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U.S. Halt to Foreign Aid Cripples Programs Worldwide

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U.S. Halt to Foreign Aid Cripples Programs Worldwide

Treating H.I.V. across dozens of nations. Stopping the forced labor of Chinese workers. Training Mexican and Colombian police in anti-narcotics enforcement.

Those are just a tiny sample of aid programs around the world operating with grant money from the U.S. government that could be permanently shut down under an executive order President Trump signed last week to halt foreign aid.

The sense of crisis among aid groups worldwide is surging, as American officials tell groups they must obey an almost universal stop-work order issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio after Mr. Trump’s directive.

The officials say the groups must freeze nearly all programs that have received any of the $70 billion of annual aid budget approved by Congress through bipartisan negotiations. They include programs that provide medicine, shelter and clean water in dire conditions and often make the difference between life and death.

Uncertain of whether they can pay salaries or get any future funding, groups around the world said they are starting to lay off employees or furlough them. In the United States alone, tens of thousands of employees, many of whom live in the Washington area and rely on contract work with U.S. agencies, could lose their jobs. Some have already been laid off.

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Leaders of aid groups say they have never seen such an expansive and damaging directive, even during periods of aid reassessment by earlier administrations. Many of them are scrambling to contact lawmakers and other U.S. officials to get urgent messages to Mr. Rubio. They said some programs will be hard to restart after a temporary shutdown, and many could disappear.

The State Department said the move was aimed at ensuring that all foreign aid programs “are efficient and consistent with U.S. foreign policy under the America First agenda.”

The crisis deepened on Monday evening, when Jason Gray, the acting head of the United States Agency for International Development, put about 60 top officials on paid leave. He wrote in an email that those officials had taken actions “designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders.” On Tuesday, office workers removed photographs of leaders from the walls. Contractors have also been fired or put on leave.

Mr. Rubio said in a cable to U.S. missions abroad that the halt would last at least through a 90-day assessment period. But U.S. officials have already told some aid groups that certain programs, including ones that promote diversity, women’s reproductive rights and climate resilience, will be permanently cut.

U.S. agencies will need to break contracts during the halt, and they will likely need to pay fees. Among the U.S.A.I.D. employees put on paid leave are three lawyers, including the lead ethics lawyer, according to one person briefed on the situation.

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The executive order halting foreign aid was the president’s first major foreign policy action, and many aid groups are only now understanding its broad scope. Foreign assistance money generally supports humanitarian, development and security programs, and it makes up less than 1 percent of the government budget.

Two Democratic members of the House, Gregory Meeks of New York and Lois Frankel of Florida, sent Mr. Rubio a letter on Saturday saying that lives were being “placed at risk” because of the aid halt. “Congress has appropriated and cleared these funds for use, and it is our constitutional duty to make sure these funds are spent as directed,” they wrote.

The stop order applies to most military and security assistance programs, including in Ukraine, Taiwan and Jordan. Much of that aid is disbursed by the State Department. Military aid to Israel and Egypt is exempted, as is emergency food assistance.

Mr. Trump’s decision to halt foreign aid could cause long-term damage to U.S. strategic interests, critics of the action say. Policymakers from both parties have long regarded foreign aid as a potent form of American power, a way to increase U.S. influence overseas using a tiny budget compared with military spending. Many development programs support democracy, education and civil rights efforts.

In recent years, China has tried to win more global influence with development projects, and it could gain ground as the United States retreats.

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“This 90-day stop-work is a gift to our enemies and competitors — with effects that go beyond the immediate harms to people,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, the assistant administrator at U.S.A.I.D. in the Biden administration.

“It trashes our alliances with scores of countries built over half a century, trashes our world-leading expertise and capacity and threatens our security,” he said.

Dr. Gawande noted that U.S.A.I.D. has the largest footprint abroad after the military, employing hundreds of thousands of contractors, who will now be dismissed or put on leave.

Some former officials say a goal of the action could be to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. and move its work to the State Department — while keeping the amount paltry. The Trump appointee at the State Department overseeing foreign aid is Pete Marocco, a divisive figure in the first Trump administration who worked at the Pentagon, State Department and U.S.A.I.D. At the aid agency, employees filed a 13-page dissent memo, accusing him of mismanagement. Senior State Department officials can exercise authority over U.S.A.I.D., though the agency usually operates autonomously.

Some of U.S.A.I.D.’s critical work is listed on its website. One document says that during the civil war in Sudan, a United Nations agency relied on U.S. government support to screen about 5.1 million children age 5 and under for malnutrition, and it provided about 288,000 children with lifesaving treatment last year between January and October.

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Smaller groups will struggle to survive. China Labor Watch, a New York-based group with overseas offices that aims to end forced labor and trafficking of Chinese workers, is shutting down programs that rely on $900,000 of annual aid from the State Department, said Li Qiang, the organization’s founder. Seven staff employees will be placed on unpaid leave and could depart for good, Mr. Li said, adding that employees who lose their work visas might have to return to China, where they could be scrutinized by security officers.

Groups worldwide that have relied on U.S. funding are now “victims of this disruption, leading to distrust in the U.S. government,” he said.

He continued: “This will further isolate the U.S. internationally. Damaging national credibility and alienating allies for short-term gains will have lasting repercussions.”

The clampdown also cripples the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the celebrated program started by President George W. Bush that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. A shutdown of the program would likely cost millions of lives in the coming years, health experts said. The program’s work involves more than 250,000 health workers in 54 countries.

“When the funding stops before the epidemic is under control, you erode the investments you’ve made in the past,” said Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, who heads the Desmond Tutu H.I.V. Center at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

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Simultaneously, Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization has prompted that group to tighten its belt, curtailing travel and limiting operations on the ground.

On Sunday night, employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed to immediately stop communicating with W.H.O. staff. and other international partners.

The blackout means American officials are likely to lose access to information about human outbreaks, including of mpox, polio and the emerging mosquito-borne disease Oropouche, and animal diseases, like swine flu, that could devastate the nation’s agricultural industry, Dr. Gawande said.

U.S.A.I.D. has helped to contain 11 serious outbreaks of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers in the last four years. One such disease, Marburg, is smoldering even now in Tanzania, with 15 confirmed cases and eight probable cases. Ten people have died.

“This is a disease with no test, no treatment and no vaccine that’s been approved,” Dr. Gawande said.

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On Monday, Trump administration officials instructed organizations abroad to stop distributing H.I.V. medications that were purchased with U.S. aid money, even if the drugs are already in clinics.

Separately, officials worldwide were told that PEPFAR’s data systems would be shut down on Monday evening and that they should “prioritize copying key documents and data,” according to an email viewed by The New York Times. The system was maintained by a contractor forced to stop work because of the aid freeze.

About 90 percent of Dr. Bekker’s work in South Africa is funded by PEPFAR and the National Institutes of Health. Her team has helped to test H.I.V. medications and preventive drugs, and vaccines for Covid and human papillomavirus, or HPV, all of which are used in the United States.

Shutting down PEPFAR, which accounts for 20 percent of South Africa’s H.I.V. budget, would add more than a half million new H.I.V. infections and more than 600,000 related deaths in the country over the next decade, Dr. Bekker and her colleagues have estimated. The effect is likely to be far worse in poorer countries, like Mozambique, where PEPFAR funds the bulk of H.I.V. programs.

Abruptly halting treatment can endanger patients’ lives, but it can also increase spread of the virus and lead to resistance to the available drugs.

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The Trump administration’s actions will cause long-lasting harm, including to Americans, said Asia Russell, executive director of the advocacy group Health Gap.

“If you’re trying to achieve a review of all foreign assistance, including PEPFAR, you can do that without attacking the programs through stopping them,” Ms. Russell said.

“It’s extraordinarily dangerous and perhaps deadly to do it this way,” she said, “but it’s also wasteful and inefficient.”

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Czech Dam Project Was Stalled by Bureaucracy. Beavers Built Their Own.

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Czech Dam Project Was Stalled by Bureaucracy. Beavers Built Their Own.

For years, officials in the Czech Republic had pushed a dam project to protect a river south of Prague, and the critically endangered species living in it. But the project, hamstrung by land negotiations, stalled.

In the meantime, a group of chisel-toothed mammals — renowned for their engineering skills and work ethic, and unencumbered by bureaucracy — decided to take on the task. The beavers of Prague simply built dams themselves.

The rodents’ fast work saved the local authorities some 1.2 million euros, according to a news release from the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic, a government agency responsible for conservation across the country. “Nature took its course,” Bohumil Fišer, the head of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, where the revitalization project was planned, said in the statement. The beavers, he added, had created the ideal environmental conditions “practically overnight.”

The project, on a former army site on the Klabava, a river about 40 miles southwest of Prague, the Czech capital, was drafted in 2018 and had a building permit, but had been delayed for years by negotiations over the land, which had been used as a military training grounds, Agence France-Presse reported on Tuesday. Officials had hoped to build a barrier to protect the river and its population of critically endangered crayfish from sediment and acidic water spilling over from two nearby ponds, A.F.P. reported.

The beavers began working before the excavators could even break ground. It was not immediately clear specifically when the dams were built and how long it took to build them.

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The new wetland created by the dams covers nearly five acres, the conservation group said. It is twice as large as the area that the humans had planned, Agence France-Presse reported. “It’s full service,” Mr. Fišer told A.F.P. “Beavers are absolutely fantastic and when they are in an area where they can’t cause damage, they do a brilliant job.”

Despite their remarkable ability to construct dams, beavers often draw the ire of landowners and farmers for destroying trees, eating crops and flooding roads and fields. But in thinning a tree canopy, the rodents can often help to diversify an ecosystem by allowing in sunlight in so that other plant species can thrive, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota.

“They’re fundamentally changing the way water and life moves through that landscape,” she said.

To build a dam, the beavers, whose weight as adults can range from about 40 to 80 pounds, begin by piling small stones across a river or stream, packing those stones in with mud, and repeating the process to construct a pond, which they then expand to become a wetland, Dr. Fairfax said.

They are motivated by their fear of predators: Beavers are adept swimmers and can hold their breath underwater for 15 minutes. On land, their ungainly waddle makes them easy prey. “They’re basically a big chicken nugget for predators,” which include bears, mountain lions and wolves, she said.

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The Czech dam is not the first time the rodents have assisted in building a wetland. Beavers in California have helped to restore a floodplain about 30 miles northeast of Sacramento. In that case, the beavers’ work also helped local officials save money. “All they had to do was let the beavers be there,” Dr. Fairfax said. In other cases, beavers often did work that went unacknowledged. “We sort of have a blindness for beavers,” she said, noting that they were often considered a nuisance because of their alarming size and capacity to rapidly change the landscape.

“They’re powerful, they’re big, and they’re elusive,” Dr. Fairfax said, noting that, despite the beavers’ engineering prowess, they presented a challenge for conservation groups when planning restoration projects.

“Oftentimes we don’t want to allow the beavers to make the choices, because it’s hard to plan around that uncertainty; it’s hard to turn over control to a giant water rodent,” she said. “But that’s when beavers are at their best.”

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Mother of Israeli hostage begs Trump, Netanyahu to bring son home before ceasefire collapses: 'No more time'

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Mother of Israeli hostage begs Trump, Netanyahu to bring son home before ceasefire collapses: 'No more time'

Idit Ohel, the mother of Israeli hostage Alon Ohel, urgently pleaded for President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to secure the release of the remaining Oct. 7 captives held by Hamas amid fears the current ceasefire deal is disintegrating.

“They have no more time. And please don’t go back to war. Please. Because if that happens, if we go back to war, the hostages could die. The hostages that are alive could die,” she told Fox News Digital. “That’s what happened last time. Last time we saw that after the hostages came out and war started, so many hostages died and were murdered by Hamas. So we cannot let this happen. Please do everything in your power and do something for my son. He’s in the tunnels. He’s crying for help.” 

Idit Ohel said she received confirmation that her son is still alive from released hostages Eli Sharabi and Or Levy, two of the three gaunt, frail-looking Israelis forced to speak Saturday during a Hamas hand-over ceremony in Gaza. 

The mother said the released hostages, who were held with her son for part of their nearly 500 days in captivity, told her that Alon Ohel is unable to see out of an eye after being struck by shrapnel when Hamas was closing in on Oct. 7, 2023. Alon Ohel, a civilian, was attending the Nova music festival when terrorists attacked, and he took cover in a bomb shelter. Hamas pounded the shelter with grenades and gunfire, and he “was taken, wounded, with blood all over him,” Idit Ohel said. 

ISRAEL SLAMS PALESTINIAN ‘DECEPTION SCHEME’ OVER CLAIM IT HALTED TERROR REWARDS PROGRAM

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A placard of Alon Ohel seen during a rally marking his 24th birthday in Tel Aviv. (Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Alon Ohel’s ancestors survived the Holocaust, including his great-grandfather who weighed just 30 kilos [about 66 pounds] when he was released from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Idit Ohel said. “So if he was alive today, he would probably die instantly just knowing that his great-grandson in the year of 2025 is starving,” she said. “Alon has these genes. So he’s fighting. He’s fighting for his life every day.” 

Under the deal, another three hostages were due to be released by next Saturday, but Hamas said Monday that the group would not let them go, accusing Israel of violating terms of the ceasefire agreement. 

Concerns that fighting will resume are rising. Trump has since said that Hamas must release all remaining 76 hostages by noon Saturday, or he would demand the ceasefire deal be canceled and “let all hell break out.” Netanyahu backed the demand. 

Israeli media is reporting that Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is being dispatched to Israel and Qatar this week to prevent the ceasefire deal from unraveling. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected in Israel on Saturday. 

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To Trump and Netayanhu directly, Idit Ohel said, “Do something and bring them home. Please. Please.” 

Alon Ohel's mother speaks at Tel Aviv rally

Idit Ohel speaks to the crowd during a Tel Aviv rally marking the 24th Birthday of her son Alon Ohel who is held hostage by Hamas. (Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“Give him a chance. It’s unbearable. Something has to change. You have to do everything in your power to bring him home to me, to his family,” she said. “There’s still hostages alive. There’s still hostages alive. Please. Please, do something.” 

Idit Ohel said she learned her son is being held in tunnels without medical attention and little food and has been “tortured, chained and starved.” 

“It’s not humane. There’s so much food getting into Gaza, and he’s not getting any of it,” she said.

HAMAS SAYS IT’S DELAYING NEXT HOSTAGE RELEASE, CLAIMING CEASEFIRE VIOLATIONS

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“Alon, right now as we speak, is still being not fed, sleeping on the floor, being chained, constrained. So he cannot move for 494 days,” Idit Ohel said. “My son is important. My son is only an innocent civilian. He went to the Nova festival to have fun. He’s a pianist. He loves music. He did nothing wrong to nobody. We need to get him out now. He cannot continue. This is humanitarian.” 

Days before Trump took office, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement. Former President Joe Biden said at the time that the first phase involved a “surge of humanitarian assistance into Gaza” – something Idit Ohel stressed her son is not getting. 

She said the International Committee of the Red Cross “have never seen Alon and have never seen any of the hostages – [he] didn’t get any treatment.” 

Tel Aviv demonstration in honor of Alon Ohel's 24th birthday

Israelis stand under placards with photos of hostages during a rally in Tel Aviv marking the 24th Birthday of Alon Ohel, who is held by Hamas in Gaza.  (Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“Where is he? Why is he not coming?” Idit Ohel added. “I do not understand it. I will never understand it. This is wrong. This is not moral.” 

Ohel rallied thousands in Tel Aviv over the weekend on her son’s 24th birthday – the second birthday he has spent in captivity since the Oct. 7 attacks. 

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“I wanted to say happy birthday to my son. I couldn’t even talk [to him] and see and hear his voice,” she said. “When I heard about his condition, I fainted … I haven’t been sleeping for days … I cannot control what Hamas is doing to my son.” 

“Every mother in this world. Think just for a second. If there’s one night that your son or daughter doesn’t eat, you can’t even live with yourself,” Ohel added. “My son has not been getting food for 494 days.”

The mother also delivered a message directly to her son. 

“If you’re listening to me, you know I love you and your father loves you. And we’re doing everything in our power to make sure that you’re home alive. You’re coming home. And there’s so many people all over the world and in Israel that are with you and are praying for you,” Ohel said, asking fellow musicians to play songs in her son’s honor in the coming days. “And you are not alone, Alon. You are not alone.” 

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Anti-Trump demonstration ahead of NATO meeting in Brussels

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Anti-Trump demonstration ahead of NATO meeting in Brussels

The demonstration happened on the sidelines of US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s address at the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels.

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Dozens gathered for an anti-Trump demonstration in front of the Brussels-Central station on Wednesday, calling for the defence of democratic values in the United States.

Spokesperson for Democrats Abroad Belgium Robin de Wouters said “we really want to protest the Trump administration’s attack on our constitutional values and American values.”

De Wouters added that the American population has entrusted the US president after a democratically held vote, but stresses the importance of representing all of its citizens, “and that’s not by alienating a vast majority of Americans.”

“He has to respect the rule of law. He has to respect the decisions of the court. He has to respect due process in Congress. And he cannot assert himself as an autocrat,” he concluded.

The demonstration happened on the sidelines of newly appointed US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth’s visit to Belgium.

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Speaking at a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels, Hegseth said that Ukraine’s desired return to its pre-2014 borders as well as NATO membership are “unrealistic” goals that should be excluded from any future peace settlement. He also underlined that US troops would not be a part of any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine.

The meeting came a day before defence ministers are set to meet in the Belgian capital to prepare for the NATO Summit that will be held in The Hague in June.

“It is important that we send a strong message that we are a strong NATO member, that we will abide by the treaty, and that we are not going to undermine NATO,” former chair of Democrats Abroad Belgium Pauline Manos told Euronews at the rally.

“This cannot happen again,” she added, referring to Trump’s policy during his first term at the White House in 2016. “We will stand with Europe.”

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