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 We don’t know the provenance, and it may be inaccurate, incomplete, and/or out of date.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:
- The leaked list of cancelled awards that we used for our earlier estimate, which included 5,724 entries.
- 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.
- 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.