When U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department told their contractors to pause all work, Sadie Healy expected the impact to be “horrendous.”
But Healy, who runs a small global health consulting firm, Molloy Consultants, realized no one was documenting how bad the freeze on U.S. foreign aid would be. USAID wouldn’t be cataloging the impacts as President Donald Trump’s administration fired senior staff, shuttered its headquarters and then told its employees their jobs would end. The nonprofits and aid companies who worked with USAID were fighting to survive.
So Healy decided she would do it.
“I am an action person. The depression and the sadness that we knew this was going to cause was something I couldn’t deal with,” Healy said in an interview with The Associated Press. “So we called a Zoom meeting.”
Healy is one of a growing number of people and organizations in the international development ecosystem stepping forward to track the impact of the freeze on U.S. foreign aid. Many are nonprofits who already support grassroots groups around the world, while others are professionals now volunteering their time, connections and skills.
The U.S. is the largest single global humanitarian funder, giving $13.9 billion in 2024, and largest supporter of U.N. agencies, meaning any changes to foreign assistance have sweeping impacts across geographies and issues. The pause in funding has since turned into the dismantling of USAID and its programs.
“CLOSE IT DOWN,” Trump said on social media on Friday, though a judge has paused a plan to put thousands of employees on paid leave.
Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and billionaire adviser to the Trump administration, has led the campaign to shut down USAID, saying in posts on X that it is “evil,” a “criminal organization,” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said funding will not be permanently cut, but people in the field say every day the freeze continues and USAID stops works causes irreparable harm. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Healy and her business partner Meg McClure said they decided to focus on documenting the number of American jobs lost. They eventually got in touch with a staffer from a Senate committee, who advised them on what data to collect.
Within days, they launched a website, USAID Stop-Work, and a survey to document how many U.S. jobs have been lost as a result of the freeze on foreign assistance. So far, employers or employees have reported 10,758 jobs cut since the stop work orders landed on Jan. 24. That number includes some positions at USAID, but not all of the 8,000 workers directly employed by the agency and the thousands more in the field.
“We can document the destruction that this executive order has caused,” Healy said. “And we hope that lawyers and we hope that members of Congress can use that for their case.”
At least two groups with tech capacity and deep networks circulated online surveys to learn about the extent of the funding cuts. They eventually merged efforts and set up the website, Global Aid Freeze to visualize the initial responses. The nonprofit GlobalGiving launched a fund to support small international organizations, many of whom will not survive even a 90-day pause in U.S. foreign funding.
Roth Smith, an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, studies how people organize outside of formal structures, often in response to a disaster. He said volunteer efforts to map a crisis and connect that information to people who can act is typical, but the reach of this organizing is impressive.
“This is a much larger scale and it seems to be highly polished," he said.
The international nonprofit Accountability Lab, which now operates the Global Aid Freeze website, said 568 organizations responded to its survey about the impacts of the U.S. government's foreign aid freeze. Half of the respondents estimated they had less than 3 months of operating reserves, meaning they will shutdown by May if funding remains on hold.
Blair Glencorse, founder and co-CEO of Accountability Lab, said they've been in touch with foundations to try to help them figure out where their support can be most strategic. He said it also seems hard for nonprofits in developing countries to understand how dramatic and lasting the changes in U.S. foreign funding may be.
“Things are fundamentally changed and I don’t think the aid system is going to be the same again,” he said.
Other grassroots efforts have focused on supporting those who lost their jobs. Joanne Sonenshine, an economist who has worked as a consultant alongside USAID for more than a decade, said she saw a flood of LinkedIn posts about layoffs and in response, a flurry of job announcements. So, she set up a spreadsheet where people could put in their experience and contact information and others could post links to open positions. Almost 800 people wrote in their names, locations and work history. Another spreadsheet included more than 550 entries.
"This just goes to show how much we need support for these people. And this is not just D.C. people, by the way,” Sonenshine said. “These are U.S. contractors or U.S. staff all over the world whose livelihoods and their family’s life depended on the U.S. government.”
These grassroots tracking efforts are largely self-funded and self-directed. Healy and McClure pay for the website tracking U.S. job losses themselves. Accountability Lab stood up their survey without any dedicated funding, though they've recently gotten some support to continue the effort.
Other professionals within international development have also offered to work for free to help people find jobs or help organizations get new funding. Healy said that willingness reflects the broader ethos and resilience of the community.
“We love planning, it’s our favorite thing,” Healy said. “We are like, ‘This is the moment we were made for. Let’s go.’”
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