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Inklings | What to make of the Trump aid freeze chaos?

“It still fails to cover anything not immediately lifesaving. But it does buy some time.”

The header image for the Inkling's newsletter entry of 29 January, 2025. On the top left you see Inklings written in a serif font with an ink bleed effect and underlined with a burgundy-coloured line. On the bottom right we see a list of the main topic: What to make of the Trump aid freeze chaos?

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Here’s an evergreen intro for the days ahead: What a mess. 

This is Inklings, where we explore all things aid and aid-adjacent unfolding in the wilds of Geneva, on the front lines of emergency response, or in the dark corners of USAID stop-work orders and executive backtracks.

It’s also available as an email newsletter. Subscribe here.

Today: Rubio’s waiver, how aid freezes are hitting local aid, and what’s up with that InterAction statement.

On the radar|

One by one this week, US-funded frontline aid programmes were shuttering clinics, classrooms, and other services as the impacts of US President Donald Trump’s aid freeze cascaded down. Then, a late 28 January memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, labelled as “an additional waiver of the pause”, appeared to backtrack – a little. The result? A sliver of breathing room, maybe, and a slew of new questions. Here’s what we know, along with some key points about the freeze fallout.

What Rubio’s waiver is or isn’t: Bits of the Rubio memo (first reported by WaPo), are making the rounds in humanitarian circles today. While initial waivers to Trump’s order carved out room for “emergency food assistance”, the new waiver appears to be a bit broader, covering “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance”. But one aid official warned against getting “overly excited”: The waiver will be of “limited use”, said the official, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely. “It still fails to cover anything not immediately lifesaving, is short term, and has lots of caveats. But it does buy some time for both humanitarians and, importantly, affected people, to plan and make decisions.”

  • Domestic lawsuit has global ripples: What pushed Rubio to issue his waiver (essentially, a waiver on a waiver to a stop-work order of an executive order)? Trump’s aid freeze is part of a wider-reaching set of federal spending pauses. Hours before Rubio’s waiver hit the press, a US judge temporarily blocked Trump’s freeze on federal grants. This was in response to a lawsuit filed by groups including the National Council of Nonprofits. The judge’s order for a “brief administrative stay” lasts until 3 February. That’s when the two parties (essentially, the nonprofits and the US Office of Management and Budget, which oversees budget at the executive level) are due to argue their sides. That gives humanitarians another date to circle on the calendar.

What about frontline aid: It feels like big aid agencies are far quicker to pass along stop-work orders to local partners than they are to reverse them. Many local organisations that receive US funding were shutting clinics or classrooms this week – essentially ordered to do so by stop-work orders handed down from international agencies that subcontract them (queue evergreen recap of systemic aid inequalities). This left frontline aid workers with the heartbreaking task of explaining to recipients why basic programmes were suddenly stopping, local NGO leaders told us. It’s unclear if the closed programmes can simply re-open. “At least this is a reprieve,” said one NGO official, of the reported new waiver. How much of a reprieve is far from clear: He hadn’t yet heard from his counterparts at the INGO that funded him.

The risk of self-inflicted wounds: Trump’s intentions are clear, but his methods are imprecise (and vulnerable to lawsuits). So there’s a degree of wiggle room, but the nearly overnight aid stoppages suggest that some humanitarian decision-makers leaned toward the most conservative interpretations of Trump’s aid freezes. Before Rubio’s 28 January memo, some HQ-level aid officials were pushing internally for the aid freeze to be viewed as an order to pause future funding only – leaving existing programmes safe. But many aid organisations seemed to be moving to pause US-funded aid programmes immediately (under encouragement, to be fair, from their more zealous US government counterparts). Before Trump’s orders were clear, in other words, the humanitarian sector was already getting in line. “The real danger is that in the panic, we, or our lawyers, forget our existing agreements and contracts, and over-interpret beyond what the executive order [says],” an aid official told us, “and as a result cause real harm to affected people.”

Money talks: Humanitarian organisations are a bit tight-lipped right now. Asked by reporters in Geneva this week to comment on the aid freeze, several UN entities referred only to a short statement from the UN Secretary-General: “The Secretary-General notes with concern the announcement of a pause in US foreign assistance.” Most big INGOs, usually more verbose, have said little. Some big NGO networks have issued statements (more on that below). There’s genuine fear and confusion, and much at stake if US-funded aid programmes shut down across the board. But it’s hard not to notice who is speaking up, and why. Among the big international agencies and NGOs, Oxfam America CEO Abby Maxman has been one of the few leaders speaking publicly in the press. Perhaps not by coincidence, Oxfam does not accept US government funding. Another organisation that’s publicly pushing back: the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “Violence, power, and control – these are the tools of tyranny, often wielded by men who perpetuate systems of oppression,” the organisation said in a statement after receiving USAID stop-work orders. “IPPF recognises these cycles and refuses to engage with the Trump administration’s unjust directives.” Reproductive health services were a clear casualty in Trump’s first term, and they are again now – regardless of how today’s aid freezes play out.

Trumplings|

Beyond Trump: It’s not just Trump, but how his actions embolden others to follow suit. Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, has reportedly proposed a law to withdraw from the World Health Organization. 

Headlines: The folks at Devex have been blasting out stateside coverage at a furious pace. This piece has my favourite headline: ”USAID cancels stop-work Q&A with partners, citing stop-work order.”

End quote|

“If we abandon our principles to save our programmes, what exactly are we saving?”

A quick statement from the US NGO network InterAction continues to cause a stir. 

“America’s humanitarian and development organisations work tirelessly to save lives and advance US interests globally… The recent stop-work cable from the State Department suspends programs that support America’s global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill,” it reads. 

InterAction was presumably stating its intent to persuade Trump to reverse course on the aid freezes, but many humanitarians were surprised and angered by language that seemed to forget some core principles – and that framed humanitarians as a vehicle of US interests (and other countries as adversaries or strategic levers).

Veteran aid worker Marina Kobzeva weighed in on LinkedIn in a post that went, she says, “slightly viral”. Asked to explain what spurred her reaction, Kobzeva told us: “When the largest alliance of humanitarian INGOs openly frames aid as a geopolitical tool, our silence equals complicity.”

For all the bluster and confusion of Trump 2.0’s first days, the aid system would be much less threatened if a single government wasn’t responsible for 30%, or more, of funding. Aid leaders know how crucial it is to diversify funding. They’ve long appealed to Gulf states, the BRICS bloc, or to China to step up. 

InterAction’s statement didn’t expose anything new about how states may view aid as soft power. But it showed why the humanitarian system struggles to diversify its funding base. Solidarity has its limits. Countries won’t buy into a system if they don’t feel a part of it.

InterAction, meanwhile, appears to have updated its statement, erasing the line suggesting that humanitarians “advance US interests”. China, it seems, still remains an adversary.

Have any tips, recommendations, or indecipherable acronyms to share with the Inklings newsletter? Get in touch: [email protected]

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