President Donald Trump’s cessation last week of the operations of USAID, the over 60-year-old agency which is the largest single funder of humanitarian aid programs in the world, has sent some 10,000 employees who lost their jobs overnight reeling and has devastated healthcare specialists in thousands of organizations reliant on USAID funding whose work on vital disease treatment and prevention is now in limbo.

There is Tanzania which is facing an outbreak of the Marlburg virus, a highly contagious hemorrhagic virus which is a cousin to Ebola, with a case fatality rate as high as nearly 90 percent.

While Trump was being inaugurated in Washington DC on 20 January, both USAID and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were using lessons learned from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which took two years and over $2 billion to contain, to find a way to stop the Marburg outbreak in Tanzania.

In Bolivia, a new outbreak of the extremely rare and Ebola-like Chapare hemorrhagic fever was being tracked, with officials scrambling for a response. Clearly these cases, both in Tanzania and in Bolivia, would have welcomed urgently needed succor from USAID. Sadly, none has, or will — perhaps forever — now be coming from the agency.

The shockwaves have rippled across many other parts of the world — starving Sudanese in war zones, Burmese refugees in Thailand who had been beneficiaries of USAID-funded charity groups, and in Afghanistan, the withdrawal of US-funded aid could likely result in 1,200 maternal deaths and as many as 109,000 additional unintended pregnancies within a three-year period, in 2025-2028, according to Asia Pacific, UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Regional Director Pio Smith.

He estimates 1.7 million people, including 1.2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, will be cut off from lifesaving sexual and reproductive services, with the shutting of over 60 health facilities.

Smith said ceasing USAID operations will also result in some 600,000 people in Bangladesh facing loss of access to critical maternal and reproductive health services. “This is not about statistics,” he said. “This is about real lives, the lives of literally the world’s most vulnerable people.”

For her part, Christine Stegling, deputy executive director of the Policy, Advocacy and Knowledge Branch at the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UN AIDS), says that over six million people could perish from HIV/AIDs in the next four years with the Trump administration’s pulling the plug on global funding for programs.

US donations account for the majority of global funding for the UN program operating in some 70 countries, leading global efforts to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.

Following his inauguration, Trump froze US foreign aid funding and on 3 February the US State Department announced that it would put USAID under the department.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the world’s leading HIV initiative, for life-saving humanitarian assistance. A waiver has been declared but no funds have been released. “If PEPFAR financial support isn’t reauthorized between 2025 and 2039, there would be a 400-percent increase in AIDS death,” warned Stegling.

“That’s 6.3 million AIDS-related deaths that will occur in the future; any penny, any cut, any pause will matter,” she stressed, urging UN member states to step in and help. “In Ethiopia, we have 5,000 public health worker contracts funded by US assistance. And all of these have been terminated.”

The Philippines is not exempt from the tremors caused by Trump’s clamping down on USAID.

Five projects under the Department of Education worth a total of about P5 billion are now floating In the air. The projects include one aimed at providing access to quality reading materials for early literacy development; the Gabay program for learners with disabilities; another one involving an alternative learning system; and one helping DepEd in designing, implementing and evaluating education programs from early childhood to workforce development.

The projects are part of DepEd’s five-point agenda tackling major issues in the Philippine education system, and where to get the money to fund them is now giving the department a headache.

DepEd Assistant Secretary Roger Masapol said that at least four of these five priority projects are focused on developing learning materials and policy formulation aligned with the reform vision of Education Secretary Sonny Angara.

As such, he stressed, “the department will not allow these critical reforms to be affected; we will find ways to keep the projects going.”

How? That’s the same searing question now being asked by implementing specialists, staff and overall administrators of tens of thousands of vital projects, many of life-and-death consequence to millions of people across the globe.