The Trump administration has finished its six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old US Agency for International Development, with the vast majority of them scrapped.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he will move the 18 per cent of aid and development programs that survived under the State Department.
Rubio made the announcement on Monday in a post on X, in one of his relatively few public comments on what has been a historic shift away from US foreign aid and development, executed by Trump political appointees at State and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency teams.
USAID staffers abroad have until April 6 to move back to the US if they want to do so on the government's tab, according to a USAID email sent to staffers.
They say the deadline gives them scant time to pull children from school, sell homes or break leases, and, for many, find somewhere to live after years away from the US.
President Donald Trump on January 20 issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all of the tens of billions of dollars of US aid and development work abroad.
Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.
Rubio's social media post said that review was now "officially ending", with some 5200 of USAID's 6200 programs eliminated.
Those programs "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", Rubio wrote.
"In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18 per cent of programs we are keeping ... to be administered more effectively under the State Department," he said.
Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally funded programs illegal, saying such a move requires Congress' approval.
"The patterns that are emerging is the administration does not support democracy programs, they don't support civil society ... they don't support NGO programs," or health or emergency response, said Andrew Natsios, the USAID administrator for Republican former President George W Bush.
A group of former US diplomats, national security figures and others condemned what it said was an opaque, partisan and rushed review process and urged Congress to intervene.
"The facts show that life-saving programs were severely cut, putting millions of people in allied countries at risk of starvation, disease and death," while giving Russia, China and other adversaries opportunities to gain influence abroad as the US retreats, the group, the US Global Leadership Coalition, said.
The Trump administration gave almost no details on which aid and development efforts abroad it spared as it mass-emailed contract terminations to aid groups and other USAID partners by the thousands within days earlier this month.
Aid groups say even some life-saving programs that Rubio and others had promised to spare are in limbo or terminated, such as those providing emergency nutritional support for starving children and drinking water for sprawling camps for families uprooted by war in Sudan.
The State Department in one of multiple lawsuits it is battling over its rapid shutdown of USAID had said earlier this month it was killing more than 90 per cent of USAID programs.
Rubio gave no explanation for why his number was lower.
The dismantling of USAID that followed Trump's order upended decades of policy that humanitarian and development aid abroad advanced US national security by stabilising regions and economies, strengthening alliances and building goodwill.
Australian Associated Press
