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.
“Rubio’s a good, compassionate person,” Comer said.
In Liberia, a pregnant woman and her unborn son died this spring, unable to make it to a doctor in time as she hemorrhaged. The ambulances that America had donated to help women in labor in her region were reportedly out of fuel due to the funding cuts. And a Washington Post report last month from war-torn Sudan detailed deaths by starvation and illness among children who had previously been receiving life-saving food and medicine from USAID.
“It’s not like a business where you just go to zero and then build it back up. I think that was the DOGE mentality,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican and one of the party’s most vocal supporters of the foreign aid. “A lot of these programs are life and death.”
“It’s real,” he said of people abroad dying of preventable causes after USAID’s withdrawal.
“When we retreat from the world,” McCaul warned, “our adversaries fill the vacuum.”
In interviews with more than a dozen Republican lawmakers about USAID’s dismantlement and subsequent deaths, most brushed off the matter entirely. They said America’s foreign aid apparatus needed reform and the freeze had saved taxpayer money — even though the U.S. government had already paid for many life-saving supplies that are now sitting on shelves unused.
Republican lawmakers who spoke with NOTUS also refused to consider whether a different strategy, like implementing the spending cuts over time, getting input from Congress or trying to find private donors to support aid operations in advance, could have minimized harm to people who relied on it.
“The way this place works around here, you try to do something slow and incremental like that, it never gets done,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia argued. “This is one that you had to rip the Band-Aid off immediately.”
Reports of deaths are “incredibly sad,” he said. “But also, my question is: Why such reliance on U.S. foreign aid, when we’re obviously heading for financial disaster in how in debt we are?”
Some Republicans denied that people who once counted on food and medicine from USAID-funded programs could be getting sick and dying at all.
“Wait a minute,” Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania said when asked about the children who have reportedly died of disease and starvation in Sudan after the cuts.
“Wait, wait, wait. How could that be?” he asked. “There are already people dying?”
“I don’t believe that,” Kelly told NOTUS. “No.”
And Georgia Rep. Mike Collins dismissed The Washington Post’s report from Sudan as merely hypothetical.
“If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his butt,” Collins responded to NOTUS when asked about the deaths. “I don’t go off of ‘ifs.’”
“We’ve looked into it,” Collins said of USAID. “And we’ve cleaned up all the waste, fraud and abuse.”
For decades, USAID assisted people in countries hit hard by famine, disease and war. An analysis in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that USAID-funded programs have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths worldwide — and that more than 14 million additional deaths may occur over the next five years if USAID’s work remains largely halted.
Congress codified USAID in 1998, roughly two decades after an executive order first established it. Lawmakers funded the agency through appropriations bills, with new money passed into law as recently as this year. The Trump administration argued the president had discretion to halt USAID’s work as it was part of the executive branch.
Its funding represented a tiny drop in the bucket of overall federal spending, but USAID was among tech billionaire Elon Musk’s first targets when he started implementing DOGE’s cost-cutting goals at the start of Trump’s second term.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk wrote in early February.
A few Republican lawmakers are openly distressed by deaths in places previously reached by USAID assistance.
“This is a horrendous story,” Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who plans to retire at the end of his term, said of deaths in Sudan.
“USAID did some real stupid stuff, but also some really good stuff,” Bacon said in a text message to NOTUS. “Cutting out the good because of the bad is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And here… literally.”
“There should be a review of impacts,” he said.
Most other Republicans, however, aren’t interested in looking into the effects of the freeze.
“Congress needs to investigate the stealing that went on in USAID and how they always bring out these poor folks who are in a pitiful way, and they don’t bring out the incredible amount of stealing that’s going on,” Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said.
“It’s horrible that children, if children are dying, that they are,” he told NOTUS. But Burchett said he believes the foreign governments and nonprofit organizations receiving the aid couldn’t be trusted. “It’s become a welfare state,” he said.
It’s not clear how many people have faced illness, starvation or death as direct results of USAID’s demolition. Bridget Cusick, a spokesperson for the Jesuit Refugee Service, told NOTUS the freeze had halted a daycare program in Sudan for children with disabilities that provided therapy and food for at-risk kids.
In February, a few weeks after the Trump administration’s stop-work order, an 8-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who had been participating in the program became ill and was diagnosed with severe malnutrition “due to the suspension of funding,” Cusick said. “With her immune system compromised by lack of nutrition, she died from the illness.”
Cusick told NOTUS the changes were life-altering for children in vulnerable places. Thousands of schoolchildren in Chad who had been going to school through Jesuit Refugee Service programs had their studies derailed when the Trump administration cut off the funding, she told NOTUS.
A small contingent of Republicans has long been skeptical of any involvement abroad. Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-minded member from Kentucky, has often found himself as the sole “no” vote on foreign policy legislation.
“We’re broke,” he said when asked if there’s any room in his worldview for assistance abroad. “I don’t vote for any foreign aid.”
Most others have voted for foreign aid, though, both for humanitarian reasons and as a geopolitical strategy to win goodwill and allies abroad. Some Republicans hope to boost foreign aid programs in a funding bill later this year.
“I’m a big fan of foreign assistance,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NOTUS, although he said he is concerned about mismanagement and waste. “My hope is that we can come out with a ’26 bill that will get PEPFAR back to where it needs to be, help The Global Fund.”
Still, Graham wants America to end up as just one component of a global humanitarian network, rather than the largest donor by far.
“It’s time for others to step up,” he said. “The Global Fund, we have a matching component. I’m going to take that idea and spread it throughout the bill, that America will be generous, but other people have to match.”
Some GOP lawmakers said they are focused on limiting aid to countries with trustworthy governments or places where leaders can demonstrate they care about bettering their people’s lives. Former Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida, a Republican, has spent much of the year urging his former colleagues to approve continued foreign assistance, but he wants to see the United States be tougher on foreign governments.
“Children are always going to be starving,” Yoho told NOTUS in a phone call. “We need to address the underlying problems.”
“We know how to feed people, we know how to teach them to grow, but if their government is not willing to invest in that, they’re going to continue to have starving people,” Yoho said. “So, cutting these programs, or pausing them — yeah, there probably are going to be some kids that get caught up in that and probably die. But there were kids dying from the conflicts that were going around from bad policy and bad government.”
Republicans will likely take direction from Rubio as they work on future funding legislation.
“Americans should not pay taxes to fund failed governments in faraway lands,” Rubio said in a blog post announcing the end of USAID. “Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited.”