About a year ago, the Trump administration abruptly withdrew funding from an Australian project feeding and educating tens of thousands of schoolchildren in Timor-Leste.
Almost half the children under five in the country – which has a population of about 1.4 million, with about 157,000 under five – are stunted due to malnutrition.
A year later, the Care Australia project known as Hatutan is operating, but at a fraction of that level.
Globally, dozens of people – most of them children – are dying needlessly every hour since the US gutted its foreign aid program, ripping tens of billions of dollars out and changing the way it is delivered.
In Australia’s region, the loss of critical funding for health, nutrition, education and climate change is having an ongoing effect.
Bianca Collier, Care Australia’s director of international programs and operations, says education, nutrition, health and disaster risk reduction programs in the Pacific are stopped with “devastating” consequences.
“So pretty much everything you could imagine that we were doing,” she says.
Collier says not only is there a moral imperative to look after our neighbours, there are also economic incentives to help them do well as well as broader global concerns such as climate change, vaccination schedules to stop diseases spreading and sturdy health systems to prevent pandemics.
“And we had been seeing increasing investment from the US in the region to counter China, and to build those diplomatic relationships and ties,” she says.
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Care Australia’s Hatutan project received about US$26m over five years to feed about 70,000 children in Timor-Leste.
When that funding was pulled last year, staff who themselves did not have a lot of resources had to be let go.
“It was just, OK, the funding has ended today and you need to stop,” Collier says.
“It’s also impacted our reputation in the country because if you’re in a community, normally you would give them a longer lead time to say we’re going to be stopping this program in a few months.
“But we were like … we’ve got no money from tomorrow. So the urgency of it was pretty terrifying.”
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade stepped in to help the Hatutan project, so they were able to rehire some staff and now can afford to help 12,000 children.
At Care International, 48 US-funded programs across 31 countries, helping about 18.4 million people, were closed.
The US Agency for International Development was the world’s biggest provider of foreign aid.
But on 20 January 2025, the newly re-elected president Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping USAID funding for foreign aid programs pending a 90-day review.
That prompted weeks of chaos and confusion with waivers, legal challenges and the chaotic takeover of the agency by Doge staff. On 3 February, Trump’s then head of Doge, Elon Musk, boasted that he had put USAID “through the woodchipper”.
By March, the administration announced that 83% of USAID’s programs had been cancelled and the rest of it would be absorbed into the state department.
Organisations had to show their work was in America’s interest – seemingly ignoring the global implications of climate change and pandemics, for example.
Health, reproductive health, gender rights, LGBTQ+ rights and climate change programs were particularly targeted.
Meanwhile, other countries are spending less as they redirect funds to defence.
And Australia’s neighbourhood continues to deal with the ripple effect of the cuts.
In the Indo-Pacific region about $400m was torn out of programs in the first six months, thousands of staff were let go and about 20 country offices had to be closed.
Many of them are wary of speaking out in case of retribution from the US.
The Australian Council for International Development (Acfid) is Australia’s peak body for non-government organisations in international development.
Its chief executive officer, Matthew Maury, says freezing global aid suddenly has “continued to ripple and have impacts”.
“The fact that the tap was turned off immediately, the agreements were frozen, programs were stopped,” he says. “To have it just all of a sudden, with no warning, completely frozen and stopped, it was somewhat unprecedented.
“And I think the image that stuck in so many of our minds … was Elon Musk up on a stage with a chainsaw, talking about how they were cutting programs. That imagery was a pretty good illustration of the lack of thinking and the crudeness of how that was done.”
At the six-month mark, a study published in the Lancet predicted more than 14 million people could die by 2030 because of the cuts. The authors said of the “staggering number of avoidable deaths” that the shock to poorer countries would “be similar in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict”.
Real-time modelling by a team run by the Boston University mathematician and health economist Associate Prof Brooke Nichols shows the withdrawal of USAID funding has caused almost 250,000 adult deaths and more than 500,000 child deaths.
Her metrics show about 88 people are dying every hour from malaria, pneumonia, HIV, malnutrition and more.
Maury says Australia didn’t follow other countries and make cuts to foreign aid, but Acfid is still calling on the government to do more.
It is calling for 1% of the budget to be invested in foreign aid, up from the 0.65% now spent on development assistance.
Acfid also wants an expansion of high-performing NGO programs, more for the Humanitarian Emergency Fund, and bigger investment in climate action, education funding, social inclusion funding and health funding across the Asia Pacific.
Asked recently about foreign aid in the wake of the USAID cuts, Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said the reduction in funding was “having consequences” and that development assistance was “an investment in stability, peace, it’s an investment in our security” and “an investment in the people whose region we share”.
While Australia alone cannot deal with all of the consequences of the USAID cuts, the government has “pivoted as much of our aid as possible to fill the most critical gaps where we can”, Wong said.
“So now 75c of every development dollar goes to the Indo-Pacific region,” she said.
