More than a year after the Trump administration dismantled USAID, researchers launching a three-year study of Malawi's post-USAID education sector find the country in a "transitional space," where the terms of development are being rewritten, according to The Conversation.

After the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts shuttered clinics and severed access to HIV medication across Zambia, NPR reports that children are increasingly being orphaned as their parents die of AIDS — reviving the child-headed households that defined the epidemic before U.S. programs like PEPFAR helped bring it under control.

A USAID inspector general report finds that roughly $8 million worth of taxpayer-funded contraceptives bound for low-income African nations has spoiled in a Belgian warehouse after the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID, The Hill reports.

NPR reports that the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts have triggered widespread shortages of a ready-to-use therapeutic food critical for treating childhood malnutrition across more than 500 community clinics in Senegal. 

The U.S. has been able to lead the response to the May 2026 Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda only because CDC country offices preserved relationships with local health ministries through the dismantling of USAID and the U.S. exit from the WHO, Think Global Health reports. 

Acting CDC director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya publicly denied that the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts harmed the response to the ongoing Central African Ebola outbreak, saying he had seen no evidence the reductions affected the agency's ability to act — a claim that directly contradicts a recent House Oversight Committee report from Democrats citing the dismantling of USAID.

Just Security reports that the U.S. has reached a secretive agreement to deport third-country nationals to the Central African Republic, where they would face armed conflict, Russian Wagner-linked forces, and a collapsing health system now confronting Ebola risk.

Aid groups report that the world's largest humanitarian crisis has been compounded by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has spiked fuel and fertilizer prices and choked the flow of food and assistance, even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio concedes Washington's response remains limited to identifying aid distribution points, PBS reports.

The Council on Foreign Relations reports that the revamped $1.2 billion Food for Peace program moved to the USDA is now routing U.S.-grown commodities to a short, mismatched list of just seven countries — two of which don't meet an emergency threshold — while bypassing countries needing it the most.

Writing in the New York Times, former USAID disaster-response official Jeremy Konyndyk warns that the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo and Uganda could become the worst on record, in part because the Trump administration's shuttering of USAID, staffing cuts at the CDC, and U.S. withdrawal from the WHO. 

This Health and Human Rights Journal editorial argues that the closure of USAID helped set the stage for the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak spreading through eastern DRC and into Uganda by gutting U.S.-funded programs that once enabled early detection and rapid logistical response. Michael Garcia Bochenek frames the harms to children's right to health as foreseeable and disregarded rather than unintended.

A year after the Trump administration ended most U.S. democracy funding, Carnegie Endowment scholars find that no actor has stepped in to fill the void, with established Western donors largely maintaining but not expanding their commitments — and several, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK, cutting democracy aid further.

Lawfare argues that the Trump administration's termination of nearly all of its $1.8 billion in aid to Afghanistan—along with the shuttering of U.S.-funded border reception centers and the elimination of the State Department office overseeing the region—has left some 2.9 million returnees facing extreme poverty and social isolation while erasing early-warning systems along the Pakistan border. 

El País travels to Nairobi to meet women left without contraception after the dismantling of USAID stranded $9.7 million in pills, IUDs, condoms, and implants in Belgian warehouses facing destruction or expiration, with public clinics that relied on USAID for their supplies now recording months of zero stock and post-abortion care cases up 50%. An estimated 108,000 Kenyan women will lose implant access this year.

HuffPost reports that the New World screwworm has been confirmed in south Texas for the first time in decades, roughly a year after DOGE eliminated the USAID-funded program that monitored and helped contain the parasite's northward spread. While it remains unclear whether the cuts directly enabled the outbreak, the case has raised alarm about a potentially costly crisis for the U.S. cattle industry as beef prices climb.

A new report from House Oversight Democrats finds that the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID has contributed to an estimated 600,000 deaths, two-thirds of them children, while also hampering the global response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak, The Hill reports.

In a bipartisan rebuke of the Trump administration's approach to foreign assistance, the House passed an $8 billion Ukraine security aid package with 18 Republicans breaking from party leadership to support military loans, reconstruction funding, and new sanctions targeting Russia's energy and financial sectors, The Washington Post reports.

When the Trump administration dismantled USAID in early 2025, it also took down the public archive documenting decades of U.S. global health achievements — leaving many without baseline data. Think Global Health reports that former USAID officials have launched an interactive tool recovering fiscal year 2019–2023 data.

In this opinion, Nicholas Kristof argues that the dismantling of USAID and the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO have directly worsened the current Ebola outbreak by eliminating early-warning infrastructure, expert presence in the DRC, and disease preparedness planning.

U.S. funding cuts to UNFPA-supported maternity services in northeastern Central African Republic are forcing overwhelmed clinics to reduce staffing and cut outreach, Al Jazeera reports.