. Trump signed an order last week to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement and cease all funding under the U.N. climate change framework.
Former officials argue those actions threaten America’s credibility as a reliable partner and create opportunities for adversaries such as China to step in and fill the void.
“Why would partners trust us to do long-term, complicated infrastructure projects when we’ve proven we can’t even pay our bills on time?” said Auth, who worked at USAID from 2014 to 2020. She called the moves “incredibly damaging” — not only to Trump’s agenda but to America’s long-term goals around the world.
Caldwell put it this way: “If President Trump has an America First policy, this move is the best way to put America last.”
Reporter Karl Mathiesen contributed.
