A spokesperson for the State Department told me in an email that “as USAID winds down, the State Department is responsibly moving programming onto new mechanisms” with “longer periods of performance and updated award and oversight terms.” The State Department has recently begun signing health-financing agreements with some African governments—including Cameroon and Malawi, as well as five of the nine countries eligible for redirected funding—that will go into effect later this year. But in December, Jeremy Lewin, a senior official in the State Department, announced at a press conference that the administration would allow its contributions to the UN body to be spent only in an initial list of 17 countries, which included none of the seven whose current aid will soon end entirely. Each of the newly canceled awards represents an occasion in which federal workers had previously convinced Trump appointees that the money would help meet the most basic survival needs of people fleeing war, caught in deadly disease outbreaks, or in danger of starving to death, a former senior State Department official, who left the administration in the fall, told me.
Author: Hana Kiros
Published at: 2026-02-22 23:34:35
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