Amid the flurry of executive orders President Trump signed on his first day in office was one that called for a 90-day pause and review of all foreign assistance programs. Three months later, that has resulted in the cancellation of thousands of contracts and grants distributed through the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the gutting of the agency’s workforce.
Portland-based Mercy Corps is one of the many organizations that USAID had awarded grants to for the delivery of humanitarian assistance around the world. Mercy Corps says 40 of its 62 programs that were funded through those grants have now been terminated, from a project that would have provided clean drinking water to 12,000 villagers in Afghanistan to health centers in Nigeria that provided lifesaving food and nutrition services to tens of thousands of young children and pregnant women at risk of starvation and malnutrition.
Mary Stata is the chief development officer of Mercy Corps. She joins us to share the scope and human toll of the terminated programs and the future of international humanitarian aid without U.S. government support.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end this week with a conversation about what the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid have actually meant around the world. Thousands of contracts and grants distributed through the U.S. Agency for International Development have been canceled. Dozens of them had been providing funding for Portland-based Mercy Corps, which offers humanitarian assistance throughout the world.
Mary Stata is the chief development officer for Mercy Corps. I talked to her on Wednesday. I started by asking what these federal cuts have meant to the nonprofit’s work in Nigeria.
Mary Stata: What’s happening in Nigeria is absolutely heartbreaking. We have been managing a program in Nigeria that supports health facilities, and these facilities provide life-saving nutrition support to over 55,000 children under the age of five and 11,500 pregnant women. And this program was cut off with no warning, and so we’ve had to suspend these services, close the health facilities, and this has put these children and pregnant women at immediate risk. These are malnourished kids who are no longer receiving therapeutic foods. And, this one absolutely devastating story comes from a mother who was a participant in this program. She had twins, and just four days after we had to shut down this program, one of her children died because of malnutrition. So the impacts of these cuts are very real, they’re very devastating, and they’re immediate.
Miller: What about Sudan?
Stata: Sudan is truly one of the worst hunger crises of the 21st century. Every day there are children dying from hunger and malnutrition, and we have had to cut programming as a result of the U.S. reduction in foreign assistance. And our response in Sudan really did serve as a lifeline for over 220,000 people.
These are civilians. These are communities that are struggling to survive in the midst of violent conflict, displacement. Many of them have had to flee their homes and are now experiencing record levels of hunger. There are parts of Sudan that have been declared a famine at this point.
Similar story to Nigeria, we have had to stop programming that was providing therapeutic food to children. We’ve had to stop some programming that was providing safe drinking water. And whenever this happens, it immediately heightens the risk of dehydration. It increases the risk of waterborne illnesses breaking out, and so again, these impacts are immediate and they’re very tragic.
Miller: I want to ask you about one more country, and I could ask you about dozens, but I want to get to the bigger picture in just a second, but what about Afghanistan?
Stata: The story in Afghanistan is also a really tragic one where we were working in rural Afghanistan. This is a critical humanitarian assistance program that was restoring damaged and dilapidated water infrastructure. And we all know how critical clean water is for us, for our well-being. And for years, these villages in rural Afghanistan have struggled to access clean drinking water. And so our teams were working to rehabilitate water supply networks, and we were 90% done with this program, with this project. And so we were so close to being able to give access to 12,000 people, access clean drinking water. But we had to halt this work right before we got it across the finish line, again, because funding from the U.S. government was cut without warning. And so these villages who were imminently planning on having access to clean water, if that’s no longer happening.
Miller: When you say cut without warning, so one day, for example, people In Nigeria, we’re giving out life saving nutrition support, or in Afghanistan, we’re working on these pipes and the next day, they just stopped.
Stata: So, Mercy Corps has been a proud partner of the U.S. government for decades, a proud partner in delivering U.S. foreign assistance and in delivering real impact around the world. We’re a nonprofit, and so when the U.S. government notifies us that a program has to be terminated, we have to do that immediately because we don’t have the funding to continue it. And so these are, again, these have been very abrupt decisions that have been made, and we’ve been given them without any warning, any ability to really properly shut down programming
in a responsible way.
Miller: Are some of the grants that Mercy Corps has received through the federal government still being honored? I mean, is some federal money still flowing?
Stata: So, prior to the executive orders that reduced foreign assistance, Mercy Corps had been operating over 60 programs with U.S. federal funding, and over 40 of those have been terminated, so we really have just a fraction of the programming left that we had once been doing. And that programming that is continuing is important work. It is life-saving work, it’s critical, but at the same time, we are, we’re we’re still not receiving payment from the U.S. government, so the payment system has not been functional and so we’re not able to continue all of this work even the stuff that has been approved technically because we aren’t actively getting paid by the U.S. government for it.
Miller: Has the State Department or any federal employee shared with you their reasoning for terminating in this case, I guess two-thirds of your grant projects, but keeping going, although not even paying you for the other third? Is there a rhyme or reason to the grants that have been shut down and the ones that are still limping along?
Stata: To be honest, it’s really difficult to tell because some of the programs obviously that I was just sharing about in Nigeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, that was life-saving work that we were doing and by the State Department’s own definition of life-saving assistance, we were meeting that threshold. And then there’s been other programs that we have been able to continue that are also life-saving. So it definitely does not feel like it’s been consistent across the board and it’s been difficult for us to determine why some things have stopped, why some have started, so it’s definitely been challenging to navigate.
Miller: You say difficult to determine. Have you even been able to have conversations about this with anybody?
Stata: Mercy Corps is certainly working via back channel conversations with government officials, and we are certainly very committed to continuing to be making the strong case that U.S. foreign assistance is impactful and that we’re a great partner to them.
Miller: But just to go back to what you were saying earlier, months ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he was going to exempt emergency food aid and what he called life-saving programs from cuts. You’re saying that has not happened.
Stata: It’s been inconsistent, is what has happened, yeah.
Miller: Prior to these cuts, so you said that you had about 60 programs funded with federal money at Mercy Corps. Can you give us just a ballpark sense for how much of your overall budget came from the U.S. government?
Stata: Yes. It was significant. The U.S. government has been our biggest donor as an organization. We’ve also been really fortunate to receive funding and to partner with a number of European governments around the world, and we also have a really strong foundation of support from private donors ‒ individuals, companies, foundations ‒ and many of those donors are based here in the Northwest. And so while the funding from the U.S. government and those cuts have obviously been significant, it has affected us as an organization, no doubt, we do still have a really strong network of other donors that are enabling us to continue to work in over 40 countries around the world.
Miller: Can you give us a ballpark sense just so we understand how important the federal government though is for your overall budget?
Stata: I mean, you can say it’s been a majority of our budget at times, so it’s certainly been a significant part of how we’ve been able to achieve impact globally.
Miller: Does it seem to you as the chief development officer that you can make that up? What I imagine we’re talking about are tens of millions of dollars. Can you make that up from private philanthropy?
Stata: We’ve seen incredible generosity over the past couple of months. I’ve really been blown away by the response we’ve gotten from donors, and to your point, it isn’t enough to fill the huge gap left behind. The reality is that the U.S. was the largest donor for foreign assistance, as you just said, providing about 40% of global humanitarian assistance. And so the gap is huge. And as I’ve shared in Sudan, in Afghanistan, in Nigeria, when we are seeing the U.S. really stopping that work very immediately, it has a huge impact.
And so while we have seen incredible generosity from private donors, we will continue to be seeking additional support, the gap is huge,and it is significant. And also as a humanitarian organization, we are, unfortunately, we’re no stranger to crises, and there’s never a crisis that we’ve backed down from. And so I fully believe that Mercy Corps is up to the challenge and that I know that we will continue to be doing incredible work around the world, and that’s because of the support that we receive from donors.
Miller: Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said this, “Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions. Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Do you agree with him, first of all ‒ we can get to whether you think that the work you’re doing accomplishes those things, if you could answer yes to those questions ‒ but do you think those are questions that need to be answered in the affirmative in order to justify foreign aid?
Stata: I think those are important questions, and I also absolutely believe that the work that Mercy Corps does aligns with those objectives.
Miller: In what way? So let me just say them again: so, does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?
Stata: Yeah.
Miller: To go back to the examples you were saying earlier about clean water, say, in Afghanistan or life-giving medicine or food in Nigeria, how does that kind of aid lead to yes answers to those questions?
Stata: Programs like this, they directly benefit the United States because these programs create global stability. They reduce violence. We have other examples of terminated programs that worked to prevent youth radicalization into extremist groups, for instance. These programs increase economic prosperity and self-reliance in countries, and this ultimately protects U.S. interests at home and abroad.
I think in particular, the past five years have shown that the biggest challenges we face are global. What happens on the other side of the world, it impacts us here at home. We saw that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve seen that through volatile food prices. These challenges, they don’t respect borders, they transcend borders. And on the flip side, when countries like Afghanistan, like Nigeria, like Sudan, when countries can experience increased opportunity and access to food, nutrition, economic stability, it reduces the drivers of conflict and displacement. It lowers health risks, and it expands global economic opportunity and that’s a good thing for all of us.
Miller: What do you see as the future of Mercy Corps given the gigantic federal cuts that at least for the short or medium term, it doesn’t seem like they’re going to be reversed?
Stata: Yeah, I’ve been doing this work for almost 20 years now, and this really is a crisis like I’ve never seen before a funding crisis. It is a reckoning in which the funding for the entire humanitarian sector is changing. And what I know about Mercy Corps is that we will continue to deliver impact. We are creative, we are innovative, we are committed. I continue to just draw so much inspiration and strength from the work of my colleagues around the world, and many of whom are from the communities where we work. And so this work is personal and this work means that, for people who work at Mercy Corps, it’s what they feel called to do. It’s what they’re committed to do. And I know that through the grit that we really pride ourselves in that we’re going to continue to deliver impact regardless of these challenges.
Miller: One of the points we’d heard made as an argument for U.S. humanitarian aid globally is that it helps our soft power, that for decades it has boosted the American image around the world in ways that that are that can eventually help us. And along with that argument is, if we don’t do this work, then other countries, especially now, like China will. Have you seen China stepping in to do the kind of work that the U.S. has traditionally funded?
Stata: No, I think what we have seen over the past several months in particular is donors stepping up to be really responsive to the increased humanitarian needs that we’ve been experiencing as a result of the U.S. And so in one example, the Sudan example I gave earlier, where we have received a termination notification from the U.S. government, we have had other donors step in to help fill that gap. And so I do think that we are seeing other partners really stepping up to be meeting this increased humanitarian need.
Miller: Before we say goodbye, I want to turn to some local news. For the last 16 years, your global headquarters have been in a prominent building on Southwest Naito Parkway just south of the Burnside Bridge, but as I understand it, you’re selling the building. Why?
Stata: Yeah, so we’ve considered selling the building for the last five years, largely due to utilization. Since COVID, we’ve really been working increasingly remotely, and that means that the number of our U.S.-based employees in Portland has decreased over the past five years. And so the building has been very underutilized.
And we’re also an organization that is committed to reducing our carbon footprint. We’ve made a commitment to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% by 2030. That’s something that we are working with our offices globally around the environmental impact of our offices. And so the Portland office is also included in that. And so we’re certainly moving forward with selling the building because of the underutilization, and also the circumstances with these foreign aid cuts are also a consideration. We’ve had to take cost containment measures in order to grapple with the impacts of these funding cuts, and so selling the building was also part of that decision.
Miller: Would this have happened if it weren’t for the USAID cuts?
Stata: It’s been on the table for the past 5 years, so I think it was likely going to happen regardless.
Miller: Do you think this will actually have an impact on the work you do around the world, or is this just an internal issue?
Stata: Yeah, this is definitely an internal issue. Again, what does remain is an incredibly motivated team who are committed. Our team in the U.S. really enjoys working remotely and working and having flexible working arrangements, and so I don’t see this causing any disruption.
Miller: Mary Stata, thanks very much.
Stata: Thank you.
Miller: Mary Stata is the chief development officer of Mercy Corps.
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