University of Arizona research departments are navigating change following the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze of the United States Agency for International Development.
The United States Agency for International Development, established Nov. 3, 1961, under President John F. Kennedy during the Cold War, has led humanitarian efforts around the world.
USAID’s assistance has been important in improving the quality of life of communities within vulnerable countries.
The agency’s mission is to promote global development, alleviate poverty, reduce disease transmission, improve education, enhance democratic governance and boost economic growth in developing countries.
The agency employed 10,000 people prior to when the Trump administration began to review and terminate foreign aid contracts. USAID will be reduced to some 15 positions from the previous thousands.
The reasoning for imposing such extensive measures on USAID is due to claims of fraud and waste generated within the agency.
“We found fraud and abuse, I would say those two words as opposed to the third word that I usually use, but in this case, fraud and abuse,” President Donald Trump said.
During a White House press conference on Feb. 12, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “I love to bring the receipts.”
She explained that, in her view, projects and contracts such as the $36,000 allocated for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services or the $3.4 million for the Council for Inclusive Innovation at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are fraudulent.
“They are wasteful and they are an abuse of the American taxpayers’ dollar,” Leavitt said.
However, there is little concrete evidence to verify the accuracy and transparency of these allegations.
Eric G. Postel, senior official at USAID during the Biden and Obama administrations and senior advisor to USAID administrator until January this year, said “foreign assistance has to draw so much scrutiny and there’s so many different views about it; I think it’s fair to say that USAID gets more scrutiny than almost any other part of the US government.”
According to Postel, between October 2018 and September 2024, the total budget for USAID was $228 billion. Congress, the inspector general and international inspector generals looked at this budget and audited 94% of it. They audited $215 billion and questioned $640 million.
“Questioning doesn’t mean it’s a waste, fraud, or abuse. It means maybe there’s waste, fraud and abuse,” Postel said. “So out of the $640 million that was questioned, they collected more than half. So out of the total $228 billion of spending, there were problems with about $300 million dollars.”
“Now, don’t we wish we had $300 million and personal bank accounts? I’m not trivializing that, right? If you’re a taxpayer who works really hard and pays $5,000 a year in taxes, $5,000 matters to you. But my point is that you can’t argue that it is a criminal enterprise or that everything that it does is waste, fraud and abuse,” Postel said .
The United States is one of the 33 countries allocating funds for international development as a member of the Development Assistance Committee. According to the Official Development Assistance, the largest donors include the United States with $65 billion, Germany with $35 billion, Japan with $17.5 billion, the United Kingdom with $15.7 billion and France with $15 billion.
“You may have seen that there was a very big earthquake in Asia, expecting the death toll to be in the thousands and the country has asked for assistance. Normally, because American citizens really love to help others and also as an element of soft power to show people that we help them, we’re not there to invade them, literally by this point already, there would be people on planes going there, experts dealing with earthquakes,” Postel said. “They are not going anywhere today because all the contracts with the transporters, the airlines to fly in there, they’ve all been canceled. And the USAID people who work on this are furloughed and about to be fired.”
Many programs that are highly reliant on U.S. aid will suffer from the dismantling of USAID.
Some of the key projects that have been terminated include food assistance aiding 1 million people in Ethiopia, cash-based humanitarian programs for 1 million people in Ukraine and the largest malaria prevention project in Senegal, which distributed bed nets and medication to tens of thousands of people.
The administration has cut 83% of foreign aid projects. Many question the review process of canceling most projects over 6 weeks.
“There are all kinds of proof I can provide to definitively prove that there was no thorough methodical processes for these reviews and a friend of mine was briefly in the room for one of these reviews, and the part that the person witnessed went something like this: Maternal child health in Ghana? What’s that? ‘You know, helping pregnant women.’ Oh yeah, we don’t need to do that. Next,” Postel said.
The impact is also seen on a local level at the University of Arizona.
According to the Arizona Daily Star, “researchers say the University of Arizona will lose more than $8.5 million in unspent federal funds from the U.S Agency for International Development after four of the agency’s UA projects were canceled this week.”
Zach Guido, assistant research professor at the Arizona Institute for Resilience, leads the International Resilience Lab, which focuses work on international development, humanitarian assistance and environmental challenges. This lab has projects spanning the Caribbean, Africa and Bangladesh.
“I think it’s a shock to the people I interact with, who have decades of experience in international development — they’ve never experienced anything like this. So again, this is the unspooling of, you know, 60 years of infrastructure, international infrastructure and foreign assistance in a matter of weeks,” Guido said.
Guido also stressed the benefits of humanitarian aid for the country.
“To put it in the language of Marco Rubio, I think foreign assistance, humanitarian assistance, makes us stronger, more prosperous and safer,” Guido said. “But it’s also part of our humanitarian values as a country, that we can continue to try to support those places that are less fortunate than we are.”
For some research projects fully funded by USAID, such as the Climate Adaptation Research Program and Humanitarian Assistance Technical Support, this freeze directly impacts UA jobs.
“The big picture is this directly bears on their positions because they’re fully funded by this program,” Guido said.
UA Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and CARP employee Timothy Finan noted the dismissal of three staff members, who have been there for more than 10 years, due to the changes enacted by the new administration.
CARP is a $10 million project that started as a supply project in Africa. CARP partners with Stellenbosch University and 12 higher education institutions across Africa. In 2023, CARP had funded 33 research projects across 10 African countries, along with webinars, in-person workshops and networking activities.
“The university is the one that is telling our partners that they cannot spend the money, even the money that was already for proposals that were already reviewed and awarded across Latin America, across Africa. I’m not sure if that’s actually legal,” Finan said.
Despite a court order to temporarily lift the freeze for programs worldwide, the Trump Administration has continued to withhold foreign aid, said a federal judge on Feb. 20. As of Tuesday, Feb. 25, Federal Judge Amir H. Ali gave the Trump Administration less than two days to release billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid, saying that the administration had given no sign of compliance with his two-week-old court order.
As of March 27, the UA has nine terminated awards and nine on stop order.
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