CV NEWS FEED // Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced March 10 that 5,200 contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been canceled, and approximately 1,000 remain.
Rubio said in an X post that the now-canceled contracts “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.”
The Trump administration has spent the past six weeks determining which contracts should be kept or cut. In total, 83% of the contracts were ultimately canceled, according to Rubio.
“In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department,” Rubio added. “Thank you to DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency] and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.”
The Trump administration is also poised to reduce the number of USAID employees, after a U.S. district judge March 7 lifted a temporary block of the reductions, as CatholicVote previously reported. Unions representing USAID workers had sued and obtained the temporary block, arguing that it would leave overseas employees without emergency communication. The USAID administration assured employees that they would have access to emergency communication.
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The Trump administration’s move to end most of the USAID contracts has been criticized by the secretary general of the Vatican’s global aid network Caritas Internationalis. In February, the network’s Secretary General Alistair Dutton warned that the funding cuts “will kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanising poverty,” as CatholicVote previously reported. Caritas member Catholic Relief Services was the largest USAID fund recipient from 2013 to 2022.
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On Feb. 3, the Trump White House released an article stating that the USAID has funneled “massive sums of money to the ridiculous – and, in many cases, malicious – pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.” Among the listed taxpayer-funded projects are $2 million for “sex changes” and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, and funding for 3D printing of contraceptives in developing countries, according to the Trump White House.