USAID Cuts: New Estimates at the Country Level

Last week, we published an estimate of cuts to USAID programs at the sectoral level based on two leaked documents covering cancelled and retained awards. Since then, a new version of the terminated and retained awards list was shared with Congress. Using that updated list, we revise our earlier sectoral estimates using the same approach as previously, and also estimate the scale of cuts to USAID country programs. All of this analysis comes with the same caveats as our last estimate (some repeated below).

The country analysis suggests a number of country programs may have been effectively closed down, particularly in Central and East Asia but also in West Africa, Central Europe, and the Americas. In absolute dollar value, by far the largest cut is to the Ukraine program, followed by Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

For the purposes of the country cuts map (below), we ignore aid that is not targeted to a specific country. In FY24–25, 20 percent of USAID awards by value listed their primary geographic destination as “World” or some other regional grouping, e.g., “Southern Africa Region” or “Latin America and Caribbean Region.”

The map shows three measures: absolute cuts and cuts as a share of a country’s baseline USAID programming. Notes are warranted in each case:

1. Absolute cuts in dollars: As discussed in our earlier post, assigning a dollar value to a specific USAID award is not straightforward: do you care about how much has already been spent under that award? Or how much could theoretically be spent in the future? Here we measure the dollar value of USAID awards in terms of the amount obligated during FY24–25 as reported in foreignassistance.gov. Note not all cancelled awards match data in foreignassistance.gov, so this figure will be an underestimate of the true scale of cuts.
2. Cuts as a percent of country program: Here we assume our new list of cancelled and retained awards combined is complete, and simply calculate the total of cancelled awards as a proportion of cancelled and retained values combined (both as measured by FY24/25 obligations). Note that because of the different approaches to calculating absolute and percentage cuts, these two numbers are not directly comparable. Note also this misses any support provided through regional and global grants.
3. Cuts as a percentage of recipient GNI: This uses the absolute dollar cuts as above and divides them by recipient GNI in current US dollars. Note because of both regional and global spending and because of missing data from foreignassistance.gov this will be an underestimate of the scale of the cuts on this measure.

The largest absolute dollar cut at the country level is $1.4 billion in Ukraine assistance. Ethiopia, the DRC, Colombia, South Africa, Palestine, Bangladesh, Kenya, Afghanistan, and Tanzania all see cuts over $200 million. Liberia sees the largest cut as a percentage of its economy, estimated at 1.6 percent of GNI. Afghanistan, Palestine, and Somalia are all over 1 percentage point. In terms of the existing USAID program, our data suggest in some cases country cuts may be equal to 95 percent or more of the value of programs including the following countries where programs were previously above $100 million: Madagascar, Georgia, El Salvador, Senegal, Nepal, Indonesia, Liberia, and the Philippines.

The updated sectoral analysis suggests that the total cuts may have been in the region of 38 percent of contract values measured by FY24–25 obligations, as compared to our estimate of 34 percent last week. The sectoral results remain broadly similar, with the exception that disaster readiness cuts are reduced by about 20 percentage points (see the table and chart below).

Table 1. Sectoral cuts (in millions $)

Table 2. Country cuts data