Congress Voted to Cut $7.9 Billion in Foreign Aid. The White House Canceled $4.9 Billion More Without a Vote.

For sixty-four years, the United States Agency for International Development ran the government's foreign assistance programs.▸ In 2025 it stopped. On March 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on his official account that "after a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID," putting the count at 5,200 terminated contracts. By July 1, USAID had formally ceased to implement foreign assistance and its surviving functions moved to the State Department. What was left of the money went two different ways: some of it Congress voted to cut, and some of it the White House canceled on its own.

Congress has one lawful way to cancel money it already appropriated: the president proposes a rescission, and both chambers have 45 days to pass it into law.▸ That's what happened in July. The Rescissions Act of 2025 — Public Law 119-28 — passed the House on June 12, passed the Senate on July 17, and was signed on July 24. It permanently canceled $7.9 billion in foreign assistance funding, plus $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Both chambers voted. The money was gone through the front door.

Five weeks later, the administration used the back door.▸ On August 28, the White House announced a "pocket rescission" — sending Congress a proposal to cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid so close to the September 30 fiscal-year deadline that the money would expire before the 45-day review clock ran out, whether or not Congress voted at all.

The Government Accountability Office reviewed the same package and did not clear it.▸ GAO has long held that the Impoundment Control Act does not let a president withhold funds past the date they expire — and every account in the August 28 message expired September 30, well before Congress's 45-day review window would have closed on October 23. The White House used the maneuver anyway, the first time in nearly 50 years anyone has tried it, according to Secretary Rubio.

None of that money moves itself.▸ It used to move through an agency with offices in dozens of countries and a workforce sized to match. The State Department's own inspector general audited what replaced it.

In fiscal 2024, USAID employed roughly 4,500 domestic direct-hire staff, 5,000 locally employed staff — mostly non-U.S. nationals working in the countries where the aid was delivered — and more than 1,000 personal services contractors: about 10,500 people in total.▸ The Secretary of State's approved plan for absorbing USAID's surviving functions calls for 308 direct-hire staff, 370 locally employed staff, and 40 contractors — 718 people, a 93% reduction. The inspector general's finding was not that the cut was too deep or too shallow; it was that the number wasn't tied to any strategic workforce plan at all, and that the working group responsible for managing the transition was itself scheduled to disband before the realignment was finished.

Dollar and staffing figures in this piece come from the specific documents cited inline and in Sources below; figures describing ongoing litigation or disputed program counts reflect the state of the record as of this writing and may be superseded by later court rulings or agency data.