USAID Turmoil Threatens Key Aid Supplies to Gaza, Officials Say

The Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the United States Agency for International Development have endangered the funding for food, tents and medical treatment for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, according to U.S. officials and workers for humanitarian groups funded by the agency.

Officials said that the threats to the aid supply chain risked destabilizing the fragile cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which is contingent on the weekly entry of 4,200 aid and commercial trucks to the territory.

With almost all U.S.A.I.D. staff set to be placed on administrative leave by Friday night, there will be only a handful of officials left to sign off on and audit hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding payments to the agency’s partners on the ground in Gaza, raising alarm about how those groups will fund their operations.

Of more than 200 officials in the agency’s Mideast team, just 21 will remain in post to manage its entire regional portfolio, according to an internal agency email reviewed by The New York Times. The team that organizes emergency aid supplies in dozens of crisis zones around the world each year, of which Gaza was just one, is down to just 70 staff members from more than 1,000.

This is expected to slow or prevent the delivery of food packages to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as tents, mattresses, blankets, hygiene kits and medical treatment, according to three officials and an aid worker. All four people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

While the aid agency does not operate inside Gaza, it has provided roughly $1 billion in aid to international aid groups on the ground since the war began in October 2023 — about a third of the total aid response, according to the United Nations. Hundreds of millions of dollars have yet to be disbursed and now may never be transferred to United Nations agencies and other major aid organizations, three officials said.

“They’re making an already fragile cease-fire more fragile,” said Dave Harden, a former U.S.A.I.D. mission director for Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “Lifesaving aid to Gaza is going to be disrupted.”

The State Department, which oversees the aid agency, declined to comment. The agency’s director in Jerusalem referred reporters to the U.S.A.I.D. press department, which did not respond to requests for comment. It was unclear if it was still operational.

The World Food Program, the International Organization for Migration and the International Medical Corps, all of which distribute aid or run projects in Gaza funded by U.S.A.I.D., also declined to comment.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a television interview this week that the moves were “not about getting rid of foreign aid,” but an attempt to prevent “rank insubordination” by uncooperative workers.

The Trump administration says the agency wastes taxpayers’ money on costly and unfocused overseas programs that do little for the American people.

Mr. Rubio said that agency employees “take taxpayer money and they spend it as a global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest.”

Officials interviewed for this article said that the aid to Gaza was a clear example of how the agency’s work was helping to further President Trump’s stated foreign policy goals. He has repeatedly called for an extension of the cease-fire, which is partly dependent on the smooth flow of aid.

The virtual collapse of U.S.A.I.D. is expected to remove a key form of oversight over that aid delivery. The agency is set to lay off officials who monitor the distribution of supplies within the territory, three officials said, making it harder for the United States to assess who controls and receives the aid within areas run by Hamas.

It is also likely to sideline officials who previously coordinated between the Israeli military, the Egyptian government, the United Nations and private aid groups, helping various parties to troubleshoot problems in the supply chain and prevent soldiers from mistakenly firing on aid convoys. An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, confirmed the importance of the aid agency’s coordination role and said it was unclear which institution would step in to fill it.

Some aid and development programs in Gaza and the West Bank have already been halted or restricted after a freeze in January on most of U.S.A.I.D.’s programs and the firing or suspension of thousands of its workers. By the start of this week, more than half of the roughly 50 officials who work on the Gaza response in Jerusalem and Washington had already been placed on leave or had their contracts terminated.

They included a U.S.A.I.D. representative who worked from an Israeli military control room in Tel Aviv, helping to coordinate between the military and aid groups in Gaza, according to three U.S. officials.

The funding freezes have already suspended tens of millions of dollars earmarked for Gaza, including for water infrastructure, mobile hospital units and psychological support programs, according to one of the U.S. officials.

Among the groups affected was the International Medical Corps, a Los Angeles-based medical aid group funded by U.S.A.I.D. that runs two large field hospitals in Gaza. As a result, the group said in a statement that it may no longer be able to sustain an emergency room that treats up to 200 patients a day, an outpatient department that serves up to 2,000 people a day and a childbirth unit that delivers roughly 20 babies a day.

Anera, a Washington-based aid group, said in a statement that the freeze on a U.S.A.I.D. grant worth $50 million had forced it to suspend work on a program to restore Gaza’s decimated health services.

Tens of millions of dollars for West Bank and East Jerusalem projects have also been frozen, endangering key funds for several hospitals that President Biden pledged to sustain during a visit to the region in 2022.

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.