Politics
What Remains of U.S.A.I.D. After DOGE’s Budget Cuts?
As the United States Agency for International Development was being dismantled in early February, aid workers and officials in Washington and around the world set out to salvage what they could.
In the months since, there has been a widespread and under-the-radar effort to retain and restore some of the agency’s most critical work — including some projects favored by those who had the administration’s ear, a New York Times investigation shows.
Former President George W. Bush, who created the H.I.V./AIDS prevention program known as PEPFAR, called Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Leadership at the World Food Program called senators and ambassadors, and they said that millions of hungry people would die. Aid workers and foreign officials found programs that could be said to align with Mr. Trump’s America First agenda and flagged them for Republicans to pass on to the White House with a request to reinstate them.
The shell of U.S.A.I.D that is left today is the result of this chorus of pleas and negotiations, and of hasty decisions made by political leaders, many of whom had little experience in foreign aid.
Remaining U.S.A.I.D programs by sector
The overhaul was a far cry from the comprehensive review to evaluate aid programs and realign them with U.S. foreign policy that Mr. Trump promised on his first day in office.
Aid workers said different departments frantically drafted their own lists of awards to keep or restore, but no one seemed to be looking at the big picture. Sometimes Mr. Rubio would sign off on a decision, only for staffers from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or other political appointees to determine the opposite. The piecemeal approach, aid workers said, ignored the reality that some programs relied on others to function.
U.S.A.I.D. employees and officials — including members of Congress who are supposed to provide oversight of the agency’s work — have said they are still struggling to decipher the administration’s goals for foreign aid.
This account is based on 70 interviews and dozens of internal documents and correspondence, and an analysis of both public and internal award databases.
As a share of each country’s funding before cuts
Where U.S.A.I.D. funding remains
The remaining awards are designed to address acute disease, hunger and other emergencies, and not areas like education, governance or jobs that are supposed to help countries avoid crises in the first place. Aid workers and experts said this is a short-sighted way to handle foreign aid that reflects a deep misunderstanding of the agency’s work and will have long-term consequences for Americans.
“You know what is not efficient? Putting out fires,” said Laura Meissner, a former U.S.A.I.D. contractor, whose work to manage humanitarian aid in multiple countries was terminated. “It’s way cheaper to stabilize people so they can weather the storm than to wait until they are destitute and their kids are malnourished.”
No rhyme or reason
In February, Elon Musk appeared in an X Spaces event in part to discuss DOGE’s work at U.S.A.I.D. “You have just got to get rid of the whole thing,” he said.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who helped create DOGE, was also on the call and offered a solution: “Let’s say something is cut that the people of this country just demand needs to exist again. It can always be voted back into existence.”
Mr. Musk agreed. “Well said, Vivek.”
Demands to return funding to certain U.S.A.I.D. programs were already underway.
The day after Mr. Musk’s talk, Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, publicly urged Mr. Rubio to move American-grown food aid that was stuck in U.S. ports with no funding for shipment. In the weeks to follow, U.S. shippers and farmers met with members of Congress to explain the value of their lifesaving programs.
Many U.S.A.I.D.-supported organizations, including Catholic Relief Services and Mercy Corps, spoke with members of Congress. Several award recipients, including faith-based groups, had private meetings with Pete Marocco, who was managing the agency for Mr. Rubio. Other aid organizations sued the administration.
These efforts were far more frantic than standard lobbying on Capitol Hill. At the same time, U.S.A.I.D. staff members were pushing Trump-appointed officials inside the agency to restore dozens of terminated awards that provided lifesaving food or medicine or kept employees safe overseas.
Political leaders, who had told employees that they knew little about the agency’s programs, acknowledged in late February that some of these awards might have been cut in error, according to internal emails reviewed by The Times.
Then on March 2, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who oversaw global health programs leaked memos that estimated millions would suffer or die from disease if programs did not resume. Over the next day, more than 300 awards were restored, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times. More than 100 more would be “unterminated” in the days to follow.
A timeline of restored U.S.A.I.D. programs
Over several weeks, officials reinstated programs in reaction to external pressure, global events and specific interest groups.
The newly restored awards included U.S.-grown emergency food aid, disaster preparedness, programs to combat H.I.V./AIDS and malaria, and several awards in Jordan and Cuba.
A senior State Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly said that agency leaders had conducted a faster review than originally planned, after a federal judge ordered officials to reverse the president’s freeze on foreign aid programs.
The official added that recalibrations should be an expected part of any major overhaul and noted that a vast majority of the termination decisions remained in place. The agency declined to make officials available for an on-the-record interview.
U.S.A.I.D. staff members said they felt there was no rhyme or reason to any of it.
The idea was to destroy everything, said a global health security expert at U.S.A.I.D., who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, as did most aid workers and other officials interviewed for this article. If someone complained, they would bring it back.
Smaller, local organizations were largely absent from the restorations. Without people in Washington to speak up for them, many were left behind.
“Many were wholly dependent on U.S.A.I.D.,” said Tom Hart, the president of InterAction, an alliance of global nongovernmental organizations. “Suddenly pulling the rug from beneath them hurts the idea of helping countries reach self-reliance, a goal the first Trump administration rightly sought.”
Not about fraud, inefficiency or cost
Despite its claims that “waste and abuse run deep” at U.S.A.I.D., the administration did not prioritize keeping programs that work to reduce fraud.
Instead, officials canceled contracts designed to prevent abuse, including awards for inspectors to watch over aid delivery in high-risk locations in more than a dozen countries.
Cost savings was not a significant factor in the administration’s decision making, either. In March, Mr. Rubio announced that officials had cut about 83 percent of the programs at U.S.A.I.D., but, in dollar terms, they cut programs that were worth less than half of the agency’s obligations.
Officials kept some of U.S.A.I.D.’s largest commitments and cut thousands of less expensive ones, an analysis of multiyear grants and contracts shows. The median kept award was worth $6 million, and 40 percent of these awards were worth $10 million or more.
Some were worth billions. For example, the Washington-based private development firm Chemonics retained two awards for global health supply chains focused on H.I.V. and malaria, worth over $6 billion and $2 billion, respectively.
The median cut award, by contrast, was worth just over $1 million. About a third of the cut awards were worth $100,000 or less.
In March, Mr. Marocco told officials privately that he planned to save $125 billion by cutting programs at both U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department. All together, the canceled awards at U.S.A.I.D. were worth an estimated $76 billion over several years, and $47 billion had already been committed to them.
It remains unclear what will happen to that money. An analysis of spending data shows the canceled awards had about $17 billion left unspent when DOGE took its ax to the agency.
If the overhaul wasn’t focused on fraud, efficiency or costs, there was one north star: a post on X from Mr. Rubio on March 10, which explained the government was keeping “approximately 1,000” U.S.A.I.D. programs. Agency staff members said they were told that they could recommend programs to restore — or even seek new funds for existing awards — but that they could never let the total count surpass 1,000.
Aid workers saw the post as Mr. Rubio retaking some control of the U.S.A.I.D. overhaul after DOGE had taken it too far.
Divisions between the secretary and Mr. Musk’s team became clear in April, when Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staff member who became a top U.S.A.I.D. official, canceled dozens of the most critical emergency food awards that officials had already promised to keep. Mr. Rubio had just signed off on more funds for at least one of the awards, a rare step and a clear sign of its priority.
Within days of the cuts, Mr. Lewin asked agency employees to restore at least six of the awards, according to an email reviewed by The Times. He apologized for the back and forth, saying it was his fault.
“You have Secretary Rubio getting kind of made a fool of by DOGE because he has repeatedly said that they are going to protect these kinds of lifesaving programs. And then you have DOGE go out and basically countermand him,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former U.S.A.I.D. adviser to the Biden and Obama administrations. “It’s really unclear who is steering the bus.”
The senior State Department official said that all decisions had been made by U.S.A.I.D. and State Department officials in close consultation with Mr. Rubio, and that they made adjustments as priorities evolved.
Picking up after DOGE
Conservatives have long wanted to reform foreign aid and the layers of bureaucracy that stand between Washington and the people who benefit. But the enormous scope of the U.S.A.I.D. reduction, and the rushed and opaque way it was done, has privately concerned many Republicans.
Andrew Natsios, a former U.S.A.I.D. administrator under President George W. Bush, said that DOGE made a mess that has left gaps for China and Russia to fill.
“Our economy, our security and our way of life is dependent on our connection to the developing world and not just the rich world,” he said “And we have just lost our influence in the developing world.”
As Mr. Musk has stepped back from the spotlight, the remaining steps of the overhaul have been relatively calm and more strategic, according to internal correspondence reviewed by The Times and interviews with people familiar with the decision making. Officials are bringing the remaining U.S.A.I.D. awards under the umbrella of the State Department this summer, where plans for these programs could change again.
The bureaus that will absorb the awards are facing significant cuts too, and employees have expressed concern that they simply do not have the staff, resources or expertise to run them. They plan to terminate more awards and to let others expire.
After months of uncertainty, even the chosen projects are struggling to plan for the future.
One is a World Food Program contract in Kenya that helps feed 700,000 refugees from nearby conflicts. The program is nearly out of food, and while it remains on the list of active U.S.A.I.D. awards, it has not received any funding this year.
As a result, the program’s organizers have had to reduce the rations they provide.
“Do I feed more people for a shorter period of time, or do I feed fewer people who are more critical?” said Lauren Landis, the program’s country director in Kenya. “We haven’t made that decision yet.”
Methodology
A complete list of U.S.A.I.D. awards operating after the president’s decision to review the agency’s work has not been made public. To assess which programs were kept or cut, The Times obtained internal data on individual award status from U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department in April and May and compared that data to similar information on award status that was shared with Congress in March and obtained by The Times. A small number of awards were missing from each of these data sets.
Reporters drew on data from ForeignAssistance.gov and USASpending.gov to determine information about the sectors, recipients and spending for each award.
Award status data is as of May 7; a few dozen awards have been cut since then, internal data shows.
Except where noted, the dollar value of awards is based on the amount that had been obligated over the lifetime of the award, as of May 7 for active awards and as of March 25 for terminated awards.
Spending, sector, and recipient data was not available for 45 terminated awards. Spending data was not available for 18 active awards.
Politics
Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reducing the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.
“Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” Fox News Digital asked Omar.
The congresswoman stayed silent as she was repeatedly questioned, after previously telling Fox News Digital that the original filing — showing Omar’s reported assets reducing by as much as $29.9 million — was inaccurate and “incomplete” information.
ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED DOWN TO UNDER $100K: REPORT
US Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, speaks during a press conference with family members of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as members of Congress call for US investigations into Israel’s actions and reintroduce the Justice for Shireen Act, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 18, 2023. The Al Jazeera journalist, who was a dual US citizen, was killed on May 11, 2022. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers likely shot the reporter. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The controversy surrounding Omar’s finances began when a 2024 financial report estimated that Omar and her husband possessed between $6 million and $30 million in assets, all while the Minnesota fraud scandal within the Somali community was beginning to come to fruition.
A more recent 2025 financial disclosure report shows Omar’s revised value of shared assets between her and husband to sit at a maximum of $125,000 — a multi-million-dollar drop from the year prior. The lower estimate of their assets, $20,000, compared to the low and high debt estimates, $30,000 and $100,000, would imply the Minnesota Democrat could have a negative net worth.
Both her and her husband have separate debts, each ranging somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 — from her own student loans and her husband’s credit card debt, according to the disclosures.
WATCH: OMAR SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED ON ALLEGED TIES TO MASSIVE MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
RICHFIELD, MN – AUGUST 08: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (C) campaigns with her husband Tim Mynett (R) at the Richfield Farmers Market on August 8, 2020 in Richfield, Minnesota. Omar is hoping to retain her seat as the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in next week’s primary election. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
The biggest change in the documents involved Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. His reported ownership interests in both his winery and venture capital advisory firm, which were previously valued in the millions of dollars, are listed with no value now.
In Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.
Omar’s office previously told Fox News Digital that Mynett has partners in both businesses and said the earlier disclosure mistakenly reflected the businesses’ total equity rather than his ownership interest. The office also said the original filing listed assets without accounting for liabilities.
VANCE REFERS TIM WALZ, MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL TO DOJ FOR CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OVER STATE’S ALLEGED FRAUD
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has publicly voiced his interest in the Ethics Committee opening an investigation into Omar’s personal finances after the 2025 financial reports came out showing the possibility of a $29 million drop in her net worth.
Vice President JD Vance also has previously said the U.S. Department of Justice will be opening a probe into her alleged fraud as part of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce that he spearheads, though no formal investigations have been shared with the public at this time.
Omar has been reluctant to answer Fox News Digital’s questions about her financial fallout and potential probes to be opened against her.
The Minnesota lawmaker similarly dodged answering any of Fox News Digital’s questions just last month about the revised disclosures.
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“There’s also the possibility that it might rain on this sunny day,” Omar replied without responding directly to the content of the question.
Fox News Digital’s Robert Schmad contributed to this report.
As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.
Then came Donald Trump.
Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.
In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.
Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)
Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.
Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.
A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.
“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”
“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”
Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.
“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.
Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”
And so he has.
The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.
As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”
Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)
Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.
At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.
One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.
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Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger, a Rockland Democrat, former nurse and former mayor, is drawing sudden national attention after saying now-former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner encouraged her to consider taking his place on the ballot in the Maine Senate race.
While Geiger has not been named the replacement nominee, her name entered the Maine Senate scramble after she told local outlet WMTW that Platner called her Monday night, praised her as a “fighter” and asked whether he could put her name forward. Platner’s campaign told the outlet he had not made an endorsement decision but confirmed he encouraged Geiger to consider running if he stepped aside.
After Geiger said Platner called her about potentially putting her name forward, Geiger posted Tuesday she would not “throw Graham under the bus,” while also saying she would not “slander or accuse” Jenny Racicot, the woman who accused Platner of rape, “of anything more than telling the truth as she experienced it.”
By Wednesday, local outlets were reporting that Geiger said Platner had encouraged her to consider running if he withdrew. Platner, who suspended his campaign Wednesday night, has denied the claim.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IF PLATNER DROPS OUT? HERE’S WHO COULD REPLACE HIM ON THE BALLOT AND HOW IT COULD WORK
Graham Platner Maine State Rep. Valli Geiger (Maine State Legislature/Getty Images)
“For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.
Geiger is a third-term Democratic state representative from Rockland, according to her legislative biography, representing a coastal House district in Maine that includes Rockland, Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle Plantation, the Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven and part of Owls Head. Her biography says she serves on the Labor Committee and the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.
Before entering the state legislature, Geiger served six years on the Rockland City Council, including one year as mayor and four years on the Rockland Comprehensive Planning Commission, three of them as chair.
Her biography says she holds a master’s degree in sustainable design and built her own passive-solar, net-zero-energy house. It also describes her as a former nurse at Pen Bay Medical Center who later worked as a health policy analyst and health administrator, including as director of the Healthreach Hospice program and clinical director for Federally Qualified Health Centers around Maine.
The Maine State Capitol May 18, 2026, in Augusta, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
PLATNER CAMPAIGN PUTTING ‘THUMB ON SCALE’ TO INFLUENCE POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, MAINE DEM ALLEGES
Geiger’s connection to Platner predates the latest replacement speculation. Local reporting has described her as a close Platner supporter, and WMTW reported she previously stood with him and credited him with helping secure funding for rape kit tracking in Maine.
In her Facebook post responding to Racicot’s allegation, Geiger wrote that Racicot’s story “seems credible” but added that “none of us knows the truth nor will we ever.” She also described Platner as “a man becoming a better man” and said she had hoped he would lead the political movement his campaign had built and will not “throw Graham under the bus.”
In the post, Geiger also praised Platner’s “passion for economic populism” and said she had granted him “an enormous amount of grace” for his behavior during what she described as his “dark years” after multiple deployments.
Dr. Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference about COVID-19 at Maine Emergency Management Agency in Augusta. (Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
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The Maine state representative is not the only Democrat whose name has surfaced as Maine Democrats prepare for the possibility that Platner exits the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Several Democrats have expressed interest or are considering bids, including former gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah.
Under Maine law, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the general election ballot by selecting a new nominee through its party process, with the replacement required to be chosen by July 27.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
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