The U.S. Agency for International Development officially shut down on July 1 after decades of humanitarian work around the globe. Republican lawmakers — who once largely supported the agency and repeatedly passed funding for it — hardly noticed.
For six months, medicine, doctors, food and schools previously funded by the United States in vulnerable countries have been offline, after the Trump administration unilaterally halted congressionally approved spending for those programs. The impact of the foreign aid freeze was immediate: A Burmese refugee who needed oxygen died in early February after a U.S.-funded hospital that had been providing treatment closed suddenly under a State Department stop-work order.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who now handles the fraction of foreign aid that the Trump administration has left intact, “will sort it all out,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer told NOTUS.