All but two of the programs awarded under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor would be cut, affecting nearly $1.3bn in grants.
The US state department has been advised to terminate grants to nearly all remaining programs awarded under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), which would effectively end the department’s role in funding pro-democracy programming in some of the world’s most hostile totalitarian nations.
The review could affect nearly $1.3bn in grants, three state department officials told the Guardian, citing briefings on the results of a Foreign Assistance Review produced by the office of management and budget (OMB).
Of 391 active grants, only two were not recommended to be cut, the officials said. They concerned one program in China and one in Yemen.
The recommendations would “terminate about 80% of all US government foreign assistance at the state department”, said a state department official briefed on the findings of the review.
In a separate incident this week, a new senior adviser to DRL recommended that the bureau’s leadership use funds earmarked by Congress for foreign assistance to cover pet projects for the administration including the resettlement of Afrikaners to the United States and to support the legal defense of the rightwing French politician Marine Le Pen.
According to the state department officials, Samuel Samson, a recent college graduate appointed as senior adviser to the bureau under the new administration, made the recommendations on a DRL white paper being drafted to program hundreds of millions of dollars in congressional funding before they expire later this year.
Samson, one of a number of young conservatives to rise under the Trump administration, reflects the White House’s changing priorities for foreign assistance. He recently wrote a controversial post on the state department’s Substack page titled The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe in which he also criticised the labeling of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party as an “extremist” organisation, saying that this “environment also restricts Europe’s elections”. MORE