The US State Department announced, on Wednesday, that the United States has reduced $ 54 billion, or 92 percent, the budgets for development programs and multi -year foreign aid.
“At the conclusion of the operation led by the US Agency for International Development, including the segments that Foreign Minister Marco Rubio personally reviewed, approximately 5,800 grants of total value of $ 54 billion were set to cancel it within the framework of America’s agenda first – which means a 92 percent reduction,” the ministry spokesman said in a statement.
On January 20, on the first day of his return to the White House, Trump signed an executive order to freeze US foreign aid for 90 days.
On that day, the Republican President said that this freezing period is imperative to conduct a full review to assess the extent of the agency’s compliance with the policy he intends to follow, especially the fight against programs that promote abortion and family planning and those that call for diversity and integration.
However, at the request of two organizations, Federalism decided, at the request of two organizations that gathered companies, NGOs and other beneficiaries of American aid money, to suspend the executive order issued by Trump and practically frozen expenditures approved by Congress.
As part of this procedure, Foreign Minister Marco Rubio, who supervises the American Agency for International Development, and based on a review conducted by his ministry for the “US ID” programs, decided to cancel nearly 5,800 aid programs worldwide and to keep about 500 other programs, according to court documents.
In addition, Rubio decided to cancel about 4,100 financing grants for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and keep about 2,700 other directions, the Trump administration announced.
Trump’s decision to freeze external aid sparked a shock within the USD, the independent agency established under a law issued by the US Congress in 1961 and runs an annual budget of $ 42.8 billion.
The agency’s budget represents 42 percent of the total humanitarian aid that is distributed all over the world.
On Thursday, the US State Department spokesman said that “these logical cancellation will allow offices, along with contracting and grant officials, focusing on the remaining programs, finding additional competencies, and allocating subsequent programs in a closer way to the priorities of the America administration first.”
He added that the aid programs that were not appeared in the reduction included food aid and life -saving medical treatments for diseases such as HIV and malaria, and aid to countries among them, especially Lebanon, Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela.
