If HIV patients in the global south were an obvious casualty of Elon Musk’s decimation of US foreign aid, one group may have been unintended beneficiaries: the international criminal gangs involved in the illicit trade of endangered animals.
The $23bn illegal wildlife trade is run by a range of actors, from global crime groups such as Chinese triads and Mexican cartels to local poachers. Those criminals are benefiting from the Trump administration scrapping US-funded programmes to combat wildlife trafficking and protect endangered species, experts and campaigners say.
“The traffickers are loving it,” said Susan Lieberman, vice-president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, a big US funding recipient. “With fewer restrictions, they think: ‘No one will catch us, so let’s go for it.’”
The now-disbanded US Agency for International Development (USAID) spent at least $375mn annually on wildlife conservation, anti-poaching and anti-trafficking efforts in the developing world. More funding, some of which has also been cut, was funnelled into anti-trafficking through the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
By supporting law enforcement, border control and community outreach in many countries, conservation programmes have played an important, if hidden, role in fighting organised crime and its expansion into wildlife, experts say.
The criminals supply buyers across the world, with heavy demand coming from China and Vietnam, where some animal parts are valued as status symbols or ingredients in traditional medicine. Those include rhino horns, tiger teeth and scales of pangolins, a type of anteater and the world’s most trafficked mammal.
Sulma Warne, a Bangkok-based wildlife trafficking expert who lost his job due to the recent cuts, said USAID had been a “pioneer” on counter-wildlife trafficking. The cuts would damage cross-border policing and efforts to reduce demand for wildlife products in the region, he said.
In many countries, US conservation aid was the only thing preventing gangs, often with Chinese links, from running rampant, said Andrea Crosta, executive director of Earth League International, a Los Angeles-based NGO that investigates transnational trafficking gangs.
Anti-wildlife trafficking efforts were frequently the most effective way to penetrate international crime syndicates, he said. In one undercover operation, one of Crosta’s agents stumbled upon members of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel while posing as a buyer of illegal wildlife products.
“This guy started saying: ‘I have three tons of shark fin, some illegal timber, Jaguar parts’,” Crosta said. Then a cartel operative showed up at the rendezvous, at which point talk turned to felonies such as money laundering. “All these crimes are committed by the same networks,” Crosta added. “They do absolutely whatever they want and nobody can stop them.”
One senior conservationist who has worked closely with the US government said Washington had used wildlife protection programmes as part of a broader security strategy to tackle terrorism and organised crime. However, NGOs had always been nervous about making explicit the link between conservation and US security interests, he said.
“It’s very hard for Washington to say to governments, we’re going to put boots on the ground to deal with terrorism in your country,” he said, requesting anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “But if you can help with combating wildlife trade, then, just by your very presence, you can deter other criminal activities.”
Cuts to those programmes could destabilise fragile countries where much of the world’s richest biodiversity is found, said Lieberman. “It will harm wildlife, but it will also harm security and governance globally,” she said.
African Parks, which manages 23 reserves across the continent, including two in Benin that have been struck by jihadis, received $27mn from USAID between 2016 and 2024 to use in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. Both countries have big security challenges, and the Trump administration has sought to broker a minerals-for-peace deal between DR Congo and Rwanda.
James Desmond, co-director of the Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection, said his organisation lost $3mn in funding to expand a chimpanzee reserve in the west African country. “We were receiving funding from USAID and INL and we just don’t see that money coming back, maybe ever,” he said. “All the investment that the US government made in supporting capacity-building and law enforcement will disappear.”
But at least one NGO found a way to reverse cuts by persuading Washington that its projects help US national security.
The Nairobi-based African Wildlife Foundation said it persuaded the US to row back on cuts to two INL-funded anti-trafficking programmes by convincing the state department that they met secretary of state Marco Rubio’s America-first criteria, said chief executive Kaddu Sebunya. “We made the case that this is not only about conservation, it’s more about security, governance and local ownership.”
Beyond the security implications, many expect the impact of the cuts on nature to be devastating.
WCS, a USAID-supported non-profit, works in 60 countries and helps protect gorillas and elephants in the Congo Basin, pumas in Patagonia and coral reefs and whales in Oceania.
New York-based Panthera received USAID funds to help protect 40 species of wildcats, including tigers, lions and jaguars. Johannesburg-headquartered African Parks has reintroduced rhinos to countries where they had gone extinct. And the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya protects more than 15mn acres of habitat that are home to more than a dozen endangered species.
Organisations and governments would have much less to spend on rangers and wildlife management, as well as on policing borders, said Ted Reilly, a legendary conservationist in Eswatini: “Everyone thinks nature is for free, but to keep nature intact is an incredibly expensive enterprise.”
