Rubio approves some foreign aid exemptions to Trump's spending halt

Iain Marlow, Bloomberg News on Jan 28, 2025

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio has approved some waivers for emergency food aid and some salaries after President Donald Trump’s executive order to halt and reevaluate all foreign development assistance prompted an outcry among aid groups around the world.

In a statement late Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said Rubio had provided waivers for food assistance as well as “some salaries and administrative expenses, including travel for U.S. direct hire staff conducting ongoing programs.”

The clarification, which reiterated a carve-out for foreign military financing to close security partners Israel and Egypt, comes after Trump’s 90-day pause to American foreign development assistance generated chaos in the global aid industry — where U.S. development funds fuel projects across the world.

“President Trump stated clearly that the United States is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people,” Bruce said in a statement. “The secretary is proud to protect America’s investment with a deliberate and judicious review of how we spend foreign assistance dollars overseas.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development, which falls under the State Department, managed more than $40 billion in U.S. assistance in the 2023 fiscal year and employs thousands of staff overseas, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The State Department statement on Tuesday evening did not provide any details about the fate of billions of dollars of assistance to Ukraine, or foreign military financing to other U.S. partners, such as Taiwan.

Without providing details, however, the statement did name some examples of “egregious funding,” including more than $100 million to the International Medical Corps in Gaza, more than $6 million for an “institutional contract for democracy, rights, and governance” in an unspecified location, and just over $600,000 for technical assistance for family planning in Latin America.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization expressed “deep concern” for the impact the funding pause would have on HIV programs in low-and-middle income countries.

“A funding halt for HIV programs can put people living with HIV at immediate increased risk of illness and death and undermine efforts to prevent transmission in communities and countries,” the global agency said. “Such measures, if prolonged, could lead to rises in new infections and deaths, reversing decades of progress and potentially taking the world back to the 1980s and 1990s when millions died of HIV every year globally,” including in the US.

Last week, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order directing the US to withdraw from the WHO.