(Bloomberg) -- The demise of the US Agency for International Development is sapping billions of dollars of funding for health and social programs that will be difficult for the world to replace. But it’s also leaving behind a complicated legacy as a promoter of American values abroad.
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Donald Trump and his efficiency czar Elon Musk made USAID an early target of their cost-cutting campaign in part because the president is prioritizing domestic issues over international support. The agency funded journalistic outlets, human-rights groups and anticorruption efforts that critics at home and abroad argued were unnecessary interventions in other countries’ affairs.
These organizations were sometimes the only local sources of criticism or independent research in places with autocratic governments, though they also did work in countries that were long-time democratic allies, such as Mexico and Colombia. Many of those groups will struggle to carry on without US funding, and Trump’s retrenchment is emboldening some authoritarian leaders to crack down on dissent.
“Now is the moment when these international networks have to be taken down, they have to be swept away,” Hungary’s Viktor Orbán said in a radio address last month, announcing plans to target any nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign funds and praising Trump’s move. “It is necessary to make their existence legally impossible.”
That move is part of a push by a “consolidated axis of antidemocratic actors” to suppress civil society that will only accelerate as the US turns inward under Trump, according to Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow at Chatham House in London who from 1997 to 2005 was Latin America director at the National Endowment for Democracy, which also had its funding cut alongside USAID.
“This was one of the sole sources of support to open up and to sustain political space in these countries,” he said. “A lot of the private foundations don’t do that.”
After a six-week review, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 10 that more than 80% of USAID’s contracts were officially canceled because they didn’t serve — and in some cases even harmed — “core national interests.” The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Some USAID activity became uncomfortable even for countries with close relations with the US. Frustrated by an anticorruption group he said was tied to conservative opposition parties, Mexico’s then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador penned a formal complaint to US counterpart Joe Biden in 2023 about what he saw as an “interventionist act.”
Colombia’s leftist leader Gustavo Petro has also balked at foreign assistance. “That aid is poison,” he said during a televised cabinet meeting last month, asking why his country couldn’t foot the bill itself for a USAID-funded border patrol.
But in other places, USAID was seen as an ally to governments that strived for democratic ideals. In Ukraine, the agency supported independent journalism that helped sway the country to implement reforms aimed at European integration, according to Oksana Romanyuk, head of the country’s Institute of Mass Information.
More than 80% of 120 media outlets the institute recently surveyed received US grants. “It was soft power, which held the democratic world together,” she said.
There’s a high risk foreign actors will exploit the void, Ola Myrovych, head of the Lviv Media Forum, told Bloomberg by email. “With external support from authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, media outlets in Ukraine may face increased pressure to align with foreign agendas,” she said.
Russia’s former president praised the move in a post on X.
A similar dynamic is playing out in Asia. Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor, a platform that documented protests and other forms of opposition in China, has suspended all work since USAID funding was withdrawn, making it harder to gauge public sentiment in the world’s second-biggest economy.
“The message it sends is that the United States is walking away from some of its longest-held priorities,” according to Emily Mendrala, who worked on Cuba and migration policy under former President Joe Biden and is now a Washington-based consultant.
Elsewhere in Europe, other leaders are echoing Orban. Authorities loyal to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic sent investigators to raid the offices of pro-democracy groups funded by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, in search of potential evidence of financial fraud or misuse of funds.
“There will be many more surprises in the coming days, documents are coming to light,” Vucic said March 9, referring to the probe of USAID projects. “Anything that wasn’t done in accordance with the law will have to be accounted for.”
USAID also funded independent local news operations covering autocratic regimes across Latin America. An already dwindling independent press in those places will now have to look elsewhere for resources.
In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s government has shuttered more than 400 independent media outlets since 2000. Thirteen organizations with US funding were among the few outlets willing to buck the state media line when the socialist strongman declared himself reelected to a third term last July without presenting evidence. Of the 235 reporters in that network at the time of the contested vote, only 39 now remain.
A journalist who covers Daniel Ortega’s administration from exile in Costa Rica, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals both in Nicaragua and the US, described the Trump administration’s move as a gift to the regime.
In neighboring El Salvador, democratically elected but authoritarian-leaning President Nayib Bukele has repeatedly voiced support for Trump’s decision. “The vast majority of ‘independent’ journalists and media are, in fact, part of a global money laundering operation aimed at promoting the globalist agenda,” he said on X last month.
The kinds of outlets under fire are often among the few reporting on drug trafficking and immigration — key issues for the Trump administration, said Gypsy Guillen Kaiser, head of global affairs at the Committee to Protect Journalists. But now that they’re being dismantled, the journalists who received funding are being hounded by the authorities on flimsy or fabricated charges.
“The message that this entire process is sending to other governments is that those journalists are free prey,” she said.
On the other side of the Atlantic, across Africa’s Sahel region, military rulers who seized power in recent years and spurned the West in favor of Russia have joined the push to investigate NGOs — with some arguing Trump is following their lead.
The junta that runs Mali said it had “denounced the danger of development aid being used to fund terrorist networks long before the new US administration took office,” according to a Feb. 24 foreign ministry statement. The military leadership has cracked down on civil society and seen civilian deaths rise since it overthrew the civilian government in 2021, kicking out Western troops who were leading the fight against a decade-long Islamist insurgency.
The junta vowed to “investigate and punish” anyone responsible for the misuse of funds, urging US authorities to investigate and charge those who used the money “to finance international terrorism.” Musk responded enthusiastically to the assertion in a post on X.
“With the US administration suspending aid, the Sahel military regimes can say, ‘Look, even the US says it, so our suspicions were right,” said Yvan Guichaoua, an independent researcher focusing on the region.
In an interview with a right-wing US influencer last week, Rwandan President Paul Kagame — who has ruled for three decades — slammed foreign aid. He has come under increasing Western pressure as a militia his military supports and arms has seized major cities in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, displacing nearly 1 million people.
“Whoever gives you aid controls your life,” said Kagame, whose country has long been one of Africa’s biggest per-capita aid recipients. “It is weaponized.”
Still, some democratically elected leaders have also welcomed Trump’s move, on the grounds that it will help end Africa’s aid dependency. Hakainde Hichilema, the president of Zambia, is among them. Without US funding, he said this month, “we’re on our own” and that represents “a great window.”
--With assistance from Piotr Skolimowski, Marton Kasnyik, Misha Savic, Rebecca Choong Wilkins, Fabiola Zerpa, Taonga Mitimingi, Matthew Hill, Iain Marlow and Dave Merrill.
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