On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate. For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s … [Read more…]
After the Trump administration cut off food from the third-largest refugee camp in the world, thousands of families faced impossible choices as their children starved. MORE
When the Trump administration slashed foreign aid, it gutted a program that had reduced malaria deaths world wide. In northern Cameroon, health workers tried to protect children in one last rainy season. MORE
In August, I traveled to Kakuma, Kenya, to try to understand what happened when the U.S. cut off food to the world’s third-largest refugee camp. Soon after President Donald Trump froze foreign aid on his first day in office, my colleague Brett Murphy and I began hearing from government experts. We learned that despite explicit … [Read more…]
FROM USAID December 15, 2025 Dear USAID Implementing Partners, As the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) continues to finish closing the agency, USAID is taking additional immediate and decisive action to safeguard taxpayer funds and enhance financial oversight across its assistance portfolio. Effective immediately, USAID suspends all payments through Letters of Credit (LOCs) for … [Read more…]
Givewell is a nonprofit organization that gives money to “save or improve the most lives per dollar.” Part of their whole thing is a rigorous research process with copious and specific datapoints. So, in the chaotic wake of USAID’s gutting, they scrambled to figure out if they could fund the kind of projects USAID used … [Read more…]
Palladium is currently seeking a French speaking US based Technical Advisor (TA) to support implementation of the Translating Data for Implementation (Data.FI) award in Francophone Africa (DRC, Niger, Core d’Ivoire, Burundi). Data.FI is a global project funded by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the State Department. Data.FI partners with PEPFAR … [Read more…]
Despite White House claims, prices on key staples are on the rise, including cranberry sauce and potatoes. But official data actually suggests that prices are going up. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecasts suggest turkey prices will be about 40 percent higher than this time last year, largely because of supply shortages tied to … [Read more…]
Symone Austin, 33, was earning $131,000 annually as a UX designer when she lost her job in January 2025, not long after she had purchased her house in North Carolina. Here is how she has managed to pay her $2,800 mortgage and her student loans for the past 10 months despite the loss.
Since February, according to my latest analysis, almost 600,000 Black women have been economically sidelined. The November 20, 2025, Jobs Report makes clear this isn’t a blip. It’s a structural crisis. The economy added only 119,000 payroll jobs in September. Revisions to August and July erased another 33,000 positions (the country actually lost 4,000 jobs … [Read more…]