UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima urged Washington to reverse its decision to begin a phased withdrawal of PEPFAR funding from South Africa, warning the move could cost lives in the country with the world's largest HIV-positive population. She cites early signs of reversal tied to the broader collapse in U.S. aid funding.

Despite Congress passing a law directing the State Department to spend $9.4 billion on global health and over $5 billion on humanitarian aid, ProPublica reports that Trump officials have delayed obligating funds, labeled aid money "unallocated" to require OMB sign-off, and ignored congressional inquiries.

With official development assistance falling 23.1% in 2025 and projected to decline a further 5.8% in 2026, The Conversation argues that the pullback in U.S. and other Western aid should push African governments to build fiscal self-reliance through fairer domestic taxation, smarter debt use, and unified bargaining power rather than continued dependence on donor goodwill.

Germany's far-right AfD is exploiting a fraud scandal at development agency GIZ — where 24 Yemen-office employees were dismissed over alleged embezzlement estimated at tens of millions of euros — to push for abolishing the country's development ministry entirely, with party spokesperson Rocco Kever explicitly pointing to the Trump administration's gutting of USAID as an "interesting and courageous signal" for Germany to emulate.

The Trump administration is initiating a phased drawdown of PEPFAR funding to South Africa — which supports roughly 8 million people living with HIV and has received over $400 million annually — citing the country's "failure to make demonstrable progress" on U.S. policy concerns, with full termination expected by early 2027.

IOM Director General Amy Pope tells AFP that declining development aid is driving more displacement from crisis-hit regions like Sudan, and urges wealthy donor nations to invest in stability now rather than face costlier emergencies later.

A new State Department plan would strip the CDC of much of its role in PEPFAR and the disease surveillance infrastructure it underpins, shifting control of funds to the State Department and replacing the agency's budget with a pay-per-service menu, The New York Times reports. 

The WFP received an $800 million contribution from the U.S., a partial reversal after the Trump administration earlier slashed U.S. funding to the agency, even as global hunger sits at record levels, Reuters reports. 

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.