A Boston University infectious disease expert calculated more than 570,000 will die from Trump’s foreign aid cuts. Many from Africa....
Read MoreWhat Africa lost under Trump:
at least $5 billion.
What it got in return:
“true chaos.”
A CCIJ analysis details the depth of U.S. aid cuts to Africa. The slashed programs fight famine, shelter refugees, combat diseases. They even promote America’s national pastime, baseball. Now: “True chaos” reigns in the face of deaths and humanitarian crises. The financial toll is likely much larger.
By Peter Aldhous, Trenton Daniel, Carme Sanz-Muñoz, Beloved John and Andrew W. Lehren
November 25, 2025
People protest in front of the U.S. Capitol on February 5, 2025 in Washington, D.C., against the Trump Administration’s decision to virtually shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
At a refugee camp near the South Sudan border, about 100 deaf children were promised special devices to help them hear. But the Trump administration slashed humanitarian assistance and now the hearing aids are not coming. Gone, too, are teachers who could communicate with them in sign language.
At the same time, a massive program to spark trade between the United States and Africa—and thwart growing Chinese influence—lies in tatters.
In Kenya, where U.S. foreign aid had been paying to build wells for providing much-needed fresh water, pipes now lay dormant on the ground.
Even baseball—long a symbol of America’s soft diplomacy—has been slashed.
These are just some of the many programs gutted in Africa since President Donald J. Trump instituted an America First agenda that crippled U.S. foreign assistance around the world.
The Trump administration has not released figures on exactly how much assistance it has eliminated for Africa. To address the question, the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) analyzed Department of Government Efficiency records and mined federal spending data. By conservative methods that focused on promised spending, the Trump administration has halted at least approximately $5 billion in aid to Africa alone—about 90 percent of which would have flowed from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). That includes money the United States promised to spend on specific projects this year and in the coming years.
The Trump administration stopped payments for protective barriers and security cameras for U.S. employees living in Mozambique, which were originally ordered to keep them safe in their homes. It spiked an effort to improve Moroccan prisons. In Nigeria, women in rural villages find that it is harder to get needed medicines to combat AIDS—one of many massive efforts previously backed by the United States to combat infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
In reality, the cuts will run much deeper. CCIJ’s calculations focused on obligated funding—money the government agreed to spend for a project—but not yet sent money to recipients. It excludes what would be spent if programs continued operating like they had in prior years, or if new grants and contracts are awarded.
The administration’s 2026 budget proposal calls for further reductions, slashing more than $3.2 billion from international disaster assistance and almost $2.5 billion from the State Department.
The slashing began on Trump’s first day in office.
After Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, he threw the international humanitarian community into turmoil when he signed an executive order that put a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. The executive order said, “the United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
Four days later, the Trump administration sent stop-work orders to thousands of organizations. The moves halted thousands of projects—worth tens of billions of dollars around the globe. The administration put them under review to see how they aligned with the president’s agenda.
Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency. Its then-leader, billionaire Elon Musk, announced Feb. 2, on his social media platform X, that DOGE had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” The next day, USAID’s headquarters were closed.
Despite these cuts, the U.S. State Department promised to continue “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” including projects in global health.
But on the ground, even life-saving work remains disrupted.
CCIJ analyzed DOGE records and mined federal spending data. By conservative methods that focused on promised spending, the Trump administration has halted at least approximately $5 billion in aid to Africa alone—about 90 percent of which would have flowed from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Left, Employees and supporters protest outside of the USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 2025. USAID employees were instructed via an email to stay out of the agency’s headquarters following a weekend take over and announcement by U.S. billionaire Elon Musk that President Trump had agreed with him to shut the agency down.
Right, An activist holds a sign of Elon Musk as he participates in a Stand Up for Science rally outside the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on March 7, 2025. The rally was called to protest against DOGE and the Trump Administration which proposed funding cuts for federal agencies and medical research institutes.
The crown jewel of U.S. foreign aid—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), established by George W. Bush in 2003 to stop the spread of HIV—is in chaos. Large parts of the program have been canceled. Funding for what remains is uncertain. The decisions to eliminate parts of the program appear to hinge on ideological differences and Trump’s quarrels—notably with South Africa—rather than medical needs.
The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) was about to launch an effort to help African nations administer an injectable drug called lenacapavir, which in clinical trials has had spectacular results in preventing HIV infection among people at high risk. While the project was not terminated, partial funding was released only after months of delay. Mitchell Warren, AVAC’s executive director, said he was forced to lay off a third of his staff. His organization sued the Trump administration in February, challenging the legality of the funding freeze.
Overall, nobody has a definitive picture of what has been lost. By all accounts, it is massive. U.S. foreign aid in 2024 accounted for more than 40 percent of all global humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations.
In its investigation, CCIJ found almost $5 billion in unspent funds. But the full extent of the damage will likely be several times this conservative estimate.
“Removing the U.S. from the system it created will simply lead to its collapse, and I’m not sure there’s been a real reckoning of what the implications of that choice are.”
Kenya: Ground zero for cuts
To better understand the reductions, look at Kenya, which had the most to lose on the African continent.
For decades, the capital Nairobi has served as a hub for humanitarian work across the continent. If a non-governmental charity—an NGO—is doing its work somewhere in Africa, chances are its headquarters received a USAID contract and is based in Nairobi.
The reasons are many: People in Kenya speak English, the country is relatively stable, its transportation infrastructure is comparatively good, it maintains strategic ties to powerful allies, and Kenya is conveniently located for tackling major problems, with neighbors that include Somalia and Sudan, two nations that have seen considerable political turmoil.
Programs axed in Kenya highlight the broad range of assistance that the United States provided for the continent—from massive multi-year contracts awarded to behemoths like Chemonics International to grants for much smaller operations.
The projects ran the gamut from fighting malnutrition to offering psychological support for orphans who narrowly escaped war and famine.
The African nations that have lost the most contracts under Trump
This searchable table tells you—country-by-country—the African nations that have lost U.S. contracts. It shows the number of contracts and the amount that has been cut.
Credit: Peter Aldhous / CCIJ
Data source: USAspending, as of Sept. 30, 2025
The African nations that have lost the most grants under Trump
This searchable table tells you—country-by-country—the African nations that have lost U.S. grants and cooperative agreements. It shows the number of awards and the amount that has been cut.
Credit: Peter Aldhous / CCIJ
Data source: USAspending, as of Sept. 30, 2025
Foreign aid has long faced criticism
Kenya is home to some of the largest refugee camps in the world, including Kakuma in the northwestern part of the country, where some 224,000 refugees live. Set up in 1992, the camp received the “Lost Boys of Sudan” who famously fled war in South Sudan.
Now, refugee settlements long bolstered by U.S. assistance are reporting spikes in infections like scabies, farmers have lost critical harvesting seasons and health facilities are not getting enough water to provide medical services. International aid groups that do not accept government funding such as Doctors Without Borders said they are taking on added work.
“The entire refugee operation is really struggling,” Richard Tsalwa, project coordinator for Finn Church Aid, a Finnish faith-based aid group , said by Zoom from Kakuma. “Lots of new things, new policies and specifically aimed at doing more more, using less.”
Finn Church Aid lost a $2 million project in Kenya. The money went toward teachers’ salaries and classroom supplies. Almost 170 teachers working in Kalobeyei were let go, Tsalwa said. “Very minimal learning and teaching is taking place.”
For about 100 deaf children, halting the project had devastating consequences. At both Kakuma and adjacent Kalobeyei refugee settlement, Finn Church Aid said the cuts meant it lost the money needed to deliver hearing aids for the children. And among the teachers who lost their jobs are those who could communicate with students in sign language.
The humanitarian world has drawn extensive criticism over the years—long before Trump was elected.
Chief among the complaints have been charges of waste, fraud and corruption. Members of the aid sector have largely agreed that reform is necessary, but countered that the sector’s shortcomings did not warrant the Trump administration’s gutting of overseas humanitarian relief.
“Those problems can and should be addressed through significant reform efforts. But that’s not what has happened,” said Jake Johnston, a senior researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and author of a book critical of the aid industry, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti.
“Removing the U.S. from the system it created will simply lead to its collapse, and I’m not sure there’s been a real reckoning of what the implications of that choice are.”
Brooke Nichols, a Boston University infectious disease expert, estimated in October the cuts will lead to more than 570,000 deaths globally. Two thirds would be children. A peer-reviewed study in The Lancet found the number may reach into the millions.
Sudanese women wait for food aid from a USAID aid distribution point near an Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camp in Darfur, Sudan.
At Catholic Relief Services, deep reductions
The faith-based agency Catholic Relief Services, founded by American bishops, lost 40 percent of its funding. Bill O’Keefe, a CRS vice president who has worked there for 38 years, said the impact was acute: About 3,000 employees around the world were let go. The organization restructured. Projects in 41 countries were cancelled.
Eighteen months ago, O’Keefe visited CRS projects in Kenya, in Marsabit and Isiolo. The remote region is something of a moonscape: Rocks, dust and shrub, with a succession of droughts.
On his trip, he spoke to a local woman. He asked about the project’s impact.
“She said, ‘Well, you know in our village, no children died.’ But in the next village, which isn’t part of this program, children died,” O’Keefe recounted. “These folks really are on the edge and I think the services that came with this program were really important to their overall well being, their health.”
The project has been effectively terminated and will not return unless CRS can get money to revive it.
“We’re looking under every single rock we can find,” O’Keefe said. “No donor can step in at that scale and at the breath of the U.S. government.”
CRS was building water wells in northern Kenya. The agency purchased pipes and other supplies—but the cuts led the charity to abandon the project.
“We don’t have the resources to finish the work and so, you know, those pipes are sitting there unused and it’s a waste of tax payer dollars.”
O’Keefe said the program did more than fight poverty—it helped combat the spread of terrorism.
He hopes one day the United States will resume its foreign aid efforts. “It’s good economically,” he said. “It’s good for national security. But as a faith-based organization I think we’re not letting go of the moral responsibility that we as a country have.”
Craig Tucker, head of delegation for Swiss nonprofit Terre des hommes, which works to save the lives of children, said in a Zoom interview that he is seeing the ripple effects beginning to play out in Kenyan refugee settlements. The group had a six-month project for $1.8 million with the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, part of the State Department.
“We’ve been just managing decline, and it’s really tough to see,” Tucker said from his home in Nairobi.
He reported rising malnutrition, girls being married because the family cannot afford to feed the extra mouth, and more early pregnancies. He anticipates that this is just the first wave of effects. He expects a second wave as U.S. funding to U.N. agencies dries up.
“I’ve never had a conversation before with technical people where I say to them, ‘What do we do in a scenario where we have to choose between a case of sexual abuse against a child and a case of you know just physical abuse?’ And that’s really where we’ve ended up,” Tucker said.
Public health and infectious disease experts estimate hundreds of thousands of people will die because of the loss in foreign aid.
“It’s really costing lives and it’s going to cost more lives soon,” said Tucker.
Brooke Nichols, a Boston University infectious disease expert, estimated in October the cuts will lead to more than 570,000 deaths globally. Two thirds would be children. A peer-reviewed study in The Lancet found the number may reach into the millions.
“I've never had a conversation before with technical people where I say to them, ‘What do we do in a scenario where we have to choose between a case of sexual abuse against a child and a case of you know just physical abuse?’ And that's really where we've ended up."
Aid groups afraid to talk
There are major hurdles when it comes to counting projects that have been slashed.
Some projects with significant work done in Africa may be missing from CCIJ’s analysis because of the way that the U.S. government’s USAspending online database deems the primary country of performance, particularly for work that occurs in many nations.
Major grants to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, for instance, are listed in USAspending data as happening primarily in Switzerland, where Gavi is based—even though its work immunizing people against Ebola and more than a dozen other diseases actually occurs across the developing world.
Despite these caveats, CCIJ’s data analysis paints a vivid picture of what has been targeted and what has been lost.
In Africa, the U.S. aid contracts cut by Trump
This searchable table details U.S. government contracts that the Trump administration cut in Africa. For a particular contract, hover over the description to see the government’s description of the work that was supposed to happen. The cut shown is the promised spending minus the amount already spent.
Credit: Peter Aldhous / CCIJ
Data source: USAspending, as of Sept. 30, 2025
In Africa, the U.S. aid grants cut by Trump
This searchable table details U.S. government grants and cooperative agreements that the Trump administration cut for Africa. For a particular award, hover over the description to see the government’s description of the work that was supposed to happen. The cut shown is the promised award minus the amount already spent.
Credit: Peter Aldhous / CCIJ
Data source: USAspending, as of Sept. 30, 2025
Slashed projects run from mundane purchases of office chairs to funding for Prosper Africa Trade and Investment (PATI), a major effort to increase bilateral trade between the United States and nations across Africa. PATI is losing almost $165 million in unspent funds as of Sept. 30. The effort was supposed to spur economic development in Africa while reducing dependence on China.
PATI was coordinated from Kenya by DAI Global, a company headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. DAI Global is also one of the organizations involved in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze and the dismantling of USAID.
DAI Global declined to comment for this article.
Indeed, CCIJ found many recipient organizations were reluctant to talk about difficulties they have experienced. Some apparently fear this could result in reprisals.
At Kenyatta University, a top-tier public institution in Nairobi, its Public Relations & Communications Office wrote to CCIJ, “Due to the termination of all USAID projects and funding, we are unable to comment” on the Trump administration’s reductions.
“It’s hard for these groups to talk because they still have ongoing relations,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow with the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Other deep cuts include projects for education, security and government accountability.
“Our entire sector has six to 12 months left in its current form,” said Jean Scrimgeour of the Accountability Lab, a global network headquartered in Washington, D.C., which works on transparency, open government and anticorruption.
Projects in sexual and reproductive health—long viewed with deep suspicion by U.S. conservatives opposed to abortion—have been largely zeroed out.
To make matters worse, on Aug. 29, the Trump administration cancelled another $5 billion in foreign assistance already appropriated by Congress but not yet obligated with contracts and grants to specific projects. Because it is unknown how much of that money might have gone to Africa, it is not included in CCIJ’s analysis. But no doubt a large portion of the funds would have gone to the continent.
The White House and the U.S. State Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
“There’s been no response to what’s been happening in the world in the last nine months when it comes to humanitarian emergencies.”
– Charles Kenny, senior fellow with the Center for Global Development
A woman walks through an Interally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camp in Darfur, Sudan.
"True chaos": No response to new emergencies
As new crises have emerged in Africa, the Trump administration has largely not responded with help.
Africa has been rocked this year by an escalating famine in Sudan, caused by its ongoing civil war. Meanwhile, a conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has seen more than a million people forced to flee as Rwanda-backed rebels captured cities in the east of the nation.
“There’s been no response to what’s been happening in the world in the last nine months when it comes to humanitarian emergencies,” said the Center for Global Development’s Kenny.
Before Trump came to office, USAID had around 9,500 staff. It was formally wound down in July.
To handle the work, the State Department said it would hire more than 670 employees. But with the State Department in the midst of reorganization, there are few signs that this reduced workforce is making much progress sending out foreign aid.
The effects on aid organizations has been devastating. One non-scientific survey of USAID funding recipients estimates around 260,000 are people losing their jobs worldwide.
“The true chaos that was created was real and doesn’t get undone,” AVAC’s Warren said
This is starkly evident for PEPFAR projects, credited with having saved more than 26 million lives, mostly by getting antiretroviral drugs to people exposed to HIV.
Given this track record saving lives—let alone bipartisan support—PEPFAR’s activities should arguably have been largely exempted from elimination. But CCIJ’s reporting from Nigeria indicates that its PEPFAR-supported projects remained in disarray for months afterwards.
In Nigeria, in the wake of the Trump cuts, getting medications to those with HIV have been made worse because of drug shortages. Healthcare workers now manage a limited supply.
Pregnant women told CCIJ this summer that they now skip doses to prevent running out of supplies.
“I skipped my doses in February, after I went to the health center in Gwagwalada, on the outskirts of Abuja, and found that I couldn’t get drugs,” said Blessing Christopher, who was pregnant, in an interview in Gwagwalada. “I was running out of medication.”
“I take today; I don’t take tomorrow. That’s how I was alternating the drugs to make them last longer,” she said.
Although the women said it is a necessary compromise, health experts warn that inconsistent use of antiretroviral drugs poses serious dangers—both for the mother’s health and the baby’s well-being.
Deborah Ubieko, a medical doctor at the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital in Gwagwalada, finds this development concerning because of health risks.
In all, Nigeria estimates that more than 2 million people are living with HIV in the country.
PEPFAR overall has been deeply cut. An analysis by former USAID official Ramona Godbole, PEPFAR estimated that only 35 percent of awards under PEPFAR remained active.
PEPFAR reductions appear to reflect the Trump administration’s ideological positions and its disputes with specific African nations, rather than gauging program effectiveness. For example, PEPFAR is now concentrating its efforts to prevent HIV infection in pregnant and breastfeeding women. No longer on priority lists: Gay men, drug users and transgender individuals, all at high risk.
“This administration is clearly making decisions on ideology and politics, not on epidemiologic need in health terms or development need in the larger context,” Warren said.
“This administration is clearly making decisions on ideology and politics, not on epidemiologic need in health terms or development need in the larger context.”
– Mitchell Warren, executive director at AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition
People protest in front of the U.S. Capitol on February 5, 2025 in Washington, D.C., against the Trump Administration’s decision to virtually shut down USAID.
Money for Zambia—not South Africa
Godbole’s analysis also revealed vast differences in which countries lost the most PEPFAR support.
Countries with reasonably good relations with the Trump administration—such as Zambia and Mozambique—appear to have retained more than 75 percent of their PEPFAR funding.
But in South Africa, which has clashed with Trump repeatedly over the Israel-Gaza conflict and unsupported claims that its government is committing a “genocide” against white farmers, less than 25 percent of PEPFAR funding remained—even though it has 7.8 million people living with HIV, the largest number of any country worldwide.
PEPFAR’s future remains uncertain. The Trump administration and Congress—where the program has bipartisan support—have been at odds over future funding, while the Office of Management and Budget has been accused by budget watchers of a “slow walk” of 2025 PEPFAR allocations.
Despite these cuts, the Trump administration may not be saving all the money it claims.
CCIJ’s investigation found the Trump administration’s claims of savings often greatly exceeded the government’s own spending records.
The Department of Health and Human Services awarded one contract to the Avram Corporation of North Miami, to provide data support for public health projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
DOGE claims that by killing the contract, it saved U.S. taxpayers $19.5 million. But by the end of September, the government reported just $2.3 million had been obligated under the contract, and $1.4 million had already been transferred to Avram. This means any savings equals roughly $900,000—more than 20 times less than DOGE claimed.
There are also costs to shutting down assistance programs, which will erode claimed savings.
Leaders of seven large aid organizations pointed out in a letter sent to Congress in April that abruptly ending projects entails unavoidable expenses—paying legally-required severance to employees, penalties for breaking office leases, and shipping belongings of foreign staff back to their home countries.
'Field of dreams'—but dreams are dashed
In Nairobi, Kevin Schreiber recounted this summer how the sudden end of a small U.S. grant crippled the nation’s Little League program, which had garnered praise from the American Chamber of Commerce.
Baseball has long been a symbol of America’s soft diplomacy, spreading the sport to places like Japan and South Korea. That effort is arguably responsible for Japan producing some of Major League Baseball’s biggest stars, including Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki, who set the record for most hits in a season, and one of the game’s biggest stars today, Shohei Ohtani, voted four times as Most Valuable Player.
In Kenya, baseball arrived in the 1980s when Japanese families came over to run infrastructure construction projects, and also with Americans living on military bases inside the country, according to Schreiber. The sport continued with pockets of teams across the country.
Schreiber, a New York Mets fan, moved to the country about a decade ago for work and joined playing in baseball games. Soon, he said in an interview by Zoom, he was encouraged to do more. Together with a friend, he started a youth league. More than 100 kids showed up for one of the first practices.
He got donations and established a nonprofit, If We Build It, that constructed the Nairobi Field of Dreams at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology’s campus, outside the capital. The name of the charity and the ballpark are references to the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie, Field of Dreams.
In 2024, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi awarded his effort a $15,000 grant. The money was supposed to fund a Little League program with new playing fields inside the city.
“There aren’t a lot of public parks” in Nairobi for baseball, he said. To rent a playing field, he said, you need to pay a fee.
The U.S. grant was killed before he got any money. The Little League managed four games on a soccer pitch.
“We had made promises to youth teams all around the city that you’re going to be able to play,” he said. “That was definitely a letdown.”
How CCIJ measured losses to U.S. foreign aid in Africa
By Peter Aldhous
The Trump administration has provided no comprehensive breakdown of its cuts to foreign aid. To identify which projects have been lost and to put a conservative dollar figure on the sums involved, the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism turned to the Department of Government Efficiency’s “Wall of Receipts” first posted on the website in late February and updated regularly since then. The DOGE site lists projects that it claims to have canceled.
From March to July, CCIJ scraped this government log each week. Later, CCIJ obtained updates from a data feed provided by DOGE. This additional data extended into late August. DOGE included a brief description for each project that it claimed to have cut, but this was rarely sufficient to identify the country where the work was to take place. But DOGE did provide project-by-project links to information in two other government databases — the Federal Procurement Data System and USAspending.
Using the government’s unique identifiers for each project, CCIJ mined federal spending data to gather a trove of additional information. This included the primary country where work under each grant and contract was set to be done. That detail allowed CCIJ to focus on aid to African nations.
For all of these projects, CCIJ examined when the project was supposed to start and end. It documented the amount of “obligated” spending — money for which there is a legal agreement to support a project. CCIJ checked how much money the government recorded as actually having been transferred to the recipient as of Sept. 30, the end of the federal government’s 2025 fiscal year.
In some cases the Trump administration had already “deobligated” some promised funding, which we accounted for. Figures for potential cuts represent the obligated funds — prior to any deobligation — minus the money already sent out. For more details, including the code used to pull data from USAspending, see this GitHub repository.
DOGE’s list of terminated projects included some that had either passed their end date before Trump’s second administration took office, or for ones where the money was spent; the obligated funds have already been transferred in full. These are excluded from CCIJ’s tables accompanying this story.
CCIJ cross-checked its tally of terminated African projects against a list of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Department of State projects compiled by Wayan Vota, a foreign aid development specialist who runs The Career Pivot, an online community for humanitarian workers across the globe who lost their jobs because of the Trump administration’s cuts. Vota’s list included a few dozen projects in Africa that CCIJ’s analysis had not identified. This happened in part because DOGE stopped publishing information in March on its cuts to USAID contracts. After verifying these cases, CCIJ calculated the cuts and added them to its database.
“We don’t believe anyone actually has a completely accurate list—especially not the remaining USAID or State staff,” wrote Vota in a post detailing his analysis of what had been cut at the two agencies.
“They are probably too overwhelmed by internal chaos to even understand the full scope of what’s happening to humanitarian funding right now,” according to Vota.
The difficulty of doing this analysis, according to Vota and others, underscores that any dollar estimates are likely to undercount the loss in foreign aid.
DOGE itself has never claimed that its “Wall of Receipts” is complete. Others have documented that DOGE reports can be unreliable. In May, for instance, the New York Times reported on several dozen “zombie contracts” which quietly resumed but nevertheless remained on DOGE’s list of terminated projects.
CCIJ found that some projects that DOGE claimed to have slashed later disappeared from its list. To fully understand DOGE’s claims for savings, CCIJ included every project that DOGE said that it terminated, regardless of whether it still remains on the Wall of Receipts.
How CCIJ measured losses to U.S. foreign aid in Africa
By Peter Aldhous
The Trump administration has provided no comprehensive breakdown of its cuts to foreign aid. To identify which projects have been lost and to put a conservative dollar figure on the sums involved, the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism turned to the Department of Government Efficiency’s “Wall of Receipts” first posted on the website in late February and updated regularly since then. The DOGE site lists projects that it claims to have canceled.
From March to July, CCIJ scraped this government log each week. Later, CCIJ obtained updates from a data feed provided by DOGE. This additional data extended into late August. DOGE included a brief description for each project that it claimed to have cut, but this was rarely sufficient to identify the country where the work was to take place. But DOGE did provide project-by-project links to information in two other government databases — the Federal Procurement Data System and USAspending.
Using the government’s unique identifiers for each project, CCIJ mined federal spending data to gather a trove of additional information. This included the primary country where work under each grant and contract was set to be done. That detail allowed CCIJ to focus on aid to African nations.
For all of these projects, CCIJ examined when the project was supposed to start and end. It documented the amount of “obligated” spending — money for which there is a legal agreement to support a project. CCIJ checked how much money the government recorded as actually having been transferred to the recipient as of Sept. 30, the end of the federal government’s 2025 fiscal year.
In some cases the Trump administration had already “deobligated” some promised funding, which we accounted for. Figures for potential cuts represent the obligated funds — prior to any deobligation — minus the money already sent out. For more details, including the code used to pull data from USAspending, see this GitHub repository.
DOGE’s list of terminated projects included some that had either passed their end date before Trump’s second administration took office, or for ones where the money was spent; the obligated funds have already been transferred in full. These are excluded from CCIJ’s tables accompanying this story.
CCIJ cross-checked its tally of terminated African projects against a list of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Department of State projects compiled by Wayan Vota, a foreign aid development specialist who runs The Career Pivot, an online community for humanitarian workers across the globe who lost their jobs because of the Trump administration’s cuts. Vota’s list included a few dozen projects in Africa that CCIJ’s analysis had not identified. This happened in part because DOGE stopped publishing information in March on its cuts to USAID contracts. After verifying these cases, CCIJ calculated the cuts and added them to its database.
“We don’t believe anyone actually has a completely accurate list—especially not the remaining USAID or State staff,” wrote Vota in a post detailing his analysis of what had been cut at the two agencies.
“They are probably too overwhelmed by internal chaos to even understand the full scope of what’s happening to humanitarian funding right now,” according to Vota.
The difficulty of doing this analysis, according to Vota and others, underscores that any dollar estimates are likely to undercount the loss in foreign aid.
DOGE itself has never claimed that its “Wall of Receipts” is complete. Others have documented that DOGE reports can be unreliable. In May, for instance, the New York Times reported on several dozen “zombie contracts” which quietly resumed but nevertheless remained on DOGE’s list of terminated projects.
CCIJ found that some projects that DOGE claimed to have slashed later disappeared from its list. To fully understand DOGE’s claims for savings, CCIJ included every project that DOGE said that it terminated, regardless of whether it still remains on the Wall of Receipts.
CCIJ Editorial and Design Team
Editorial
Andrew Lehren
Kemi Busari & Adam Oxford
Fact-checking
Data
Peter Aldhous
Sotiris Sideris
Design and visuals
Nic Bothma
Jillian Dudziak
Photography
Matrix Images
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