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.

While the $51.4 billion foreign aid package recently signed by Trump has been framed as a restoration of slashed global health programs, analysis from KFF shows the 2026 global health budget remains around 6% lower than the previous year — and the contracting infrastructure that once turned funding into services has largely disappeared, reports The Independent.

According to NPR, the Trump administration's foreign aid freeze threatened to derail a cutting-edge HIV vaccine trial in South Africa — one of the countries hardest hit by the disease — before local researchers devised a new path forward.

The U.S. foreign aid freeze sent shock waves through agricultural research worldwide, with workers halting data collection in sorghum and peanut test plots across Africa, seed companies going unpaid, and research coordinators at more than a dozen U.S. universities laying off staff, Science magazine shows.