In January, Gunja Kirti was a part-time consultant with a humanitarian organisation working for gender rights when the company offered her a full-time role to lead their programme in India.

“At that point I was also consulting with other organisations, but I decided to take the job offer and withdrew my services from other organisations,” Kirti told Scroll.

But on January 20, US President Donald Trump issued a freeze order on all foreign assistance disbursed by the US Agency for International Development or USAID.

The effect on the organisation’s work in India was immediate. Ten days later, Kirti received an email informing her that the firm would not implement any other projects. On January 31, her job offer was withdrawn. “I am currently jobless,” she said.

A series of programmes in the social, health, education, and renewable energy sectors in India have been put on hold and lay-offs are in line following Trump’s executive order pausing all US foreign assistance from the State Department and US Agency for International Development.

Around the same time as Kirti accepted the job offer, South Asia Regional Energy Partnership – a US government programme to create sustainable energy in the region – had hired a 35-year-old public relations officer in their Delhi office.

By then, SAREP had received $1.8 million to improve access to affordable and sustainable energy in India, shows data from the US government’s foreign assistance dashboard on funds allotted to each country.

But the freeze order meant ongoing projects would halt, so would new appointments. The 35-year-old public relations officer was informed that her appointment would be withdrawn. “They intimated me immediately after the executive order came,” the PR executive said. “Several of their projects have also been halted.”

For 2025, USAID had already disbursed $31 million to India when Trump put a freeze on the funds.

“The impact [of stopping USAID] is multi-dimensional,” Kirti said. Not only have field-level volunteers and white-collar professionals like her lost their jobs, several vendors and service providers are waiting for their bills to be cleared. “But most importantly, community work has been affected,” she said.

The organisation where she consulted worked in Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to provide women access to government welfare schemes and protection from domestic violence.

Each month, over 300 women would turn up at each centre of theirs seeking help in registering a police complaint against domestic violence or for documentation to avail a welfare scheme. “There is no place for those women to go now,” Kirti said.

On March 10, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that 5,200 out of 6,200 programmes funded by USAID would be cancelled. That means 83% of their programmes globally will come to an end.

For India, that would mean a sudden disappearance of various community-level projects. But an immediate repercussion will be thousands of job losses of those directly or indirectly on USAID’s payroll. A former Tata Trust consultant told Scroll that “the market is flooded with senior level executives looking for a job”.

The impact

In a statement on January 26, the spokesperson for the US Department of State said, “President Trump stated clearly that the United States is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people.” Foreign aid will undergo a “deliberate and judicious review”, it said.

In the past decade, USAID has disbursed $1.2 billion to India. For 2025, $31 million has been disbursed. Between 2022 and 2024, aid totaling to $554 million has been disbursed.

Madhurima Mallik, media advisor at the Delhi office of International Planned Parenthood Federation, which works with partner nonprofits on sexual and reproductive health, said the USAID freeze has affected funds for a research project on sensitising women about their reproductive rights with the Family Planning Association of India.

Outside India, Mallik said the fund freeze had led to lay-offs on a large scale in Bangladesh and Afghanistan, where charitable organisations heavily rely on foreign aid.

In Bangladesh, an organisation working on LGBTQ rights was forced to let go of over 100 employees within two hours of US’s executive orders.

Another organisation, Population Services and Training Centre, which works on maternal and child health in Bangladesh, is estimated to have laid off 500 employees who were working on four different projects. “We will have to find alternate sources of funding for our member associations in these countries,” Mallik said.

An employee of a UN agency that works on migration and has an office in Delhi, said a refugee resettlement programme in India was shut down after the freeze on aid. The programme provided resettlement, relocation and repatriation for those displaced by disaster or violence. This specific component was funded by USAID.

“The executive order means all our procedures have been stopped,” said the employee requesting anonymity.

The Delhi office of this organisation will lay off 15 to 20 employees. “All components of our project have ended,” said the employee. “Our contract will end next month.” This means shelters and livelihood support for migrant workers or those trafficked will end.

Purnima Singh, social media officer at International Planned Parenthood Federation’s South Asia region, said within India several organisations that work on sexual and reproductive health are majorly funded through USAID and will suffer a setback.

An official from another NGO working on sexual and reproductive health in India said she had incentivised 18 start-ups to work on sexual and reproductive health as a business model. “We were supporting these enterprises by providing technical assistance,” the official said.

With the Trump order, the NGO now does not have the funds to pay the enterprises. “We received a stop-work order on January 27. We can’t send any money even if it is pre-approved,” the official said.

Small NGOs that are indirectly funded by USAID will be forced to lay off field-level workers, who are the first point of contact for the community.

Many NGOs are now looking at alternative funding options. Several told Scroll that they suspect the funds from Gates Foundation and from the World Bank are also set to shrink.

Projects affected

The health sector was the largest beneficiary of USAID with $16 million disbursed for 2025, $79 million in 2024 and $120 million in 2023. Apart from health, funds had also been disbursed for the education sector, governance, infrastructure and economic growth of India in 2025.

Amongst the highly-funded programmes in 2025 is Nishtha, a primary-level healthcare project working in 582 districts of India on tuberculosis, HIV, adolescent health, pandemic preparedness, maternal and child health and family planning.

For Nishtha, USAID had disbursed $1.5 million to its implementing partner, the John Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics, or JHPIEGO.

One of the largest implementing partners for USAID in India, it has provided technical assistance in establishing more than 66,900 Ayushman Arogya Mandirs across 14 Indian states.

Another project called Trees Outside Forests in India, in partnership with the environment ministry, was working on increasing tree cover outside the forest region. For 2025, USAID had disbursed $1.3 million for projects in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Haryana, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

Another five-year project to improve civic conditions and representation in Tibetan settlements in India had received $1.3 million. The project was going to end in August 2026 before USAID abruptly cut funds this year.

With a funding of $1,1 million, Project Accelerate, handled by John Hopkins University, looked at creating models for improving HIV testing and treatment services in India. The project was scheduled to run till December 2026.

Another programme that will be adversely affected is Support for Urban Water and Sanitation in India, or SUWASI, that provides safe drinking water and improves sanitation. The implementing agency, KPMG International, was given $1.04 million this year. The project was supposed to end by March 2026.

Pandemic preparedness

The US’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization also has implications for India.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan, former chief scientist at the World Health Organization and principal advisor to India’s National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme, said the funding crunch will hit emergency programmes. The withdrawal of the US from the global health body will affect technical guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The early detection part [in a pandemic] requires that all countries have capacity – lab, data, people to do testing, and kits,” said Swaminathan. “CDC was building this capacity.”

She said that preparedness for an outbreak will also suffer. “If the US is not part of data sharing, many other countries will also get reluctant,” she added.