Foreign Aid — News & Analysis

Rubio terminates 83% of USAID programs; announces agency will close July 1 (March 28, 2025)

March 28, 2025 — Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83 percent of all USAID programs had been terminated — 5,200 contracts cancelled — and that the remaining 17 percent would be transferred to a new State Department Office of Global Food Security, with all USAID employees to be dismissed through a "Reduction-in-Force" effective July 1 or September 2, 2025. The announcement came as a court cleared the way for the closures, with the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifting an injunction that had briefly blocked the dismantlement. The programs cancelled included nutrition assistance for infants, treatments for polio, malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola, and HIV, and famine monitoring systems.

The scale of what was being eliminated was difficult to overstate. USAID had had a budget of $63 billion in 2023, operated in more than 120 countries, and had funded programs that — according to a Lancet study published the same day as USAID's formal closure — had prevented an estimated 91 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries between 2001 and 2021, including a 65 percent reduction in HIV/AIDS mortality and a 51 percent reduction in malaria deaths in the countries where it worked. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both recorded farewell messages to USAID staff, with Bush — who had created PEPFAR — among the most vocal critics of the closure.

Rubio characterized the agency as having "strayed from its original mission," creating a "bloated NGO-industrial complex" misaligned with American interests. A State Department spokesperson said the government still owed more than $1 billion for work already completed before the freeze — money that remained unpaid to contractors who had delivered services in good faith.