President Donald Trump‘s decision to put a halt to most foreign-aid funding has caused “irreparable” damage to America’s standing abroad and strengthened adversaries including China and Russia, former senior Republican and Democratic officials wrote in a new court filing.
The Trump administration has destroyed the United States’ “credibility as a reliable partner” to allies around the world by dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the former top diplomats, defense and national security officials from past Republican and Democratic administrations said in a blistering amicus brief filed Monday in federal court.
The list of former officials who signed the brief includes Eric Edelman, a former senior Defense Department official under George W. Bush, Richard Greene, the director of U.S. Foreign Assistance under Bush, and the Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Perry.
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The freeze on foreign aid funding has “created vacuums of need all around the world, ceding influence and permitting China and Russia to seize those opportunities left behind,” the officials wrote in the brief, a copy of which was viewed by Newsweek.
“When you abruptly cut off really important assistance, [other nations] lose confidence and trust in us,” former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who also signed onto the amicus brief, said in an interview with Newsweek. “China and other nations will fill that vacuum,” added Hagel, a former Republican senator who led the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
“The damage is extraordinary,” Wendy Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of the State Department under former President Joe Biden, told Newsweek. “Children are going to die as a result of the destruction of USAID. But even beyond that, which is appalling, this is critical for U.S. national security.”
USAID programs have helped stop the spread of disease, combatted terrorism and provided aid to Israel and other allies, said Sherman, who signed the amicus brief filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Sherman noted that USAID funding has also gone toward strengthening law enforcement and curbing drug smuggling from Latin America to the U.S, one of Trump’s top domestic priorities.
“That money and those programs are now gone,” Sherman said. “That undermines the very objective the president has ostensibly laid out” in securing the Southern border.
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Trump has faced heavy criticism for the deep cuts he’s made to USAID in the first weeks of his second term. But the latest court filing underscores the growing level of concern in foreign policy and national security circles over the dismantling of a program that has enjoyed broad bipartisan support since its founding in 1961.
Trump targeted USAID on his first day back in office with a Jan. 20 executive order stating that the agency’s aid was “in many cases antithetical to American values.” The cuts are part of billionaire Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative to slash federal spending and shrink the federal bureaucracy.
DOGE has already eliminated 83 percent of USAID’s programs, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration official in charge of dismantling the agency.
“Hardworking staff [at DOGE] worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform,” Rubio said of the agency cuts, in a March 11 post on X, the social media platform owned by Musk.
Rubio’s comments came hours before a federal judge in the District of Columbia ordered the administration to pay $2 billion in frozen USAID contracts. Judge Amir H. Ali ruled that Trump overstepped his authority by “unlawfully impounding” funding appropriated by Congress.
The decision followed a Supreme Court ruling March 5 rejecting the Trump administration’s request to keep billions in USAID funding frozen.
