CARE USA, the humanitarian organization headquartered in Atlanta, says it has laid off hundreds of employees across the nation and thousands abroad in the wake of the Trump administration’s massive cuts to federal foreign aid.
Founded at the end of World War II, the nonprofit has also temporarily slashed wages for its employees, including CEO Michelle Nunn, said Ritu Sharma, CARE’s vice president of U.S. programs and policy advocacy.
About $165 million in CARE’s USAID grant funding has been cut, canceling 46 aid programs in 32 countries. Combined, those programs served nearly 18.4 million people. Some was meant to help improve education in Ghana and Somalia and expand internet access in India.
In all, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency is claiming $14.6 billion in savings from cuts to USAID grants, according to an analysis of federal records by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
Of that amount, according to the analysis, $353 million was cut from USAID grants that had been awarded to CARE and other organizations in Georgia, including the Carter Center and the Task Force for Global Health.
The cuts have created a painful domino effect for an ecosystem of related organizations and businesses. CARE, for example, pointed to foreign companies that help it provide humanitarian aid.
“If the money stops flowing to them, they don’t have the wherewithal to continue,” Sharma said. “That partner infrastructure has just been devastated. How are we going to go ahead with implementing our programs in-country, if there isn’t an infrastructure of local organizations?”
The funding cuts came after Trump signed an executive order in January, pausing all foreign aid for 90 days for a review.
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases are antithetical to American values,” Trump’s order says. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
On Feb. 3, Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s acting administrator.
In a March 4 memo, Nicholas Enrich, USAID’s then-acting assistant administrator for global health, warned that pausing foreign aid would “lead to increased death and disability, accelerate global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public health.”
Days later, Rubio announced the Trump administration was canceling 83% of USAID’s programs, consisting of 5,200 contracts. And in a March 28 email, a DOGE official told USAID employees their agency’s operations would be transferred to the State Department or “otherwise wound down” by Sept. 2.
Rubio spoke about the overhaul on Capitol Hill this month.
“Yes, we canceled a bunch of contracts in USAID. Some were stupid and outrageous. Others didn’t serve the national interest. And others we kept,” Rubio told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 21. “Foreign aid is not charity. It is designed to further the national interests of the United States.”
A day earlier, Democratic lawmakers grilled Rubio about the cuts during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada told Rubio he had “kneecapped foreign assistance, including programs that you previously championed, and made America less safe, less strong, less prosperous in doing so.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told Rubio he regretted voting to confirm him as secretary of state. Rubio fired back: “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”
The State Department released a statement in response to a list of questions The Atlanta Journal-Constitution emailed the agency for this article. Among other things, the newspaper asked the agency to respond to the layoffs and wage reductions happening in Georgia as a result of the USAID grant cancellations.
“As Secretary Rubio has said, we are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens,” the agency said. “We are continuing essential lifesaving programs and making strategic investments that strengthen our partners and our own country.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
The cuts are also affecting businesses in Georgia. Among them is the Vernonburg Group, a Savannah-based consulting firm. It is grappling with a roughly $50 million cut in USAID grant funding. The money was meant to help expand internet access to people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. The cut has forced the company to slash employee wages and lay off two of its workers, Vernonburg CEO Paul Garnett said.
“We are certainly disappointed that the agreement was terminated,” said Garnett, who is also experiencing a pay cut. “But we actually are still keen to work with the new administration to continue this work because we do think this is very well-aligned with President Donald Trump’s trade and foreign policy priorities.”
Like CARE, other humanitarian organizations in Georgia have lost substantial federal funding.
The Center for American Progress analysis shows DOGE is claiming $27.9 million in savings from a cut to a USAID grant for the Task Force for Global Health. Based in Decatur, the research nonprofit focuses on eliminating diseases in tropical countries, including intestinal worms; trachoma, an eye disease that can cause blindness; and lymphatic filariasis, which is commonly known as elephantiasis, a painful and disfiguring disease.
The funding cut has forced the nonprofit to lay off a few employees, said Patrick Lammie, who directs its Neglected Tropical Diseases Support Center. Like Sharma, Lammie pointed to the broader impact of the Trump administration’s decisions.
“While I am disappointed at the loss of the funding to the Task Force to support the operational research,” Lammie said, “it is much more upsetting for me, who has worked in this area for more than 30 years, to see the fundamental architecture that USAID supported basically disrupted.”
The Atlanta-based Carter Center has experienced $7.7 million in reductions to its USAID grants, according to the Center for American Progress analysis. That grant funding was meant to aid Bangladeshi women and to help eliminate river blindness, a skin and eye disease caused by a parasitic worm.
“There is good evidence that these fractional investments in global stability make the U.S. stronger, safer, and more prosperous,” Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander said in a statement from the nonprofit. “The loss of these interventions makes America a less reliable partner and will negatively affect us at home when these global issues land on our doorstep.”
Georgia-based Habitat for Humanity has experienced a $63,561 cut in USAID grant funding for a graduate student research fellowship related to humanitarian shelters and settlements. A different federal funding cut prompted the housing nonprofit to end a solid waste management project in Haiti two months early.
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