New Estimates of the USAID Cuts

Updated estimates of USAID award cancellations are available here.

Last week we presented some estimates of the extent and distribution of cuts to USAID assistance carried out under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. These were based on a (now-dated) list of cancelled programs leaked to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and published by Punchbowl. Since then, a list of active USAID projects has also been leaked. We don’t know the provenance, and it may be inaccurate, incomplete, and/or out of date. Please read everything that follows with that major caveat. With that in mind, our low-end estimate from last week of a 34 percent cut remains, with a range from 24 to 53 percent. For some sectors, it appears at least possible that all active awards have been cancelled.

Reconciling the lists of what’s been cut and what’s been kept

We’ll compare three sets of numbers in this post:

1. The leaked list of cancelled awards that we used for our earlier estimate, which included 5,724 entries.
2. The new leaked list of retained awards. It includes 373 that were earlier terminated, reflecting widespread reporting of awards termination reversals after the “final” list was agreed. At the same time, it is still a short list: 909 retained awards. These numbers aren’t too far from what Secretary Rubio suggested on March 10th: that 5,200 awards (his estimate: 83 percent of the total), were cancelled while “approximately 1,000,” (his estimate: 18 percent), were retained.
3. As a denominator, we’ll match these lists to all USAID awards on foreignassistance.gov. As a measure of size, we can either use “all obligations to date” under a given award, or our preferred alternative, “obligations during FY 2024 and FY 2025,” so that we focus on what these cuts imply for USAID’s recent work.

In principle, it should be true that:

Cancelled awards + Retained awards = All awards

In practice, this doesn’t quite hold. There are USAID awards that were active quite recently which have not been explicitly canceled or retained. If we look at total obligations to date we get something like:

$46.1 billion cancelled + $67.8 billion retained = $113.9 billion

That total is considerably shy of our (earlier) estimate of $149 billion of obligations to date under all USAID awards that were active in FY2024. The gap will be due in part to some awards active in FY2024 expiring prior to the start of the new administration, and few if any new awards being issued to replace them. But this discrepancy may also imply the leaked lists are incomplete. Additionally, our list may exclude a number of retained contracts related to services provided to USAID staff and missions (something to note with regard to our estimation of cuts to direct administrative costs below).

There is also the reverse problem: there are awards on the canceled list and the retained list that don’t appear anywhere on foreignassistance.gov. This could be because they were created very recently, or they never made any obligations so never got recorded on foreignassistance.gov, or record keeping is just incomplete.

These awards not listed on foreignassistance.gov account for about $17 billion in total obligations to date. We exclude these awards from the analysis below. First, because we don’t know when these awards were active, so can’t isolate how much of their activity happened during, say, FY24 or FY25. Second, because they don’t match to anything in foreignassistance.gov, we don’t have sector classifications for them.

Measuring the size of the cuts

The sum of obligations of the canceled and retained awards mentioned above, $114 billion, is a somewhat meaningless number: it doesn’t reflect USAID spending in any given period. It captures total obligations to date under thousands of different awards, some which are fairly new, some which have been active for several years. For comparison, USAID’s total new obligations through FY24 and so far in FY25 add up to about $44 billion.

Cancelled and retained awards could look considerably different in terms of the percentage of obligations already outlayed (spent). As we reported in our earlier blog, for the five largest cancelled contracts by obligation value, more than three quarters of the obligated amounts have already been outlayed. That means the obligation-to-date figure is not necessarily a good measure of the impact of cancelled contracts on ongoing USAID activities.

As we did in our earlier blog, we judge the impact of proposed cuts on the basis of how much of USAID’s obligations these awards accounted for in recent years to avoid comparing contracts that have been running for five years to others that have been running for only a few months. USAID’s total obligation activity in FY24 and (available data for) FY25 gives us a meaningful denominator against which to judge the current importance of the awards being cancelled or preserved. (Note in our previous exercise we used FY24 as our baseline, in this update we use FY24 and FY25 obligations, although data for FY25 obligations in foreignassistance.org is clearly incomplete.)

Valuing awards by their FY24–25 obligations only, we present three estimates of the scale of the cuts depending on what we assume about the discrepancies between the different lists.

• If we assume optimistically that the canceled list of awards is complete, the retained list is incomplete, and that awards reported in foreignassistance.gov that were not explicitly canceled or retained are active and retained, we estimate total cuts of about 24 percent relative to all USAID obligations in FY24–25.
• If instead we take a pessimistic stance and assume that the retained list of awards is complete, the canceled list is incomplete, and that awards reported in foreignassistance.gov that were not explicitly canceled or retained were active but canceled, we estimate total cuts of about 53 percent.
• Finally, our preferred approach is to assume both the cancelled and retained lists are complete, and that awards from foreignassistance.gov that aren’t listed are missing because they were completed prior to the contract cancellation. This yields an estimate of total cuts of 34 percent.

The estimates suggest that potentially all awards were terminated in sectors including private sector competitiveness, higher education, and political competition and consensus building. Other sectors were cut by potentially 90 percent or above, including infrastructure, good governance, basic education, family planning, civil society, conflict mitigation, and trade and investment. The estimates suggest comparatively light cuts in protection, assistance and solutions (which includes humanitarian relief); macroeconomic foundations for growth; and HIV/AIDS. Note again, however, the imperfect match between foreignassistance.gov data and our canceled and retained awards lists. These numbers remain approximate estimates. Note again we believe our direct administration numbers are likely wrong because we do not have full data on contracts related to services for USAID staff and offices.

This picture of a dramatically reduced sectoral scope of US assistance operations matches one draft Administration proposal for the agency’s functions under State, which involves just four offices: the first centered on acquisitions and assistance; the second centered on humanitarian and food assistance; the third targeting global disaster response; and the fourth focused on global health emergencies.

That said, at some point Secretary Rubio and the Administration will have to face the issue that Congress just passed a continuing resolution that funds foreign assistance at existing levels through the 2025 fiscal year, with numerous sectoral budget lines, and they also have to get Congress to agree to dismantle USAID. There is still considerable scope for reversal.

Even without a reversal, an immediate challenge will be to rebuild the capacity to oversee and finance existing awards while developing new project proposals and issuing new awards. While there is some evidence of payments recommencing for at least some USAID awardees since March 10th, likely related to a court order, the list of active USAID solicitations for contractors remains extremely short (it is a similar story with grant opportunities). This at a time when the number of people working for the agency is at a small fraction of its level in January.

Download the data and code for this analysis.