The U.S. has already spent at least $12 billion on its war with Iran in just the first two weeks of the conflict — a sum that exceeds the entirety of Trump's cuts to humanitarian aid in his first term, and that critics argue could instead fund nearly three years of U.S. foreign assistance at current levels. TIME breaks down what that spending could have covered.

The Guttmacher Institute warns that, on top of actions already taken to dismantle USAID and cut international family planning assistance, the sweeping new Global Gag Rule policy threatens to deepen harm to an estimated 50 million women and girls in low- and middle-income countries already denied contraceptive care.

Cuts to USAID have eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding for biodiversity protection, forcing conservation programs across dozens of countries to halt operations or shut down entirely, The Guardian reports.

Sierra Leone's Princess Christian Maternity Hospital is running short of basic surgical supplies, as U.S. and U.K. aid cuts threaten to reverse nearly 80% of the progress the country has made in reducing maternal mortality since 2000, according to the Daily Nation. The U.S. cuts represented a $45 million reduction in maternal, child, and adolescent health projects.

Contrary to widespread predictions of economic catastrophe following major U.S. and Western aid cuts, many African economies have demonstrated surprising resilience, Foreign Affairs reports.

On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took aim at the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID, calling the move morally indefensible and detailing its deadly consequences for vulnerable populations around the world.

El País follows three women across three countries to show how the collapse of U.S. foreign aid has hit women and girls hardest, stripping away maternal care, family planning, and gender-based violence protections that their governments had long neglected. The piece underscores a stark milestone: 2025 marked the first year in a quarter century that child mortality rose, a trend researchers link directly to the dismantling of USAID and the elimination of 94% of U.S. funding for sexual and reproductive health.

A new study published in PLOS Medicine finds that the loss of USAID support alone could generate approximately $7.5 billion in additional tuberculosis-related costs for households in low- and middle-income countries, with four million more families pushed into financial catastrophe.

The Trump administration's defunding of USAID halted over 40 drug distribution campaigns in 2025, cutting off treatment for neglected tropical diseases — including river blindness and elephantiasis — and leaving more than 140 million people without access to critical medication.

U.S. foreign aid cuts have gutted funding for gender-based violence programs worldwide, with over $400 million in grants eliminated and more than 40% of organizations forced to scale back or shut down entirely, according to NPR.

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration has awarded a $150 million, two-year contract to wind down USAID — but has explicitly barred any former USAID employees from working on it, citing the need to "avoid the risk of impaired objectivity."

The dismantling of USAID — once one of the world's largest funders of biodiversity protection — has left park rangers without salaries, anti-poaching patrols without resources, and decades of community-led conservation work in collapse across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

New research from the SHARP Project finds that access to HIV treatment in Kenya's Mandera County has fallen to near-collapse levels — averaging just 1.5% availability — while stockouts of maternal medicines have surged across two other counties. It’s a crisis that researchers are attributing directly to the closure of USAID, Health Policy Watch reports.

A year into the legal battle over the dismantling of USAID, more than a half-dozen lawsuits are still winding through the courts — repeatedly stalled by jurisdictional disputes and procedural technicalities rather than advancing to the core constitutional questions, Foreign Policy reports.

Based on an internal State Department email obtained by The Atlantic, the Trump administration is moving to end all humanitarian funding to seven African countries including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, and Zimbabwe, canceling programs it had previously classified as lifesaving, with the stated rationale that there is "no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests."

The Independent reports that in Zimbabwe's drought-ravaged Mwenezi district, the collapse of USAID funding has forced families to pull children out of school and survive on one meal a day, with mothers fearing their daughters will be driven into exploitative relationships with gold-panners who now flash cash in desperate communities.

Science journalism in lower-income countries is being gutted by the U.S. foreign aid freeze, with media non-profit Internews losing 95% of its $126 million government allocation and investigative networks like InfoNile seeing their budgets slashed by nearly a quarter, according to Nature.

U.S. foreign aid cuts have dealt a severe blow to hepatitis care across Africa, forcing clinics to close, laying off more than 1,500 testing aides in Malawi alone, and disrupting medication supplies for the 72.5 million people on the continent living with hepatitis B and C, El País reports.

Afghanistan is experiencing the highest surge in child malnutrition ever recorded in the country, with U.S. aid cuts forcing the World Food Programme to turn away three in four of the 4 million acutely malnourished children who need treatment, the Washington Post reports.

U.S. aid cuts have likely fueled a roughly 5% increase in armed conflict events across heavily aid-dependent countries in Africa since January 2025, according to new empirical analysis cited in this Center for Global Development blog post. The findings, drawn from real-time conflict data rather than projections, point to an estimated 1,000 additional conflict-related deaths over the course of 2025.