Just hours after his inauguration on Jan. 20, President Trump ordered a halt to all U.S. foreign aid, declaring it ‘in many cases…antithetical to American values’ and serving to “destabilize world peace.” Officials at the Agency for International Development were put on leave, staff were suspended and contracts paused pending a review. As the review began the name of the agency was scraped from the entry to its offices on Pennsylvania Ave.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the results of the review on March 11: he was cutting 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs. He disclosed this on X, formerly Twitter, and thanked Elon Musk, who has been put in charge of the demolition of AID and other agencies. Musk, who also owns X, called USAID a “criminal organization” and boasted he was feeding it “into the wood chipper.” Of the 14,000 employees worldwide, all but 290 are to be dismissed.

In a parallel move on Jan. 20, the President issued an executive order suspending the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) on grounds that the program is “detrimental” to U.S. interests and that the country lacks the capacity to absorb large numbers of migrants. Contracts with 10 longtime partner organizations were terminated. Despite court orders, the Trump administration has signaled that it could take months to restore USRAP operations.  

AID has been one of the world’s biggest aid agencies, set up by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. USRAP had served as the official federal agency to resettle refugees since 1980. Congress was not consulted when the dismantling began. 

Is this the end to American foreign aid and refugee resettlement? Can these programs be rescued? We’ve invited two top U.S. experts on humanitarian aid to address these and other questions.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, a member of our Board of Trustees, is the President and CEO of Baltimore-based Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service). She previously served in the Obama White House as Policy Director for First Lady Michelle Obama and at the State Department as Senior Advisor under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry.

Krish is a graduate from Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County and attended Yale College, where she earned an M.A. in Political Science and a B.S. in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. She was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, where she received an M.Phil. in International Relations before returning to Yale Law School, where she served on the Yale Law Journal.

Jeremy Konyndyk is the President of Refugees International, one of the leading advocacy organizations for refugees in the United States. He was the director of advocacy at Mercy Corps from 2008 to 2013, headed the U.S. AID office of Foreign Disaster Assistance from 2013 to 2017 and was the lead US official for COVID-19 in the Biden administration. He also served on the transition teams for the Biden-Harris administration for the Departments of State and Health and Human Services. He is a graduate of Calvin College and Georgetown University. Jeremy last spoke before the Council in April 2024.

Please join us on April 9 for this very special program on the dismantling of AID and USRAP.

(And please note: we have opened a members’ discussion forum on the topic on our website, where we’ll welcome your views or your experience with AID or USRAP.)