The Trump administration told Congress it had terminated 5,341 projects and would reduce USAID to a token 15 people.
The elimination of USAID funding has left conservationists and environmentalists without one of their most important and reliable sources of support. Some nonprofits have shut down, while others are scrambling to find ways to keep vital activities running.
“The U.S. was a leader in this space and doing really important work,” said Zeb Hogan, co-lead of the Wonders of the Mekong project in Cambodia. “All of that work was just stopped overnight. And the way it was done was impossible to plan for and very difficult to recover from.”
President John F. Kennedy established USAID in 1961 to administer foreign aid and development assistance. In the 2023 fiscal year, it disbursed almost $44 billion for projects in 160 countries and regions, with a small but significant percentage of its budget going to “green” projects. “USAID was really the first of the international development agencies to recognize that sustainable development would require an environmental element,” said John Robinson, recently retired as senior vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society. According to a report to Congress, in 2023 USAID provided $375 million to international biodiversity programs in 60 countries and $318 million into what it termed “forestry investments,” such as “relevant biodiversity and sustainable landscapes funds.”
Workers inventory the last boxes of medicine from USAID at a hospital in Lodwar, Kenya, earlier this month.
Luis Tato / AFP via Getty Images
For example, tens of millions of dollars went into combating wildlife crime, tens of millions more into conserving vast natural landscapes in Africa and South America. African biodiversity projects received $146 million in 2023, more than those on any other continent, with many of these projects working closely with local communities and employing local people. The agency distributed funds in the form of grants — often to NGOs — and contracts with companies that implemented projects in the name of the agency. Some of USAID’s work overlapped with or was coordinated with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which also supported conservation of threatened species like rhinos and elephants outside the U.S., and whose international projects have also been halted.
Within hours of starting his second presidential term on January 20, Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating a 90-day “pause” on all foreign development assistance “for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.” The order stated that “no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”
“This was a cut all, cut everything, cut health, cut, cut…,” says a South African conservationist. Now, “there’s no trust” in the U.S.
The chaotic dismemberment of USAID began within days. On January 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a “stop work” memo on most projects funded via the State Department or USAID. In early February, USAID’s website went dark without warning, and the administration placed thousands of personnel on administrative leave globally. Many USAID staff suddenly couldn’t access the agency’s online financial system. “Field workers in dangerous areas couldn’t even buy fuel for their vehicles,” a former USAID contractor told Yale Environment 360.
Despite ongoing court challenges, thousands of USAID staff have been fired, and the agency’s offices have been shuttered. In late March, the Trump administration told the U.S. Congress it had terminated 5,341 projects worth a total of $75 billion (86 percent of its portfolio), and the State Department said it will reduce USAID to a token 15 people, thus ending its existence in all but name. The administration stated that some “humanitarian assistance, global health functions, strategic investment, and limited national security programs” will continue within the State Department. (Legally, Congress must vote to completely dissolve USAID and transfer its funding elsewhere.)
Yale Environment 360 could find no evidence that the Trump administration will be providing funding to any environmental, wildlife conservation, or climate-focused projects previously supported by USAID. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
A member of a community forest patrol in Vietnam that was supported by USAID.
Benjamin Ilka / USAID
Most of the former USAID employees, contractors, and collaborators contacted for this article would not speak on the record, saying they were worried about their careers, that struggling projects would suffer further damage, or that they might be subject to online attacks by Trump supporters.
“The NGOs didn’t see it coming,” says Steven Collins, a South African conservation and development consultant who has worked extensively with USAID. “This was a cut all, cut everything, cut health, cut, cut… This was not a sophisticated process.” Now, he says, “there’s no trust” in the U.S., and it’s raised serious questions about the U.S. government, such as “What’s the value of a contract [to them]?”
Conservationists said that trust has been damaged not just between the U.S. government and USAID project implementers, but between implementers and the local people they work with. Laly Lichtenfeld, CEO of African People and Wildlife, an NGO that has worked in East Africa for 20 years to involve rural communities in conservation (and which worked with USAID) said, “The trust and relationships with the communities with which we work are paramount. Our most valued asset is that trust, so when shocks come quickly like this, it can undermine those relationships and that progress that can take decades to build.” Other conservationists emphasized the particular importance of maintaining trust in initiatives combating wildlife crime — many of which were funded by USAID and other U.S. government agencies — where participants are at serious risk of being harmed by organized crime gangs.
“We’re in survival mode,” said the head of project in Cambodia that lost USAID funding. “We’re in a difficult place now.”
Hogan, of the Wonders of the Mekong, said his organization focuses on conservation, supporting research on the river’s fish and ecology, and using the information generated to advise local policymakers on the Mekong’s sustainable development. He said that the project had helped rediscover a fish thought extinct and tagged the largest freshwater fish ever recorded and that the Cambodian government had agreed to keep the main channel of the river dam-free after viewing the project’s research.
Wonders of the Mekong was expecting funds from USAID to expand into three more countries — Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos — this year, but in late January was told to stop all work immediately. “The money was frozen even though it had already been approved,” Hogan said. “It’s a small percentage of the U.S. government budget, but a lot of money if you’re trying to fill the gap.” The project has received bare-bones funding from private philanthropists to continue until the end of 2025, he said, but he did not know what would happen after that. “We’re in survival mode. We’re in a difficult place now.”
A volunteer fire brigade in the Brazilian Amazon comprised of Indigenous women trained with the support of USAID.
Andressa Anholete / U.S. Forest Service
Several conservationists who have worked with USAID said the agency was particularly valued for its forward-thinking approach and its willingness to fund ambitious, large-scale projects for a longer duration than many other funders. “They were very, very thoughtful and very responsive to ideas about how to implement development within an environmental and conservation context.” USAID funded landscape-scale projects in the rainforests of the Congo Basin before anyone else did, he said, and supported similar large-scale projects in the Amazon and Southeast Asia.
Collins pointed to the agency’s support of massive transfrontier parks in southern Africa that have brought together multi-million-acre conservation areas in neighboring countries to be managed collaboratively, such as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (encompassing land in South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), and transnational water management organizations (some of which he worked on). USAID was “open-minded about concepts and more willing to fund ideas [than other agencies],” he said.
Many conservationists highlighted the agency’s vital role in creating Namibia’s vast and much-heralded network of locally-run community conservancies, where wildlife is conserved and sustainably managed via hunting and ecotourism on traditional community land. USAID was the founding donor of Namibia’s Living in a Finite Environment (LIFE) project, which began in 1993 and promoted legislative changes that allowed communities to take over and manage land for conservation and strongly supported the creation of the conservancy system that exists today.
Some conservation nonprofits that received USAID funding have ceased operations. Others are delving into savings to keep critical work going.
One former USAID contractor said the agency had been open to working outside “pretty ecotourism hotspots” because its decisionmakers understood that “what’s important and what’s easily fundable are often two different things.” She highlighted the West African Biodiversity and Climate Change Project, a five-year, $49-million project that studied environmental degradation in mountain and coastal ecosystems across West Africa and developed policies to combat it. This region contains extraordinary numbers of threatened species and forested watersheds vital to millions of livelihoods, she said, but is not set up for ecotourism and is difficult to travel in, so is hard to attract private philanthropic donors to.
Other valuable USAID-funded projects identified by conservationists include Khetha, launched in 2018 and implemented by WWF South Africa, which addresses wildlife crime in and around South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Since 2008 South Africa has experienced extraordinary levels of rhinoceros poaching, with the largest remaining populations of the animals in Kruger. Even though the park has invested heavily in a militarized anti-poaching strategy, conservationists said they had come to realize that rhinos cannot be protected by armed anti-poaching patrols alone, as these often exacerbated conflict between the park and the communities that harbor poachers. “Khetha has done great work building relationships between conservation authorities and surrounding communities, finding ways for communities to benefit from and value the park,” said a leader in an unrelated nonprofit working in the area.
A ranger guards elephants in the Sera Community Conservancy in Kenya, a project that was supported by USAID.
Northern Rangelands Trust
WWF South Africa declined to comment on the effects of the USAID funding withdrawal on conservation, but confirmed that Khetha has “come to a halt.” Meanwhile, a roughly $20 million USAID project related to Khetha, Southern Africa’s Countering Wildlife Crime Activity, has also been shut down.
Some conservation nonprofits that received USAID funding have ceased operations. Others are cutting back their programs or delving into their savings to try to keep critical work going for as long as possible. All those contacted for this article agreed there are no obvious replacements for USAID’s conservation support in the short or even medium term.
African People and Wildlife’s Lichtenfeld says that European development agencies, which might have been expected to replace some USAID dollars, are constrained because European governments have raised military spending following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Philanthropists, she said, face a conundrum because so many humanitarian and environmental projects have been impacted by U.S. cuts. “There’s no clear roadmap yet. I think the philanthropic community is still working it out among themselves.”
Besides the U.S. losing political influence, defunding these projects may cause local governments to turn away from conservation.
Collins, who is based in Johannesburg, said that the USAID shutdown is “a wake-up call” to Africans who have become dependent on foreign donors to support work “that we say is valuable but can’t persuade our own governments to fund.” Environmental organizations may have to generate more income locally, perhaps by placing levies on ecotourists or getting local governments to pay for ecosystem services like clean water from conservation areas. This could make NGOs less dependent on outside sources and more aligned with local needs, he said, although such funds would take time to raise and might not be sufficient. “Maybe some good will come out of this,” he said, “but in the meantime, it’s going to be hard.”
John Robinson said the Wildlife Conservation Society has worked at scale in central Africa for about 30 years, with much of that work funded via USAID. Its major Congo Basin rainforest conservation projects gave the U.S. soft power in the region’s Francophone countries that it never had before, he said. Besides losing political influence, defunding those projects may cause local governments to turn away from conservation, which would mean “you’ve suddenly turned the management of natural resources in central Africa over to organized crime.”
USAID, he said, “is a development agency. It was about livelihoods. It was about human dignity and governance, and it was about the environment.” Now, he said, globally “all those efforts have been hung out to dry. And from the perspective of U.S. standing and respect in the world, we just shot ourselves in the head.”
