The State Department is taking over programs previously run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a move officials say will restructure U.S. foreign assistance and reorient it toward national interests, as a new study finds the cuts could contribute to millions of deaths by 2030.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in a post on Substack on Tuesday that USAID — which oversaw foreign aid, disaster relief and international development programs — would no longer be providing assistance to other countries.
“As of July 1st, USAID will officially cease to implement foreign assistance,” Rubio wrote. “Foreign assistance programs that align with administration policies — and which advance American interests — will be administered by the State Department, where they will be delivered with more accountability, strategy, and efficiency.”
A senior official at the State Department, who briefed reporters on Tuesday, said the “U.S. foreign assistance policy” would aim to be “linked up diplomatically” with the foreign policy agenda of the Trump administration and U.S. partners.
“Once we get through this transition and the programs are over here, I think the next few months are going to help indicate where we think our vision of the future is,” the official said. “We do not foresee a gap operationally.”
Elon Musk listens as President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Feb. 11, 2025.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
The foreign aid agency was among the first government agencies the Department of Government Efficiency, formerly run by Elon Musk, slashed in its effort to scale back the size of the federal government.
The Trump administration sought to dismantle USAID, terminating thousands of contracts and placing workers on leave.
In a statement in February, the State Department said “significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States.”
In recorded farewell remarks shared privately with USAID staff on Monday, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama criticized the decision to gut the agency.
Obama calling the dismantling of USAID a tragedy and a “colossal mistake,” according to The Associated Press, which reviewed portions of the video. Bush focused on PEPFAR — the global health initiative launched under his administration to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic — which is credited for saving 25 million lives, the AP reported.
Humanitarian aid organizations said they have been witnessing the effects of USAID cuts, with programs shutting down that helped communities experiencing poverty and conflict.
“It’s an extremely sad day,” Bob Kitchen, vice president of emergency and humanitarian action with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), told ABC News. “I had the pleasure of working with hundreds of committed USAID staff around the world over the last couple of decades. They’ve done amazing work and funded amazing projects, and it’s sad to see like that’ll come predominantly to an end.”
Kitchen said IRC has lost several of its grants and that 40% of its funding came from USAID. As a result, he said several IRC programs are now closed or will soon close, including water and sanitation programs, mobile health clinics and school programs.
“What that looks like … is many thousands of girls who no longer can go to any form of school [In Afghanistan] as a result of the closure of this program,” Kitchen said. “The one that really hits me is we have somehow found ways to keep thousands of girls going to school, informal schools, underground schools. That has all stopped.”
USAID’s closure comes amid a study published in The Lancet on Monday that found cuts to USAID could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.
The USAID logo is seen on a machine that processes recycled plastic into construction blocks at the Pasig Eco Hub, a project impacted by the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid, March 10, 2025 in Pasig, Metro Manila, Philippines.
Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Using models, the authors estimated the impact of USAID funding on deaths from 2001 to 2021. The team then used models to estimate effects up to five years from now.
The study found that more than 91 million deaths were prevented by USAID funding to low-income and middle-income countries over the 21-year study period, including a 65% reduction in mortality from HIV/AIDS and a 51% reduction from malaria.
Forecasting models not only predicted millions of additional deaths due to the steep cuts, but also that one-third of those deaths are projected to occur in children younger than age 5.
The State Department official said such studies “misapprehend” the administration’s new vision for foreign assistance and that reported life-and-death impacts “is not what we’re hearing on the ground.”
“You can go back and relitigate all these little decisions. That’s not our focus,” the official said. “That’s not the secretary’s focus. We are excited about what sort of the ‘America First’ foreign assistance agenda is going to look like, and how much impact we can have moving forward.”
The official said the new strategy would, for example, expect partners to take on more prevention work for patients with HIV infections and reduce their reliance on U.S.-funded programs for preventive health care.
They noted that up to 90% of direct beneficiaries are receiving their medication under PEPFAR to date. There will be more investment in ending mother-to-child HIV transmission, the official said.
“The administration has a target of ending mother-child transmission by the time that President Trump leaves office, and we think that we can meet that and we’re going to invest more in that particular space,” the official said.
