US President Donald Trump has barely warmed his seat in the Oval Office at the White House, and already he has upended global development by issuing a broad stop-work order on all US foreign assistance programs, including those of the nearly six-decade-old US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In one stroke, Trump removed over 50 USAID career service officers and erased its account from the internet. Meanwhile, his Secretary of State, Marc Rubio, announced that henceforth, the foreign assistance agency — which administers billions in foreign aid annually and serves as a key tool in promoting American soft power globally — is now under the State Department.

Employees at USAID’s Washington, D.C., headquarters have either been locked out or suspended as part of the restructuring. Elon Musk, a major Trump campaign donor who has been given authority to cut costs and shrink the federal government, has described USAID — without evidence — as “a criminal organization” whose “time to die” has come.

What Trump and Musk are dismantling is an agency established in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War to better coordinate foreign assistance — a key platform of US foreign policy in countering Soviet influence.

Today, USAID, with a total workforce of some 100,000 — two-thirds of whom are deployed overseas — leads the US in various initiatives in 30 strategically important countries and nations in need. The agency, which also assists US commercial interests by supporting economic growth in developing countries and building their capacities to participate in world trade, receives funding from Congress through administration requests.

As of 2023, USAID recipients included Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, South Sudan and Nigeria.

In Asia, the Philippines has been one of USAID’s first partner countries since its launch in 1961. From 2001 to 2023, the agency disbursed approximately $3 billion for various programs and projects in the country. In 2023 alone, USAID allocated $198 million for different initiatives, while last year, assistance reached $180 million for health and population, governance, and education-related projects.

USAID assistance to Philippine projects, as well as critical initiatives like the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET), is now in limbo.

Established by USAID — alongside other agencies, including NASA — FEWS NET was launched as part of a global effort to prevent a repeat of the devastating 1984 famine in Ethiopia. It is regarded as the gold standard in using weather data and political analysis to predict drought and food insecurity globally.

The system, which relies on satellite-enabled remote sensing data and collaborative networks across the US government and beyond, is crucial in an era of increasingly extreme weather impacts. Along with a model run by the UN, FEWS NET has allowed aid officials to preemptively target emergency food supplies, mitigating the effects of the severe drought that struck the Horn of Africa in 2016.

It has also been instrumental in directing aid during the current famine in Sudan, where civil war continues to wreak havoc.

And now, this critical system — described by Dave Harden, who oversaw its operation during the 2016 East Africa food security crisis, as “insanely important”— has been yanked offline.

On Monday, the doors to USAID’s Washington, D.C., office were shut, and the agency’s director of security and his deputy were placed on administrative leave. Earlier, on Saturday, they had barred a group from Musk’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency, who had demanded access to USAID’s secure systems. An enraged Trump took to social media, harshly criticizing USAID as an agency “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.”

Not so, says Noam Unger, former director of USAID’s Policy Office under three presidents, including Trump during his first administration. The people working with the agency, Unger explained, are “a particularly dedicated and highly trained group, many of whom are experts with years of experience in specialty areas of agriculture, economics, security, and public health — all exemplary public servants, many of whom routinely put their lives on the line.”

Instead of dismantling an agency devoted to burnishing America’s reputation among its allies and maintaining its standing as a leader in global humanitarian and development assistance, Trump should be more concerned about the vacuum that the cessation of US aid will create — a vacuum that America’s adversaries will be eager to fill.

China’s influence in many parts of the world, including Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, has been growing.

In Q3 2023, the China Development Bank announced the release of $160 billion to finance hundreds of projects across Latin America. At the same time, while sub-Saharan Africa has historically received the most aid from the US, China has been expanding its presence in the region by offering competitive assistance.

Diminishing or altogether ending USAID could be a massive mistake. It would provide China with an opportunity to expand its power, weaken American leadership, and leave the world even more susceptible to Beijing’s influence.