Alongside the 90-day freeze of foreign assistance projects launched by the US administration, USAID has seen a number of contracts and grants terminated early during the period since January 24^th. Wayan Vota has been compiling a spreadsheet of these agreements. With the caveats that this is likely only a partial list of cancelled activities, covering a range of different contract and agreement forms including indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts that specify maximum potential rather than actual values, and the descriptions of those activities are themselves partial, it is interesting to look at what the project list suggests about the administration’s targets for assistance cuts.

These cancelled agreements add up to a little over $4 billion, equivalent to about 14 percent of the total of about $30 billion in prime awards by USAID (i.e., those to major contractors, not including subcontractors) in 2024. There are a wide range of sectors covered including health, education, governance, energy, climate, and the private sector.

Looking at a word count from agreement descriptions (see the table below), the obvious sectoral outlier is election-related contracts, with the words “elections”/“electoral”/”elected” appearing 64 times in cancelled agreements totaling about $533 million. Election-related contracts make up about 4 percent of USAID spending in FY24 but about 12 percent of cuts. The Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, the umbrella organization of the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, had $745 million in USAID agreements in operation in FY2024. It has already lost $361 million in cancelled agreements.

In the word count, “women’s rights” and “youth” both appear 15 times and “gender” appears 4 times. (Notably the words “orientation,” “sexual,” and “transgender” don’t appear at all). There are a number of health projects among the cancelled agreements, but they appear under-represented given the share of USAID financing that goes to health. And the health projects that do appear focus on governance and institutions rather than specific conditions: the words “TB”/“Tuberculosis,” “HIV”/“AIDS,” “malaria,” “infant,” “maternal,” and “nutrition” are all absent from this set of cancelled agreements.

In terms of geography, it appears Moldova comes in for special attention. Agreements covering activities in the country lost $163 million, compared to $309 million obligated to projects in the country in 2023 according to foreignassistance.gov.

Cancellations have been unevenly distributed amongst USAID largest grant and contract partners. USAID’s three biggest contractual partners in FY2024—the World Bank Group, the UN World Food Programme, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have seen no agreements terminated, nor have two others in the top ten in 2024: UNICEF and Catholic Relief Services. But four other top-ten partners—Chemonics, DAI, FHI 360, and RTI—have seen cancellations worth between about 22 and 55 percent of their FY2024 agreement values. The final top-ten FY2024 supplier, the International Organization for Migration, has seen cancellations equal to about six percent of FY2024 active agreement value.

It is worth noting this is only the start of proposed agreement terminations and the spending freeze has had the effect of shuttering many organizations that heavily rely on USAID funding even if the activities supported end up being greenlighted (this added to the fact that few new contracts are being issued at the moment). It is also near the start of legal challenges against the process and Congressional involvement in next steps.

Word counts from descriptions of cancelled agreements