The Trump administration has dialed back its sweeping, sudden freeze on international aid, issuing a new order stipulating that operations providing lifesaving medical care and serving other humanitarian purposes can continue.
But the precise meaning of the new directive is not yet clear. As of Wednesday morning, many advocates and experts were waiting for State Department officials to specify what remains subject to the freeze and what doesn’t.
The new order is a reaction to the confusion and chaos that has prevailed for days, in Washington and around the world, following a Friday memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that ordered all foreign aid operations to “stop work” for 90 days. During that period, the Friday order said, the State Department would conduct a review to make sure the services and supports in existing foreign aid programs are consistent with President Donald Trump’s priorities.
In response to the Friday order, some U.S.-funded organizations abroad had shut down operations, as HuffPost and other outlets reported. These included organizations providing HIV treatment through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, which has enjoyed bipartisan support and is believed to have saved more than 25 million lives since its establishment some two decades ago.
New administrations typically redirect foreign assistance, and Trump, in particular, had signaled his determination to pull the U.S. back from international organizations and cooperation. His conservative allies made clear they also wanted big changes, with a particular focus on how ― in their view ― foreign assistance programs were advancing a left-wing agenda on issues such as climate change and abortion.
But the full stoppage ― unexpected and apparently unprecedented ― threatened to disrupt medical care and nutritional support in countries around the globe in ways that would be increasingly difficult to restart the longer the delay persisted.
The new memo, which also came from Rubio and which HuffPost obtained, explicitly exempts “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance.”
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The revision keeps the freeze in place for “abortions, family planning conferences … gender” or diversity programs, “transgender surgeries, or other nonlife saving assistance.”
The brief memo does not mention PEPFAR specifically. And even a broad reading would appear to leave out whole swaths of ongoing international aid programs designed, for example, to promote economic development or women’s rights.