What Are the On-The-Ground Impacts of the Cuts to Foreign Assistance?

Within hours of the new administration’s return-to-office, disorder took over. A foreign aid freeze, a stop-work order, and the dismantling of key foreign aid institutions commenced almost immediately. Gayatri Patel, Senior Fellow with rePROs Fight Back, sits down to talk with us about glimmers of hope for protecting this foreign assistance funding and relevant agencies, as well as how we can prepare for the realistic, long-term impacts of these attacks. 

The assault on foreign assistance funding by the new administration—which includes the blocking of U.S. foreign assistance funding, including for development programs, humanitarian programs, and multilateral assistance—has led to the loss of food services, antiviral medications, and vaccines, among other things. This has resulted in severe harm and death. In addition, the dismantling of institutions, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the loss of funding and support for multiple UN agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), will result in continued, long-term impacts on both U.S. and international programming.

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Jennie: Hey rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So y'all maybe just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. I feel like it's been a little minute since I have done anything about donating. So, just gonna slap a little promo here at the top. If you love the podcast, please feel free to support us. You can write and review us on your favorite podcast platform, but you can also donate to us on our website at reprosfightback.com. And if you get, if you donate, we also have fun giveaways for if you donate. We have these really fun stickers that we had, Liberal Jane design and a fun postcard. And so, for a $25 donation, you will get a full set of stickers plus the postcard. And we also have a really fun bag that I just love y'all. We have this really cute design that is done in, like, a comic book speech bubble that says abortion is a human right, not a dirty word. I really love it and I love the bag. It's, like, really fun and bright pop-y colors. So for a $50 donation, you get the bag and all of the stickers we have. So, if you support us and wanna send us some love, we would really appreciate that. And I guess while I'm talking about our fun swag we have, we have also been considering maybe opening, like getting merch where you could buy these fun designs on different things. So, would that be something y'all be interested in? Like, would you want us to get a little merch store where you could get some of these fun designs on a mug or a sticker? Or I don't know, we...let us know if you're interested. If you also, if you have things you would like, like did you want a mug, do you want a water bottle? What would you be interested in? So, just send us a note. I'd love to know one, if you would be interested in buying merch, but two, if there are things that you would like to see designs on, just let us know. And with that, I, I actually think I'm gonna keep the intro a little short this week. I have some fun things happening, but I'm not quite ready to tell y'all yet. You'll find out I think next week, but until then, it makes it a little hard for me to talk about the things that are happening. So, instead of teasing y'all, I'm just gonna go cut straight to this week's episode. I'm very excited about it. We have our wonderful senior fellow Gayatri Patel to talk about what is happening around foreign assistance right now, particularly in humanitarian settings. It's been a while since we talked about what was going on with USAID, so it felt like a really important time to catch everybody up on what is happening. So with that, let's go to my interview with Gayatri.

Jennie: Hi Gayatri. Thank you so much for being here today.

Gayatri: Hey, Jennie, it's so great to be back.

Jennie: I'm always excited to have you on. But before we jump into the conversation, do you wanna take a minute and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Gayatri: Sure. My name is Gayatri Patel, she/her pronouns. I am a professional in the global development, gender equality, SRHR world. And I have been a fellow with the rePROs Fight Back work for over a year now. So, really excited to be here.

Jennie: So excited to have you and it, we've now been under the new administration for a couple months and there's been so much happening around foreign assistance. I thought it was like a good time to, like, check back in and talk about: where are we at? Like, what is happening right now?

Gayatri: I mean, it changes every day, right?

Jennie: No small question, right?

Gayatri: So, it feels like it changes every day, and it gets worse and worse for the development in humanitarian aid sectors. But I think overall we have blocking of US foreign assistance funding, including for development programs, humanitarian programs, multilateral assistance, et cetera. We have the dismantling of institutions, primarily USAID, the US Agency for International Development. We have, you know, some glimmers of hope in terms of some of these decisions are still pending in the court system, but I think we're, where we are right now is we really need to reckon with, you know: what are the long-term impacts of just the, the current upheaval that we're dealing with? And what does it mean for US development assistance overall for the partners that we work [with] in the field and just the, the sector given, you know, how, what an outsized role the US government plays in development and humanitarian aid?

Jennie: Yeah, like, one of the things I really just think about is like the breach of trust, not only between, like, the implementers on the ground doing the work, but then the communities they are serving who that or, like, had services stopped.

Gayatri: Absolutely. I mean it's I think the most horrific short term...or not short term, but the immediate impact of these funding cuts is literally people dying. Like, people literally losing access to their, to food services, to antiretroviral medication, to vaccines, to, you know, things that keep them alive and healthy and safe are, are being pulled back with zero notice. And so, there was no ability to plan ahead for something like this that has had catastrophic impact on communities and on the organizations that have relied and the local organizations that have relied on US foreign assistance. You know, a lot of them are just imploding at this point. And so, that also has kind of a longer term impact on the community and the services that they were receiving. So yeah, that loss of trust is deep and kind of a feeling of betrayal because just how it was rolled out.

Jennie: Yeah, I think this is one of those things that...people who don't work in these sectors maybe don't understand some of it in a way where they think: well, we can get it restarted and, like, everything will be fine. And, like, we've talked about around like the global gag rule, people think it's like a light switch, like, oh, it's in place. Oh, it's not in place. And, like, all the services resume and like, everything is restarted and everything's fine, but this is, like, infrastructure destruction that takes a long time to rebuild. Like, people go find new jobs and you know, it just doesn't restart again, assuming money starts reflowing.

Gayatri: Yeah, I mean that's an excellent point with, with a lot of the local partners folding right now under pressure and budget constraints, it's not gonna be easy to, to just open their doors again. They have to, they're losing personnel, they're losing facilities and it's, it's just so needless, right? Like they, we have, we have medications sitting in warehouses rotting because we have—we, meaning the US government—has canceled the contracts for their delivery. We have food aid sitting in docks rotting because we don't have the infrastructure to get it to the last mile. So, it's just such a waste and it's so ironic given that the supposed impetus for all of this is to scale back on government waste and inefficiencies. So, it really doesn't make sense at the end of the day.

Jennie: So, I think one of the really important parts and why it's so great to have you on, is to talk about humanitarian and that the way that we are seeing this play out in the humanitarian space.

Gayatri: In the humanitarian space, it's really kind of a double whammy. I mean, we have the loss of funding for USAID implemented humanitarian programs, including those that are implemented through development contractors or international NGOs. Those are the ones that are really well developed, really, you know, well structured, in place in the countries that really need it. All of that is getting pulled back due to the funding cuts. But we're also seeing a, the, the loss of funding and support for UN agencies who are also doing a lot of the kind of middle management of humanitarian assistance. So, you know, World Food Program, UNHCR, UNFPA, all of these UN agencies play a role in the humanitarian system. And the loss of US government funding to those institutions is really difficult. I mean, for example, I was just reading a UNFPA report that in Afghanistan, where the US government sustains 40% of the humanitarian operations, that loss is devastating to, particularly to women and girls in Afghanistan who are already dealing with a number of limitations on their rights, limitations on their mobility and, and ability to access services. Now, the, you know, one of the last lifelines they had is female health workers that were funded by UNFPA who can get into some of the rural areas or provide the gender responsive support health services that Afghan women and girls need. They're no longer funded through the loss of US government funding. And so, that's gonna have massive impacts on women's health, on maternal mortality, on, on children, et cetera. Similarly, in Yemen, I mean there are nearly 1 million women who are losing access to reproductive health services. In Ethiopia. There are nearly 200,000 people, including a number of refugees who are losing access to SRHR and GBV services. And these are countries, I mean, Yemen is actively in the middle of a conflict and humanitarian crisis right now, and Ethiopia is still recovering from, from conflict for a number of years. And so, the humanitarian needs are deep and the loss of really critical funding through the US government is just gonna have a catastrophic impact on those communities.

Jennie: Yeah, those UNFPA numbers were shocking. I think it's really hard for people to imagine the scale of devastation that is being caused by the loss of these programs. Like I said, UNFPA has to have some really great numbers they put out, we'll make sure to include that in the show notes. There was that great piece by Nick Kristof that was trying to outline, like, what the loss of the assistance and, like, possible lives lost and, again, the scale was... unreal.

Gayatri: Absolutely. And this is not verified, but I I was reading a resource earlier today where it, it was something like a hundred people a day are dying because of the loss of food aid, which is just unimaginably cruel, but it's just, it goes against our, our values as a country, but also goes against logic and reason. Like how, how is it that we're, we've invested so much time and energy and infrastructure into providing food aid and we're just stopping it on, on a whim and letting people die. It's quite devastating.

Jennie: And if that part doesn't move you, and it should be more than enough, a lot of that food aid is coming from US farmers. It is coming from-

Gayatri: Exactly.

Jennie: The high energy peanut stuff. It's coming from US companies. It's money in our economy that is being lost. Just important in multiple ways.

Gayatri: And it really goes to show how foreign assistance has always been a low hanging fruit for fiscal conservatives who, who are like the, you know: why are we spending all of this money overseas? We have needs at home. Foreign aid is less than 1% of the US government budget. And a big portion of that actually as you said, supports US businesses and US agriculture and farmers. So it, it, you know, we're kind of, we're kind of what's the term? We're, we're...

Jennie: Shooting ourselves in our own foot.

Gayatri: Yes, there you go. I was gonna say, you know, cutting off our nose despite our face, but- Jennie: There we go,

Gayatri: Shooting ourselves in the foot. It works too. It doesn't, it doesn't line up.

Jennie: And it's like one of those things that has been immovable where you have the public overwhelmingly saying that they think we spend too much on foreign assistance. They think it's 25% of the budget, and like, that number has been that number since I started working in this field.

Gayatri: I know.

Jennie: And, and then they're like, it should only be 10%. And like you said-

Gayatri: Okay, we'll take it!

Jennie: It's less than 1%. Like, great, could you imagine the things we can do with 10%?

Gayatri: Absolutely. And the funding cuts are huge. It’s a massive problem, massive setback. I think what we haven't been talking about enough is the setbacks in terms of policy. There's a whole cadre of development professionals who have worked for decades to integrate gender into development and humanitarian policy. And really, based on evidence, based on understanding how global development works. It really does require having a gender lens to make sure that we're being as effective and as efficient and as inclusive as possible. And what we're seeing now is not just a claw back of funding, but also just a really concerted effort to pull back rights, to pull away from even terminology related to gender, to anything that smacks of inclusion. For some reason that's a, that's a bad word, but it's almost a tenet of how good development has to happen—we have to be inclusive, we have to look at those who are most likely to be left behind. And so, I think what I would love to see more emphasis on is just the idea that we don't need to reinvent this wheel. We don't need to scale back on gender and then put it back in 10 years later when, when we have a friendlier administration. If the idea is to have efficient and effective development and humanitarian assistance programs, we need to be doing that now. We need to be accounting for all sectors of society.

Jennie: Yeah. That is something that has absolutely been on my mind as thinking through, like, you're hearing all of these conversations about well, great, we can, we can build something better. And all I can think about is that "better" is going to mean we're building something less without anything controversial in it. And all of the things that we talk about—gender repro, all of that—is gonna be left on the cutting room floor and like nobody is going to be standing up for us in the same way that we're trying to stand up for all of making sure that we keep global foreign assistance around. I really do worry about that. And-

Gayatri: Yeah.

Jennie: You know, how that is gonna set back gender and sexual and reproductive health for decades to come. We, you know, there was that, again, losing track of time and when things happen, but I think it was last year there was like a UN women report that if we stay on the same track we are right now, we won't get gender equality for, what was it, 300 years?

Gayatri: Mm-hmm.

Jennie: Like, that is already devastating. And that was before we had all of these cuts. Like I can't imagine what this is going to do to that.

Gayatri: Yeah. I mean, pre-COVID it was 237 years-

Jennie: Yeah.

Gayatri: -to achieve gender equality. Post-COVID['s height], and we all know, and we've all talked about how much of a setback COVID itself was on gender equality, but to add the funding cuts to that, the destructive factor here, it's more than two generations at this point. Three generations I guess, four maybe depending on how you're counting it, which is…I mean, we could, we could get philosophical here, but women and girls and all others have been waiting so long. We've been waiting since the beginning of time, honestly to have our rights. And so, to have a powerful country and a powerful government like the United States stand up and say, "your rights are not actually your rights," is a blow. Yeah, and I think we do have to grapple with that and we do have to talk about it and name it and not get bogged down in the technicalities of just the funding. It's this, these, as we're talking about the funding, all of this stuff with the, with the actual policy and kind of lens of gender in a more expansive definition and inclusion and diversity is all kind of backsliding.

Jennie: And I think this is one of those areas where those of us who work in global sexual and reproductive health are more familiar with having to have that debate, right? We've had years where they're like, okay, well, we'll keep global gag rule, but give you more money. And it's like more gagged money is not helpful. We need people to be able to access the care they need. So, being able to weigh those two things and know that if you are restricting the programs and who is getting access to those programs or cutting back on gender more money isn't going to make as much progress as if you have good policies behind that money.

Gayatri: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking back on an example we used back when we were advocating a lot on women's economic empowerment. This was during the first Trump administration. And there was so much emphasis from, from the administration on like pure women's economic empowerment issues like financial inclusion and banking and so forth. And us from the advocacy community are like, yes, we do need that, but we also need to look at women and girls and people of other genders in a broader sense. We know that lack of access to contraceptives has a direct impact on women's ability to earn and that has a direct impact on their daughter's ability to go to school and therefore their ability to earn later. So, we have to keep connecting those dots and we, I feel like we have made progress on that, right? Even with the first Trump administration, we had made progress in terms of, like, linking those two issues as, you know, something that we have to think about. And we made progress on instituting the policies at USAID to ask those questions, like: what are the broader issues that we need to be accounting for if we want economic empowerment? I feel, like, with, with so many of these policy changes that we've had just in the past two, three months, we have clawed that back to the dark ages in a lot of ways. And so my point is, even the programs that we know that the Trump administration purportedly supports, those are not gonna be as effective if we're not taking into account some of these things that they don't support. That's gonna set us back.

Jennie: Yeah. It makes me think back to, like, all of these, like, conversations we had around gender and, like, making sure we're talking about gender-based violence that's inclusive and not just focusing on women and girls, but that it's more than that. And, like, now we're just at the ba we're like so far back from that, it's like, why we need to talk about women, girls at all and, like, why we need to invest in women and girls. Like, we're not even to the point where we can have that broader conversation because they're just trying to wipe out all of it.

Gayatri: Yeah.

Jennie: [Sighs] Sorry, y'all, we're kind of a bummer today.

Gayatri: Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah. It's a tough time and I, I don't know how we bounce back. I wanna, like, inject some hope here and I, I don't know how we, how we build back, but I think at this moment we absolutely need to continue pushing back. And I feel like there's, there's so much overwhelm and there's so much to react to and there's so much here that could splinter us, us meaning like the gender and SRHR community, that is the opposite of what we need to do right now. Right now we need to be linking arms and being louder than ever because there's so much at risk. And so, it's hard, it's hard to cut through all of the noise and overwhelm of the moment that we're in, but there's so much at stake.

Jennie: Yeah. We need to be loud. We need to encourage our congressional champions to be loud and, and to, you know, fight back for...they created USAID, like, they have a real say in this and they need to fight back to ensure that these programs continue to exist in the way that Congress wanted them to exist. Exactly. Like there are some people who are doing a really good job standing up, but I feel like there's- they need to be louder.

Gayatri: Yeah. I mean I'm all for quiet conversations and inside baseball where it's gonna be effective. I mean, ask me in like a month or so, but right now, I don't, I don't feel like that is the most effective way. I feel like we do have to, we have to be loud, we have to have our champions, as you said, have our champions be loud. They can't rely on these quiet conversations with their colleagues across the aisle. People have dug into their positions. And so, to the extent that our champions have a voice, have positions of power in the committees that they sit on, have you know, have a platform. They too should be linking arms and really calling out what matters.

Jennie: Okay, so we talked about, you know, being loud, but what else can our audience do? Like what can we do to fight back to ensure that, one, we keep having foreign assistance, but two, that we are making sure that we are fighting for policies around gender and that we are fighting for things around sexual and reproductive health and they don't get left behind.

Gayatri: I mean...

Jennie: Gayatri, solve all the problems. [chuckles]

Gayatri: I think the most empowering thing I feel like I've done in this moment is calling my members of Congress and amping them up. Like, I have fantastic members of Congress. I live in Maryland. They're very vocal on foreign policy issues, but they were not talking enough about the impact of funding cuts on actual people and communities and the longer term impacts on women and girls and on gender equality as a whole. And so, reaching out to my members of Congress and making sure that they had those talking points, that they knew that this is something that's important, you know, to us as a community, but also, you know, to our state and locality. I think it made me feel a little better. I don't know if it makes a difference in the long run, but I think it does. I think we are a very powerful block of advocates and the more we push as constituents, as well as advocates, I think we just gotta keep banging, banging on that door. But I also, you know, and maybe this is...no, I don't think this is defeatist. I think this is a tactical analysis of the moment that we're in, which is that we really have to reckon with the idea that maybe foreign assistance is not the answer to what we're trying to achieve in the world. And maybe this is that inflection point that where we need to question should us as, as citizens, as, as people be supporting a local civil society and strengthening their ability to capture local philanthropy and build their own kind of efficiencies and processes so that they're not as reliant on the whims of the US government. And mind you, it's not even just just the US government. We're seeing cuts in the UK in, you know, changes in policy in Germany, Netherlands, et cetera. Like there's, there's so much going on right now that's stacking up against us. We needed an alternative way to kind of shore up the resources and the work that is happening on the ground. And so I think really using this moment to rethink: how do we do this? How do we resource services and aid and expansion of programs from other sources? I, I think we need to, to really think that through. And I think philanthropy, other donors—it's a moment for them to step up.

Jennie: Yeah. And I, I would also just add, because it is so rampant is like pushing back on some of that misinformation if you hear it particularly around the, like, so much of our money is going to foreign assistance because I think when people understand how much good it does and how little of our budget it is, they're more supportive.

Gayatri: That would be my second kind of meta call to action, which is, you know, think, think through ways you can support local organizations who are doing this work on the ground.

Jennie: It's important. It saves lives, it makes us safer. It's just...it's important.

Gayatri: And how it actually keeps America safer, right? Like the, you know, the whole, the whole mantle of America first does it, does it, you know, support our, our security, our prosperity, blah blah, blah. Like this is soft power. We should be investing in it. It does keep America safer, it does build bridges and it does establish cooperation and collaboration in ways that military assistance, other forms of international relations cannot. I think that it's so myopic to only look at it in terms of dollar figures.

Jennie: Gayatri, thank you so much for being here. As always, it was a joy to talk to you.

Gayatri: Thanks so much, Jennie. You got me riled up. I'm gonna go call my senator again.

Jennie: Yay!

Gayatri: He's on my speed dial now. [chuckles] But thanks so much Jennie. Thanks for everything that you do and and I hope that next time we talk, we're in a better place and we're celebrating lots of wins rather than lots of threats.

Jennie: Ugh. I hope. Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Gayatri. It was kind of a heavy conversation. Things are feeling a little bleak, but it was a good conversation. And with that, I will see everybody next week. [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprosfightback.com. Thanks all!