USAID

Overview

The United States Agency for International Development — USAID — was the U.S. government’s leading international humanitarian and development arm for more than six decades (Congressional Research Service). Created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, made a separate statutory agency by Congress in 1998, it was dismantled in 2025, when the Trump administration ended its independent operations and folded the surviving programs into the U.S. Department of State (Office of the Historian; Congressional Research Service; The Hill).

Most coverage falls into two buckets: the agency’s long institutional biography, or the 2025 headlines about its destruction. The part competitors rarely connect is the symmetry. USAID was born inside the State Department’s orbit in 1961 — its responsibilities conferred by a State Department delegation of authority — and its remaining functions returned to the State Department in 2025. Its run as a separate statutory agency lasted 27 years.

Creation and a separate statute, 1961–1998

On October 3, 1961, Fowler Hamilton was sworn in as Administrator of the new Agency for International Development. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 had specified that a new agency would replace the International Cooperation Administration and the Development Loan Fund; Executive Order 10973, dated November 3, 1961, specified the terms of the agency’s establishment, and State Department Delegation of Authority No. 104, also dated November 3, conferred specific responsibilities on it (Office of the Historian).

The agency grew into what the Congressional Research Service called “the leading international humanitarian and development arm of the U.S. government.” In fiscal year 2015 it was responsible for more than $20 billion in appropriations; in fiscal year 2013 it provided assistance to 125 countries; and it maintained more than 60 country and regional missions, delivering most of its work through grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts with nonprofit organizations, for-profit contractors, universities, international organizations, and foreign governments (Congressional Research Service).

Its institutional standing was contested for much of its life. In 1997, amid congressional critics who wanted to radically restructure or abolish the agency, the Clinton administration proposed a foreign-affairs reorganization that let USAID remain a separate statutory agency with its own appropriation, while its Administrator would report to and sit under the direct authority and foreign policy guidance of the Secretary of State. Congress approved the arrangement in the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, signed into law on October 21, 1998 (Congressional Research Service).

The 2025 dismantling

Shortly after taking office in January 2025, President Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on all U.S. foreign aid (RBC-Ukraine). The freeze suspended more than 80 percent of USAID’s grant programs, and most of the agency’s staff were laid off or placed on administrative leave (RBC-Ukraine). The dismantling was driven in part by the Department of Government Efficiency; Jeremy Lewin, a former DOGE staffer, wrote that the State Department would “seek to retire USAID’s independent operation, consistent with applicable law,” and that the department intended to assume responsibility for many of the agency’s functions and its ongoing programming (The Hill).

On March 28, 2025, the administration moved to formally end the agency: reduction-in-force notices went to the remaining staff, all remaining functions were to be absorbed into the State Department effective July 1, and operations would be substantially transferred or wound down by September 2. A memo to Congress put the remaining workforce at just 900 employees, at an agency that had once employed 10,000 (The Hill).

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that day: “Unfortunately, USAID strayed from its original mission long ago. As a result, the gains were too few and the costs were too high,” adding, “Thanks to President Trump, this misguided and fiscally irresponsible era is now over” (The Hill). The contrast with Rubio’s own earlier record was sharp. In 2019 he had said, “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you. Foreign aid is less than one percent of our budget,” and that same year he posted a photo from a USAID facility in Colombia preparing food assistance for Venezuela, calling its president “pure evil” for blocking the deliveries (The Hill).

On July 1, 2025, USAID officially ceased implementing foreign assistance. In a Substack statement, Rubio said programs that aligned with administration policy and advanced American interests would be administered by the State Department “with more accountability, strategy, and efficiency.” He cited a review of thousands of programs and more than $715 billion in inflation-adjusted lifetime spending; pointed to $9.3 billion spent since 1991 in Gaza and the West Bank — part of which, he said, had been funneled to organizations linked to Hamas affiliates — and declared that future American aid would carry a single emblem, the American flag, so recipients would know it was “not a handout from an unknown NGO, but an investment from the American people,” prioritizing “trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance” (RBC-Ukraine). Experts warned that rolling back USAID-funded programs could cause more than 14 million deaths in low-income countries in the coming years (RBC-Ukraine) — a projection reported as an expert warning, not this profile’s finding.

The court fight over the money

While the agency was being dismantled, its grantees fought the funding freeze in court — and the courts kept declining to settle the underlying constitutional question. In February 2025, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali issued a temporary restraining order against the freeze; on February 28 he ordered the administration to release roughly $2 billion in already-obligated funds by midnight (Washington Technology). On March 5, 2025, the Supreme Court voted 5–4 to deny the administration’s emergency request to stay Ali’s order — Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett — a ruling that applied to already-obligated aid and contractor payments (Washington Technology). The plaintiffs included the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Journalism Development Network, and the Global Health Council (Washington Technology).

On August 13, 2025, a divided D.C. Circuit panel voted 2–1 — Judges Henderson and Katsas in the majority — to partially vacate Ali’s preliminary injunction, holding that the grantees lacked a valid legal basis for that injunction. The panel explicitly did not rule on the merits of whether the president may override Congress’s power of the purse. Judge Pan dissented, writing that the president lacks the authority to disobey the law for policy reasons “in no uncertain terms.” About $4 billion in USAID global health funding and $6 billion in HIV/AIDS funding were at issue (Associated Press).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim Congress formally abolished USAID by statute; what the sources document is the end of its independent operations and the transfer of its functions to the State Department. It does not cover the September 2025 “pocket rescission” coda — Judge Ali’s September 3 ruling, the D.C. Circuit’s September 5 refusal to halt it, and the Supreme Court’s September 9 pause — which was not researched in full-read sources this session. It does not assert the specific 83-percent / 5,200-program figures from the March 10, 2025 announcement, using instead the “more than 80 percent of grant programs” figure from a full-read source. The 14-million-deaths projection is reported as an expert warning, not endorsed. Program-level impacts on individual portfolios such as PEPFAR or food aid were not researched beyond the funding figures cited above.