The Trump administration is terminating almost all foreign assistance grants to Central Asian countries, according to a document reportedly sent to the U.S. Congress this week outlining canceled and retained U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs.
If the document matches reality, it not only marks a devastating blow to U.S. soft power in the region but will have local impact.
Contrary to common belief, foreign aid is a miniscule part of the entire U.S. budget, and in Central Asia aid has been fairly even when viewed by sector, not skewed toward democracy promotion. For example, in 2023 — the most recent year for which complete data is available on Foreignassistance.gov — U.S. aid obligated to the five Central Asian states included $52.8 million for health programs, $40.9 million for economic development, $37.9 million for program support, $37.8 million for peace and security, $32.1 million for democracy, human rights, and governance programs, and $25 million for education and social services.
On March 10, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X:
After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID.
The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.
Punchbowl news had, days earlier, reported that a whistleblower gave members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a list of thousands of canceled USAID programs. Afterward a second list leaked, reportedly containing a list of active USAID projects.
On March 24, according to POLITICO, a document was sent to Congress outlining both active and terminated USAID programs. Justin Sandefur and Charles Kenny at the Center for Global Development did an analysis of the leaked documents and published estimates on the cuts regarding sector and scale relative to country programs.
“The country analysis suggests a number of country programs may have been effectively closed down, particularly in Central and East Asia but also in West Africa, Central Europe, and the Americas,” they wrote.
The document contains three tables: a summary table, a table of “active” programs, and a much longer table of “terminated awards.” According to the summary table there are 898 active programs and 5,241 terminated awards. The tables lists total estimated cost, obligated amount, and un-obligated remaining value.
The other two tables list a variety of information, including vendors and contract descriptions, award IDs, issuing offices, total estimated cost, “oblibated” amount (presumably a typo for “obligated”) as well as contract start and end dates. The award IDs are helpful in seeking further information about specific projects. (Note: When costs are stated below, I’m using the total estimated cost, not the “oblibated” amount — in same cases there is a huge difference, in others, none).
A few important caveats, which Sandefur and Kenny noted: First, the programs are listed with dollar amounts, but aid programs often stretch over multiple years. Sandefur and Kenny’s analysis used the amounts obligated dying FY24-25, according to Foreignassistance.gov — but not all the canceled awards match the database “so this figure will be an underestimate of the true scale of cuts.”
Second, Sandefur and Kenny make the assumption that the March 24 list is complete, meaning the active programs and terminated awards together represent the total. “Note also this misses any support provided through regional and global grants,” they pointed out. This last point is important as a certain degree of U.S. foreign assistance to the Central Asian region is provided regionally, not bilaterally.
The caveats in mind, the data is still devastating.
According to Sandefur and Kenny’s analysis, 100 percent of the country programs in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are being terminated while 78 percent of the Kyrgyzstan program and 69 percent of the Tajikistan programs are being canceled.
The regional programs that are listed as “active” in the document include three grants for food assistance via USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA): One for 131.32 metric tons of the “Harvest Lentil Pro (HLP)” for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan between September 2023 and September 2025 and a second for the same amount for Uzbekistan in the same period. Each grant has a listed cost of over $221,000. There is a third grant for HLP in the active list for Uzbekistan for September 2024 to September 2026. A 2020 factsheet, referring to food assistance to Uzbekistan, noted that “Harvest Lentil Pro (HLP)” is manufactured by an American company, Breedlove Dehydrated Foods.
There is a U.N. World Food Program grant for $17 million “to support social safety nets in Tajikistan with Ukraine Supplemental Funds. This includes school feeding and cash transfers for asset creation in vulnerable communities.”
Also in the active list is a nearly $22 million program titled “Cure Tuberculosis 2 Activity” issued by “USAID/Central Asia/Kazakhstan” and a $20 million cooperative agreement without an issuing office listed to “reduce the burden” of tuberculosis in Tajikistan.
And that’s it for Central Asia programs listed as active.
Among the canceled awards are a nearly $45 million contract with Tetra Tech ES: “Task Order to implement USAID Power Central Asia Activity Phase I.” The project, which appears to have launched in 2019 or 2020 and had been scheduled to run to 2026, aimed to “assist national governments, utilities, and other stakeholders to develop domestic energy market reforms, help strengthen the regional electricity market, and promote greater adoption of clean energy technologies from conventional and renewable sources.” According to the U.S. government, $35 million of the $44.8 million grant has already been outlayed.
Another award that was approaching its end-date and has been terminated is a $34 million project titled in the document “USAID Trade Central Asia.” The project’s award ID matches that of a 2022 contract intended “to increase the ceiling of the referenced contract by $15 million to add supplemental funding that will mitigate effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the economies and people of Central Asia.”
Other terminated awards include projects related to regional water management, rural water supply in Tajikistan, a livestock sector needs assessment in Turkmenistan, climate resilience in Kyrgyzstan, agribusiness development in Uzbekistan, combating tuberculosis in Uzbekistan (though a program targeting tuberculosis in Tajikistan has apparently survived), LGBT rights in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, anti-corruption in Kyrgyzstan, media and civil society development in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and many other projects big and small.
Some of the terminated projects were nearing completion, casting doubt on how much money has been “saved” by canceling them. Whatever the figure is, it is far short of the advertised savings. As to whether the canceled projects failed to advance core U.S. interests, that judgment rests not only on how one conceptualizes U.S. interests but also how one approaches international affairs more broadly.
