Representatives from dozens of nonprofit organizations attending a major human rights conference in Taipei, Taiwan, last week woke up Thursday to devastating news. Over the previous night in Asia, the Donald Trump administration had abruptly announced it would end nearly 10,000 contracts and grants from the US State Department, including the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) as well as the US Agency for International Development, representing about 90 percent of USAID’s contracts overall.
The announcement was the latest in a string of efforts by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to curtail foreign aid from the US, which has provided medical and humanitarian assistance to millions of people for decades. A letter sent from USAID to grantees viewed by WIRED instructed them to “immediately cease all activities, terminate all subawards and contracts,” and avoid incurring any additional expenses “beyond those unavoidable costs associated with this Termination Notice.”
Several digital and human rights organizations who spoke to WIRED in Taipei—most on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Trump administration or their own governments—say the cuts have undermined years of global democracy-building and free speech initiatives and put the lives and livelihoods of their staff around the world at risk.
Many of the groups who were at RightsCon, one of the largest annual events centered on human rights and technology organized by the nonprofit Access Now, particularly focus on providing cybersecurity support for people like journalists, activists, and other vulnerable groups in authoritarian countries, like protecting against doxxing and hacking attacks meant to intimidate and silence them. Without USAID and State Department funding, that work will likely cease.
“The digital security ecosystem has collapsed totally for NGOs, totally,” says Mohammed Al-Maskati, director of Access Now’s digital security helpline, which offers free digital security help to journalists, activists, and civil society groups.
Causing even further confusion, just days after the cancellations went out some organizations say they received notices that they were sent in error, according to correspondence reviewed by WIRED. It’s not clear how the Trump administration determined which grants and organizations would be spared.
Nonprofit organizations that can keep their funding from the US government, however, will be subject to a new requirement: Their contracts now include a rider mandating they comply with an anti-DEI executive order that Trump signed in late January. It applies to all of an organization’s programs, even if they don’t all receive American support. Failure to follow the order may constitute a violation of the false claims act, the Trump administration warned in materials reviewed by WIRED.
When WIRED initially reached out about the cancellations, a State Department representative said that “each program underwent a review with the goal of restructuring assistance to align with the administration’s policy priorities. Programs that serve our nation’s interests will continue. However, programs that aren’t aligned with our national interest will not.”
The State Department did not respond to follow-up questions about the reinstatement of certain grants. USAID did not respond to requests for comment. In a post on X on Monday, Musk asserted that “no one has died as result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.” He categorized DOGE’s work at the aid agency far more dramatically last month, boasting about having spent one weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
