“Uganda’s Ebola outbreak occurred on the same day as the foreign aid freeze. Despite that, the waiver for assistance in addressing the outbreak was quickly reinstated,” the State Department told WIRED in a statement. “This is a process. If errors are made, they will be flagged and corrected as needed, while striving to do what’s best for the American people.”
Other lifesaving USAID programs ostensibly granted humanitarian waivers have encountered similar issues. Earlier this month, WIRED reported that the food aid and famine prevention program FEWS NET remains inactive, despite having received a waiver, with many of the workers who had implemented the program furloughed or laid off. This is still true today. “We have not yet been able to resume any activities,” says Payal Chandiramani, a spokesperson for Chemonics, the international firm implementing a large portion of the program.
Meanwhile, lifesaving AIDS and HIV programs are also not resumed. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is one of USAID’s most high-profile success stories, credited with saving over 26 million lives since former President George W. Bush founded the program in 2003. Around the same time Musk was joking about his USAID blunders with Trump officials, PEPFAR’s supporters gathered for a protest in Washington, DC, to draw attention to the impact of losing these programs. Despite receiving a waiver, PEPFAR has not been able to resume its work, along with other stymied AIDS-related programs, with funding and staffing cuts hampering the program. “The waivers have not been working,” says Emory Babcock, a former USAID contractor working on PEPFAR laid off at the beginning of DOGE’s cuts.
On the same day as Musk’s comments, the Trump administration terminated over 10,000 global health grants from USAID and the State Department, killing a variety of services that had been granted a lifesaving waiver.
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, a nonprofit that often receives funding from USAID and works with PEPFAR, got notice on Wednesday that three of its project agreements with USAID had been terminated, despite previously receiving approval to resume activities under the PEPFAR waiver. The programs support over 350,000 patients in Lesotho, Eswatini, and Tanzania, including 10,000 children. “There’s nothing left,” says Russell. “The collateral damage is piles of bodies.”
Even though a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze foreign aid funds to temporarily fulfill outstanding bills and payments owed to contractors around the world, the Supreme Court stayed the order on Wednesday night, which means aid groups—including those working on infectious disease prevention in Africa—continue to go unpaid for services rendered, in some cases preventing any further lifesaving work.
Meanwhile, a new, deadly hemorrhagic fever has emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past five weeks, with over 60 people already dead, and the number of people falling sick still rising. Although it causes a violent, rapid cascade of symptoms, including vomiting blood, it is not Ebola, nor Marburg, but instead appears to be an unknown disease. A USAID worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity tells WIRED: “We have nobody on the ground to monitor this.”
Update 2/27/25 6:21 ET: This story has been updated with comment from the CDC.
