Frozen

For the last six months I’ve been working for Solidarités International, a French NGO. It’s one of the many organisations that have been hit by Donald Trump’s executive order freezing humanitarian aid for ninety days. In 2023 the US government provided $72 billion of international aid, around 40 per cent of the global total. From the comparatively shabby three-storey building in Paris where I work (L’Oréal’s headquarters are next door), SI employs more than three thousand staff to provide water and sanitation in at least 25 countries. Its annual turnover is almost $200 million but it relies on state-funded, project-by-project allocations, rarely for periods of more than two years, nearly half of which are disbursed by Washington.

For fear of spending US money it can’t afford to pay back, and with millions of dollars of outstanding funding racked up in only two weeks, SI has been forced to call a halt to many of its commitments across the world: managing a cholera outbreak in South Sudanese transit centres for refugees from Sudan; completing sanitation works in refugee camps in Syria and Yemen; providing winter fuel to women-led households in the mountains of central Afghanistan. Expenditure for life-saving activities such as the distribution of drinking water has been shifted to existing European grants, but this is a temporary fix.

At a general meeting on 28 January, the CEO told us that at the current rate of expenditure, SI would go under by the end of spring: it would have to let go of hundreds of employees in the intervening weeks. Operational questions followed. How would SI prevent tensions in the field from turning into violence as staff withdrew goods and services that beneficiaries have come to rely on? Would French NGOs form a united front when addressing USAID? What options were there for keeping ‘national’ staff in two dozen countries on the payroll, or protecting their welfare? In Gaza, for example, or the Rohingya refugee camps in western Burma, the distinction between beneficiaries and NGO staff is often tenuous. They are paid lower salaries (indexed to local costs of living) than employees in France and none will be eligible for French unemployment benefits.

An SI staffer working in Democratic Republic of Congo joined the meeting online to explain how the NGO was adapting its activities around Goma as the rebel group M23 moved into the city, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. She signed off with a whispered ‘et on emmerde les Américains.’ Clapping emojis rained down the screen. Everybody is still just about observing the CEO’s directive to refrain from Trump-bashing.

It emerged the following day that the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had signed a waiver supposedly protecting provision of food, shelter, subsistence and essential supplies, but it’s far from a reprieve. The document is vague and full of MAGA talking points, with no suggestions as to how USAID’s jilted partners are meant to proceed. Thousands of American civil servants who could resume payments, honour the outgoing administration’s commitments and guide partners through the process have been locked out of their email accounts and put on leave. Meanwhile Elon Musk has called USAID a ‘criminal’ organisation. Trump’s order is being challenged in court; dismantling USAID altogether would require congressional approval. Reform? Retrenchment? Demolition? In any case the short-term damage is done. The remaining staff at USAID, shuttling between a hostile administration and the courts, are as dumbfounded as the rest of us.

Even if Rubio’s waiver comes into effect, perhaps a couple of weeks from now, recovery for critical services will take months. Some of the larger players may fare better than smaller ones. Médecins Sans Frontières relies on private donors. Médecins du Monde is less dependent on US money than many international NGOs. Acted (the Agency for Technical Co-Operation and Development) is three times the size of SI but half of its budget, too, is American. It has been discreet about its response, but rumour suggests that thousands of its national staff across 42 countries have already been furloughed.

Earlier this month the French prime minister, François Bayrou, forced through a budget with a 40 per cent cut in foreign aid. Germany has been reducing its aid spending, too, and the trend is likely to continue whoever leads the next coalition in the Bundestag after the elections on 23 February. In this climate it would be a triumph if the European Commission stuck to its current budget. China, meanwhile, has increased its contributions to the UN, in 2019 passing Japan to become the second largest contributor after the US, but its foreign aid is mostly dispensed through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Trump has thrown out the old bipartisan arguments for overseas aid as a projection of soft power, but he may not be averse to using it as a foreign policy tool. He has already threatened to shut down funds to Egypt and Jordan if they refuse to take Palestinians fleeing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He’s backtracked since, but he could just as easily revise his revision. There are already objections from US pharmaceutical and food companies, who have a vested interest in foreign aid. The UN’s World Food Programme is a reliable buyer of American food surpluses. Bloomberg reports that the European Commission is planning a review of its spending to make it more ‘targeted for our partners’.

At the start of this week, some of SI’s teams abroad were contacted by their local USAID counterparts. Those who remain in place are clearly under the gun and barred from discussing the details of the freeze. When an SI country director broached the matter with USAID interlocutors, they huddled in concert before politely declining to answer. They clearly want to help, but would be risking their jobs by doing so.