‘It’s tectonic:’ US foreign aid freeze deals a blow to research around the globe

6 Feb 2025 — Everything was ready to go. In late January, a consortium of researchers from eight African countries was set to launch a phase 1 clinical trial of two experimental HIV vaccines that would enroll dozens of volunteers in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda. “The vaccines are in the country. The regulators have approved the study. [Clinicians] at the sites have been trained,” says Glenda Gray, chief scientific officer at the South African Medical Research Council, who leads the BRILLIANT Consortium.

But the trial is off—at least for now. The consortium, which was awarded more than $45 million by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2023, has decided to put the research on hold after President Donald Trump’s administration announced a 3-month freeze on all U.S. foreign assistance on 20 January and ordered recipients of its funding to halt their work. “It would be unethical to start a study that you can’t guarantee you can continue,” Gray says. She doesn’t know yet whether the team will have to let the project’s scientists go or how the consortium will continue to pay for cold storage of the vaccines.

The global impact of the aid cutoff is “tectonic,” she says—“and that’s an understatement.”

BRILLIANT’s predicament is just one example of how the U.S. freeze on foreign aid—along with what appears to be the gutting of USAID itself this week—has dealt a blow to scientific research around the world. USAID-backed studies have been shuttered, data streams have dried up, researchers and technical staff have been fired or put on leave, a system to predict food crises has been muzzled, and a USAID-supported global health journal has stopped reviewing manuscripts.

For many scientists, the result has been chaos and uncertainty. Gray and her colleagues have been reaching out to philanthropic organizations and other possible funders for their HIV studies and are even looking into crowdfunding. “It’s incredibly tragic, from a science point of view, to not go forward with this study,” she says.

The agency at the center of the turmoil, USAID, devotes some $10 billion to global health, much of it for humanitarian assistance such as food and medications. But it also funds clinical trials on HIV and malaria vaccines and microbicides and supports other research projects.

In an interview from a factory floor in El Salvador on Monday, Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of State, argued that foreign aid spending does not support U.S. aims and that USAID, the main conduit for foreign assistance, has been recalcitrant. The agency, he said, has a history of “deciding that they are somehow a global charity separate from the national interest. These are taxpayer dollars.” Last night, USAID posted a notice saying all of its staff globally would be placed on administrative leave effective 7 February, with some exceptions for critical jobs. Staff posted overseas would be repatriated within 30 days.

Many observers expect legal challenges will stall or stop these moves and Rubio has granted a waiver to some “life-saving” health efforts, such as the distribution of anti-HIV drugs. But already, the freeze and USAID woes are disrupting research aimed at improving the health and lives of the world’s poorest people, as well as efforts to help build research capacity in developing nations.

The renowned International Research Centre for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) said last week it had laid off 1000 people and paused ten U.S.-funded studies and projects “in compliance with the Stop-Work Order, pending further directives” according to a spokesperson. (ICDDR,B receives funding from USAID as well as the National Institutes of Health.) The halted projects focused on tuberculosis, nutrition, fungal infection surveillance, and the risk of viral spillover from animals to humans.

“Important trials which will hopefully answer many critical questions … are being potentially jeopardized by this,” says Rachel Baggaley, an HIV specialist and former team lead for testing, prevention, and populations in the Department of Global HIV, Hepatitis and Sexually Transmitted Infections Programmes at the World Health Organization (WHO). “It’s sad and incomprehensible that things have come to this.”

USAID also works with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to improve disease diagnostics and has provided funding to 66 young researchers through the African Researchers’ Small Grants Program. Its Higher Education Solutions Network funds researchers in partner countries to collaborate with U.S. scientists, aiming to improve cervical cancer screening, assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and fight wildlife trafficking, for example.

Some scientists remain hopeful their projects will resume in weeks or months—counting on legal challenges to Trump’s actions. (The Congressional Research Service in a brief issued on Monday noted that “because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to…abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.“) But the interruption itself is causing “havoc,” says Timothy Mastro, an epidemiologist with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who previously led the global health nonprofit FHI 360, which receives most of its funding from USAID. “Uncertainty of timing puts the financial management of an organization into real disarray,” Mastro says.

Meanwhile agency staff overseeing the research have been sent packing. Margaret McCluskey, who runs an HIV vaccine research program at USAID, says she was told to hand in her badge, phone, and laptop on 29 January, after which she was escorted to her office to pick up six boxes worth of material collected over the years. “The security guards had tears coming down their cheeks,” says McCluskey, a nurse and public health specialist. “I was maybe the 200th person that they had to take upstairs that day.”

The $28 million USAID program that McCluskey ran had funded the BRILLIANT consortium and also IAVI, a U.S.-based nonprofit focused on HIV vaccines, as well as its collaborators in Africa and India. “I’m completely devastated,” McCloskey says. The pursuit of an HIV vaccine depends on global cooperation, she points out. “No one company, no one organization, can do this,” she says. “If America could do it alone, we’d have a vaccine. We can’t.”

USAID-funded staff at the $800 million President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) were pushed out as well, even as they were trying to salvage some of their work, says a veteran malaria expert who has been worked at various U.S. government agencies. PMI’s disassembly began early last week, he says, when USAID contract workers—who constitute the majority of staff—were fired. That left only 11 or so actual USAID employees, including PMI’s lead scientist and several section leaders. On Monday, all were “told to clear out their desks and be gone.”

The foreign aid freeze extends far beyond USAID, disrupting scientific efforts by other U.S. departments and nongovernmental organizations.

In Nepal, a U.S.-based nonprofit named the La Isla Network put on hold its work on chronic kidney disease, a deadly condition believed to be linked to heat stress and dehydration that has emerged as a threat to manual laborers in hot countries. Its work in Nepal has been funded by a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of State in 2023. Nepal is a major source of construction workers for hot Middle Eastern countries. La Isla has been working to gauge the size of the kidney disease problem and which parts of the country are hardest hit, while also working to reform how Nepalese workers are screened for health conditions before they travel.

La Isla’s work in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to test whether the disease could be reduced by workplace improvements such as shade and electrolyte-filled drinks, funded with $8 million from the Department of Labor, was subject to the freeze for a while as well. But on 2 February, La Isla CEO Jason Glaser received a notice from the Department of Labor that the money was once again available, and the work resumed. “Everybody’s in chaos,” Glaser says. “I think that’s the headline.”

USAID has also been the main funder of the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, which collects data in numerous developing countries every 3 to 5 years. It forms the basis for global child mortality estimates, for example, and helps track progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The data are used by thousands of researchers and policymakers around the world and show up in hundreds of papers every year, says a USAID staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity. Although existing data are still available, the collection of new data “will cease,” the source says.  A banner on the program’s homepage says it is “currently on pause” and “unable to respond to any data or other requests at this time.”

The website of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a USAID-funded program that has forecast food crises since 1985, has disappeared along with all of its data.

The pause has also paralyzed Global Health: Science and Practice (GHSP), an open-access journal supported by USAID. The 12-year-old publication has stopped reviewing manuscripts. Its future is unclear, but, “If GHSP ceases to exist, effects will be felt at the level of policies and programs, particularly in countries currently experiencing the worst health outcomes, notably in Africa,” says its editor-in-chief Stephen Hodgins, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Alberta.

Some scientists are baffled that the U.S. seems to be ready to give up a major source of soft power and goodwill. Nepal, for one thing, is a strategically important part of the world sandwiched between China and India, Glaser points out. “If we’re not there as a country giving them an alternative to Chinese investment, I guarantee you [China] will start funding the hospitals for goodwill.”

And much of the research, including the HIV vaccine work, benefits the U.S. as well, McCluskey says. “Finding an HIV vaccine is fundamental to national security. It’s fundamental to our foreign policy, and always has been.”

Baggaley is still hopeful that relationships can be reestablished. The turmoil at USAID “comes after many years, if not decades, of U.S. funding for important research in various places around the globe,” she says. “It’s important for the U.S. to really see that. It’s not only a huge benefit to the countries where they work, but there’s also massive benefits to people from other countries, including from the U.S.”

By Catherine Offord, Martin Enserink