The Current - Aid organizations trying to fill the gap left by USAID cuts

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

The Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to USAID sparked worldwide alarm among humanitarian workers, leaving other organizations struggling to fill the gap. Matt Galloway talks to Avril Benoit, CEO of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in the U.S.

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Podcast. It was a little over five weeks ago that Elon Musk announced that he had spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. The US Agency for International Development was until then the world's largest funder of humanitarian aid. This week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the review of its programs is now complete. 83% of its contracts were being cancelled. The dramatic cuts to USAID have caused widespread alarm among humanitarian workers. Joining me now is Avril Benoit. You may remember her as a CBC radio broadcaster. She is now the CEO of Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières, USA. She's in our New York City studio. Avril, good morning.

Hi, Matt. It's great to talk to you. As I said, Marco Rubio says 83% of USAID programs have been cancelled. Sometimes hundreds of contracts and programs are canceled in a single day. That's the wood chipper. What are you hearing from colleagues about what that means on the ground? Well, it's a tremendous impact.

And in fact, we would call it a catastrophe for the humanitarian aid sector. This is a, uh, a country that has contributed so much to humanitarian aid over the years. The amounts of money that were involved, we're talking 40% of all the humanitarian funding from governments around the world. And for global health, it represented about 30%. So that's funding for specific health programs, outbreaks, disease control programs that were monitored and had a lot of support from the World Health Organization. So you can imagine that the disruption is real

and the experience of it for those organizations that used to use and rely on USAID or US government funding is profound. Now Doctors Without Borders or MSF, Médecins Sans Frontières, we don't take US government funding. That was a decision that we took very many decades ago and we've stuck to that. And so we still have the flexibility to work, but all around us, we see that other partners,

other organizations, ministries of health just don't have what they need to work alongside us, because we certainly can't do it alone. Where have you seen the most severe and immediate impacts? You've called this in some ways the collapse of the humanitarian ecosystem.

Yeah. I would say that the impacts, because it's been so chaotic, are hard to even discern immediately, because you'll have a program that closes, a clinic that closes, a water and sanitation provision in a refugee camp that stops all of a sudden. And as you may have followed with all of this, initially you had the closure and then there was a lawsuit and a judge's ruling and they have to send the money back and then the Trump administration says no thank you we're not listening to the courts and it punts back and forth and now finally

we have what sounds like a much more definitive answer but even then what they had done was they dismantled the mechanisms that allowed the funding to flow to those other organizations. So even when they thought they had a green light, oh, we're saved, the program can continue, we can continue treating people with HIV or tuberculosis or do vaccines or malaria work, we're saved, then they would find out, oh, but the money can't arrive because the bureaucrats, the public servants that push the button, the mechanism to make the checks or however the funding was flowing has been dismantled completely. There's nobody to do that work behind the scenes.

And so they're still waiting. And so as a consequence, they have fired a lot of their staff. And so other aid organizations, um, and some of the, some of the big ones that you've heard of have literally cut 50, 60% of their staff globally. Um, and in certain project locations that were maybe fully funded by the U S government, they've

just left. Where are you? I mean, in, in, in all of the, the, if you look at the map, it's hard probably to pick one place, but I mean, where are you most concerned about? What are you most in, in, if you look at the map, it's hard probably to pick one place, but I mean, where are you most concerned about? What are you most in, in, in light of what you've just said, what is there a place that to you is

most alarming? Well, we work in over 70 countries and typically they're low income, they're countries in crisis, they're failed States. And more often than not, there's a, an aspect of conflict to them. And in certain conflict areas like Sudan for example, no matter whether the funding was available in

the past, we didn't have a lot of other organizations working there because of their risk tolerance. It's just too volatile, it's too dangerous, too many administrative burdens to work in Sudan to deliver the aid. And as you may have followed, in certain areas, you have cholera outbreaks, you have extremely high levels of malnutrition that we've even been chronicling and reporting out from areas in Darfur, especially North Darfur. You have open fighting in Khartoum in the main capital where hospitals have run out of supplies and they can't get their staff in. Even back when there was much more funding in the system, there were very few other actors besides us that were actually there. So that sort of makes us conclude that money doesn't necessarily solve all problems because if it's too dangerous,

a lot of aid organizations just, they don't want to take those risks. But the areas where the money was flowing so beautifully with a great program, I'll just mention one, PEPFAR. So this was a Bush era program, bipartisan support for us to provide treatment for HIV. And what we were doing on the other side is we would maybe look after the tuberculosis, but especially the drug-resistant tuberculosis. But you have to do two together. So the early warnings, if you want to talk about geography, was Southern Africa, where they were saying, well, wait a second, how are we supposed to run these HIV programs if we cannot get the drugs through the funding that came from PEPFAR. And so then you had announcements, oh well we're not really going to cancel that,

it's going to come back, but the unfreezing never really materialized so far. And so we have these tremendous amounts of money that used to flow in to provide the medications. And now you've got epidemiologists and other experts in the global health area doing calculations of how many people will contract HIV, how many will die from AIDS, how many will die from tuberculosis because their HIV wasn't managed, you know, all these kinds of things. They're producing these very alarming numbers. And so just in that portfolio alone in terms of categories of health risks,

it's going to be massive if those programs don't come back online as quickly as possible. Could I just go back to something that you said earlier, which is, and it's around PEPFAR, that that was a Bush era program. George W. Bush took great pride in celebrating that and in people around him trying to defend it. There used to be bipartisan support in the United States for USAID, but there are many Americans now who are cheering these cuts under the umbrella of America First and saying that we should spend, we, the countries who spend its money in the United States and not worry about

international aid. Did you see warning signs that support for international aid was fading? Well, if you read project 2025, you knew that it was going to be part of the program here. You knew that the United States wasn't going to go this direction and frankly, other governments are doing the same.

Well, that's the other thing. Do you see that beyond the United States? I mean, is there a chill that is starting to settle in? I would say yes. Now, is it a widespread perspective from people? No, most people don't care about it. You know, most people are, you know, if they think of all the impacts of US government policies right now, the Trump administration policies on them right now, both at the constituent level, but also at the politicians that are then going to the White House with their list of, of, of grievances or requests of the Trump administration.

Restoring foreign aid is low on most people's priority list. It's something that, especially when times are hard, people will always say we should give it home first. And so America first, America first in everything. But one of the things that we find most alarming about this, those of us in the aid sector who see the tremendous impact, the life saving impact of a lot of this humanitarian response that was largely funded as I say 40% by the United States previously, is we can see that even though the original arguments were, oh, well, this is our soft power, this is how to promote goodwill toward America around the world

and all this kind of thing, most average Americans, they don't think about that. And certainly the language from the White House and that entourage right now is not only to punch down on the world's most vulnerable, on the people who are starving, on the people who are caught in wars, who need that assistance. It's not just the punching down, but it's also attempting to characterize the people who did that work with the USAID funding or the staff of that agency as criminal, as somehow unworthy of any consideration. So that too, this dehumanization, not only of the people that we assist, but of our colleagues in the sector that we saw busting their asses every day, trying

to get as much done quickly to save lives in these emergency contexts. It's, it's incredibly discouraging. And we know that the public doesn't agree with that. We, we have a lot of supporters around the world. We raise private funding for Doctors Without Borders. We know that people do care about this. So it belies the, some of the statements that

you'll hear from these, these folks in office right now and the, the, the loud ones who will disparage helping others, especially the most vulnerable. I have to let you go, but just in, in, in the last minute or so that we have, I mean, if you have that much money taken out of foreign aid, um, what, what does, what does the world look like without American leadership in that sector? If you have that much money taken out of foreign aid,

what does the world look like without American leadership in that sector? Well, the decisions that they have taken, and it sounds like they're pretty firm about it, will inevitably lead to preventable deaths, exclusion from healthcare, the resurgence of preventable diseases. Um, we are going to see much more suffering in the world.

You'll see, um, displaced people become refugees, refugees become migrants. Uh, people just will be searching any way to survive. Uh, and so the impacts are, are going to be widespread. How do you, how do you get out of bed in the morning? Knowing that.

Well, we have, we have meaningful work to do, Matt. I mean, it's, it's, it's too much. Obviously one organization or a few of us that don't take us government funding, uh, we don't have the capacity. Uh, you know, I'm responsible for about a one billion Canadian of our budget. That's what I have to raise every year to keep our wheels running across the world,

along with my colleagues all around the world. You know, we're all doing everything we can because we really believe in what we're doing, but we are not going to be able to respond to this. But you can bet that we're highly, but we are not going to be able to respond to this. But you can bet that we're highly motivated to step up and also to have the moral courage to say something about it. Because that's the other thing that's happened, of course, is that if you've lost all your funding from the government and you're crossing your fingers hoping that maybe you'll find yourself in their good graces again one day, you're not saying anything publicly about the devastating consequences of these decisions.

Avril, it's good to speak with you. Thank you very much for this. Thanks, Matt. Anytime. Avril Benoit is the CEO of Doctors Without Borders, Medecins Sans Frontières USA. She was in our New York City studio.