Trump ends some USAID contracts across the Middle East

The Trump administration on Monday, April 7, 2025, announced that it has terminated some of the last remaining lifesaving humanitarian programs across the Middle East.

According to a U.S. official and a U.N. official disclosed this to The Associated Press on Monday.

Trump notified the World Food Program and other partners of this decision.

The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government.”

This was at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump administration appointed Lewin to oversee and finish dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.

This was according to letters sent to USAID partners.

About 60 letters canceling contracts were sent over the past week.

A USAID official disclosed that the letters included request for major projects with the World Food Program, the world’s largest provider of food aid.

An official with the United Nations in the Middle East said the World Food Program received termination letters for U.S.-funded programs in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Some of the last remaining U.S. funding for key programs in some countries like:

• Yemen,
• Somalia,
• Afghanistan, and,
• the southern African nation of Zimbabwe also was affected, including for those providing food, water, medical care and shelter for people displaced by war, the USAID official said.

The U.N. official said the groups that would be hit hardest include Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon.

Also affected are programs supporting vulnerable Lebanese people and providing irrigation systems inside Syria.

Syria has been a country emerging from a brutal civil war and struggling with poverty and hunger.

In Yemen, another war-divided country is facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

The terminated aid apparently includes food that has already arrived in distribution centers, the U.N. official said.

Aid officials were just learning of many of the cuts Monday and said they were struggling to understand their scope.

Another of the notices, sent Friday, abruptly pulled U.S. funding for a program with strong support in Congress.

The Congress had sent young Afghan women overseas for schooling amid Taliban prohibitions on women’s education.

This was disclosed by an administrator for that project, which is run by Texas A&M University.

According to that administrator, the young women would now face return to Afghanistan, where their lives would be in danger.

The Administrator was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration had pledged to spare those most urgent, lifesaving programs in its cutting of aid and development programs through the State Department and USAID.

The Republican administration already has canceled thousands of USAID contracts as it dismantles USAID.

It accused the USAID of wastefulness and of advancing liberal causes.

An official of the USAID said the newly terminated contracts were among about 900 surviving programs that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had notified Congress he intended to preserve.

There was no immediate comment from the State Department.

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