This story originally appeared on Gist and is part of the Climate desk Cooperation.
As part of a vast endeavor to bypass congress and on the one hand cut government spending, Donald Trump’s management has all but closed operations at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, the independent federal body that delivers humanitarian assistance and economic development funding around the world . On his first day in the office, President Trump issued an executive order pausing all USAID funding, and the agency later released a halt work order to almost all financial recipients, from soup kitchens in Sudan to the global humanitarian group Mercy Corps.
Since then, Elon Musk’s new department of government performance has closed the agency’s website, locked employees from their email accounts and closed the agency’s Washington office.
“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk posted on X on Sunday. “Time for it to die.” (The agency is codified in federal law, and court challenges will probably argue that Musk’s actions are themselves illegal.)
While criticism of Trump’s sudden demolition of USAID has largely focused on global public health projects, which have long enjoyed bipartisan support, the effort also threatens billions of dollars to combat climate change. USAID climate funding helps low income countries build renewable energy and adapt to worsening natural disasters, as well as maintaining carbon sins and sensitive ecosystems. While Joe Biden’s management, USAID has accelerated its climate-focus efforts as part of ambitious new initiative That is supposed to last through the end of the decade. That effort now seems to be a sudden end while USAID -entrepreneurs around the world are preparing to Leave critical projects and remove staff.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took over USAID as acting director, said that Musk’s sudden stop is “not about removing foreign aid.” But even though USAID eventually resume operations to provide emergency-humanist assistance as hunger support and HIV prevention, the agency will still likely stop its entire climate work under the Trump administration. The result would be a blow for the landmark Parisian climate agreement as significant as Trump’s formal withdrawal from the United States from the International Covenant. Gossiping billions of dollars that the congress has already committed to the fight against global warming, the United States is ready to prevent climate progression much more than its own boundaries.
“This takes a torch to development programs that the American people paid,” said Gillian Caldwell, who served as USAID’s chief climate officer under former President Biden. “Many commitments according to the Paris Agreement are financial, and that is very perishable.”
The United States spends less than 1 percent of its federal budget on foreign aid, but that still makes the country the largest donor of aid in the world. USAID distributes between $ 40 billion and $ 60 billion a year – nearly a quarter of all global humanitarian aid. While in recent years the largest shares of this aid have gone to Ukraine, Israel and Afghanistan, the agency also distributes billions of dollars to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where it mainly helps promote food security, health and health, and educational efforts.
