It's been over a week since Congress granted the White House its wish to claw back $7.9 billion that Congress previously allocated for spending on disease and famine control, disaster relief and promoting democracy.
But the details on what the package will actually cut are so unclear that many in the nonprofit aid sector are scratching their heads trying to understand what the impact will be.
"Quite honestly, we really don't know," says Lisa Bos, the vice president of policy and government relations at InterAction, an alliance of aid groups. "It's very hard to understand how these cuts will be implemented going forward."
The White House had asked Congress to take back that money as part of its plan to cut foreign aid spending and eliminate the "waste of taxpayer funds." Congress voted to approve the package on July 18.
The rescission package codifies the cuts to foreign aid that the administration and the Department of Government Efficiency made earlier this year during its dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. Foreign aid programs were largely managed through USAID before the Trump administration shut it down, citing rampant "fraud and abuse." The administration has yet to provide evidence to support its allegations.
Nor did the White House provide details in the rescission document sent to Congress for approval. What the document does list are large buckets of funding for things like "global health," "migration and refugee assistance" and "democracy fund," arguing that the cuts would "best serve the American taxpayer" — but no specifics.
"They won't tell us how they're going to apply the cuts," Sen. Mitch McConnell told reporters on July 16.
NPR requested clarification on the rescission package from the White House but did not receive a response.
Still, the Trump rescission document does offer some clues as to what will be cut. Interviews with those who work in foreign aid add to the picture of what a post-rescission world might look like.
Long-term development assistance is taking a big hit
The two largest buckets of money within the rescission package are for programs that work to help people living in extreme poverty or provide infrastructure like electricity, roads and clean water. The package will claw back $2.5 billion in development assistance and nearly $1.7 billion through the Economic Support Fund.
Those billions enabled NGOs to build resilience among communities and local health care systems to cope with emergencies, like natural disasters or economic shocks.
"That's the stuff that really ensures we don't have to respond in a more costly way to an emergency, where you're doing prevention work, building resilience and getting people out of poverty. That piece in particular has been decimated in this package," InterAction's Lisa Bos says.
Development programs cover a myriad of measures in the effort to build stability and mitigate migration: expanding access to education in low income countries, creating job opportunities, improving infrastructure to provide electricity and clean water, supporting women's financial independence.
"In an ideal world, you don't have to respond to every crisis, you don't have to wait for something to happen to react," Bos says. "That's what development really helps with."
Bos described the cuts to development as a "nail in the coffin" of the idea of building self-reliance in lower income countries so they can respond to and tackle issues at home without help from the U.S. or other countries.
"If your vision is at some point to reduce reliance on foreign assistance, the way that you do that is you provide people with tools and skills to provide for themselves, to have an education, to have access to new methods of farming, to have access to even basic lifesaving things like clean water," she says.
Trump administration officials have argued that development work is ineffective and gives away taxpayer money to corrupt governments.
UNICEF is losing a chunk of its core funding
The rescission package cuts $142 million of core funding for UNICEF, the U.N. agency that is widely praised for its work to improve the lives of children. In the bill UNICEF is listed along with other U.N.-affiliated groups that the Trump administration has long had a beef with, like the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Fund.
The inclusion of UNICEF came as a shock to those in the aid world.
"UNICEF is about as lifesaving as it gets, working with mothers and children and on issues like nutrition," as well as providing health care during humanitarian crises, says Bos of InterAction.
The rescission affects U.S. donations to UNICEF's core funding rather than specific programs. Patrick Quirk, UNICEF's vice president for global policy and public affairs, calls it "the most important pot that the United States provides" to the organization. Cutting it will significantly impact UNICEF's ability to respond to the needs of children in crises, he says.
"This is the funding line that UNICEF relies on to be responsive, effective, extremely efficient to immediately respond to disasters, and there's no other plug and play solution to fill that gap."
UNICEF traditionally has enjoyed bipartisan support; some senators moved to remove UNICEF from the rescission package, but Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., successfully opposed it.
"UNICEF's mission, although admirable, is not immune from waste, fraud and abuse. That's why this rescission package includes $142 million for UNICEF's overhead," Schmitt argued during debate on the Senate floor earlier this month.
UNICEF'S Patrick Quirk says the canceled funds were not for overhead expenses.
"It is used to deploy people rapidly to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks. It's used to address root causes of migration in places like Guatemala and Mexico, so that you don't have migration accelerating across our borders," Quirk says. "And it's also proven to address some of the drivers of terrorism in places like the Sahel [a region in sub-Saharan Africa]."
Global health programs and disaster assistance lose funding
In May, a poll by the Pew Research Center showed a majority of Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — support foreign aid for medicine, medical supplies, food and clothing to people in low income countries.
The package that Congress passed includes $500 million in cuts to global health programs and more than a billion in cuts to humanitarian assistance, including emergency disaster aid. The details of which programs would be impacted are not clear.
The White House says in the package it sent to Congress that these cuts "would eliminate programs that are antithetical to American interests and worsen the lives of women and children, like 'family planning' and 'reproductive health,' LGBTQI+ activities and 'equity' programs. This rescission proposal aligns with the Administration's efforts to eliminate wasteful USAID foreign assistance programs. Enacting the rescission would reinstate focus on appropriate health and life spending."
Several senators from both sides of the aisle voiced concerns that the package would cut funding to lifesaving maternal and child health programs as well as efforts to tackle diseases like malaria, polio and tuberculosis.
At a hearing held by the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 25, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, insisted that lifesaving humanitarian assistance would be allowed to continue but did not provide details on how those programs would be protected from being cut under the rescission package.
But Bos says there is no mandate that would require the administration to ensure that lifesaving programs continue.
"I think they've been willing to go against congressional directives for the last six months, so we don't really have a lot of confidence or real assurances that lifesaving programs will be maintained as this package gets implemented. And that's our biggest concern," she said.
Funding for programs that support democracy is cut
The rescission package also cuts significant funding for efforts to strengthen democracy and tackle corruption in former Soviet republics and Latin American countries. These programs included support for local watchdogs for free and fair elections, corruption and human rights abuses, and also support for independent journalists.
The White House says those funds "support programs that undermine American values, interfere with the sovereignty of other countries, or bankroll corrupt leaders' evasion of their responsibilities to their citizens."
But in countries such as Hungary and Serbia, autocratic-leaning politicians have used the Trump administration's rhetoric against USAID and its democracy-supporting programs to go after civil society groups in their own countries.
In Serbia, for example, authorities cited Elon Musk's comments referring to USAID as a "criminal organization." Armed police raided the offices of groups that had received funding from USAID to document corruption and human rights abuses within Serbia.
"The U.S. used to be the backstop globally for human rights and support for democracy. And so who's doing that now? It's a huge loss," says Jonathan Katz, former USAID deputy assistant administrator and currently a fellow with the Brookings Institution. "It's unconscionable for the United States and the American president not to be supporting this when there's been such strong support for democracy among Republicans and Democrats for decades."
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