Monday 17,Febr,2025 {HMC} — President Donald Trump’s sweeping freeze on U.S. foreign assistance has threatened programs intended to counter al-Shabab bombmakers, contain the spread of al-Qaeda across West Africa and secure Islamic State prisoners in the Middle East, according to U.S. officials and aid workers.
Hours after taking office last month, Trump put a 90-day pause on foreign aid programs, signing an executive order that said the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests” and “serve to destabilize world peace.”
But four current and former U.S. officials, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared government retaliation, said that many of the affected programs were specifically designed to respond to national security threats, and that their suspension could endanger America and its international allies.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The United States spends nearly $10 billion annually on foreign security assistance. More than half goes to Israel, Egypt and Ukraine, all three of which received exemptions from the spending freeze. Meanwhile, other American security partners in Africa and the Middle East, which receive a much smaller share of the foreign aid budget, have seen vital security programs grind to a halt.
Of particular concern is the Anti Terrorism Assistance program, which the United States spent $264 million on in 2023 to improve the capacity of allies to respond to extremist threats. Other programs counter transnational organized crime and narcotics and strengthen local law enforcement. Almost all are now suspended.
“This is not ‘The Apprentice.’ You can’t just tell your partners: you’re fired,” wrote one former U.S. security official. “Everything we give them from training and equipment to general advice is, by definition, foreign assistance, most of which they have come to depend on to sustain operations that WE have imposed to ‘keep America safe!’”
Africa’s growing security vacuum
In Somalia, where Washington has supported the government in its long-running battle with al-Shabab, a powerful insurgent group aligned with al-Qaeda, a U.S. defense official said the sudden shutdown triggered security risks for some of the hundreds of American troops stationed there.
Contractors responsible for building and maintaining bases for U.S.-trained Somali special forces, known as Danab, left so abruptly that U.S. soldiers had to scramble to pick up the slack, he said. Nearly 400 Danab graduates were left outside an American military base with no provision for food, fuel or electricity.
Another private contractor, which conducts medevacs for wounded Somali soldiers, had personnel in a remote combat zone when the stop-work order came down, the U.S. defense official said. It was unclear if they would be reimbursed for the return flight or any subsequent medevacs.
The funding freeze has also hit U.S.-supported laboratories in Mogadishu and Garowe, Somalia, that analyze ballistics, DNA, bombs and other evidence. Lt. Col. Mohamed Mohamud Ahmed, head of the police forensics team in the criminal investigation division, said the Mogadishu lab provided fingerprints and other crime scene data to Interpol and the FBI.
Last year, the lab worked on about 120 terrorist cases, Ahmed said, “but all the activity has collapsed within one month. Our mentors have left, our IT licenses have expired.”
A security expert who has worked extensively in Somalia put it bluntly: “If all U.S. money stops forever, this war [against al-Shabab] is over very fast,” he said.
Al-Shabab militants have launched deadly attacks over the years in neighboring Kenya, another staunch U.S. ally. In 2020, gunmen overran a military base on Manda Island, killing three Americans. Hundreds of people were killed in 2013 during a days-long siege at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi; another 21 died in a 2019 attack on an upscale hotel in the capital.
In northern Somalia, where the Islamic State has built an operational and financial hub, local forces are locked in a bloody offensive aimed at dislodging the militants but have been unable to secure Western support.
A report this month from a U.N. panel of experts who study the Islamic State and al-Qaeda said the threat posed by the groups “remained undiminished,” and that both continued to shift their focus to Africa. The report also noted that al-Shabab was developing a “transactional or opportunistic” relationship with the Houthis in Yemen, whose fighters have targeted global shipping lanes.
Kenya is routinely the biggest recipient of anti-terrorism assistance in Africa. U.S. support helps Kenyan police secure the porous, 430-mile border with Somalia, counter the threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — which have killed hundreds of security forces and civilians — and respond to terrorist attacks, said the former U.S. security official.
He pointed to one critical border program, now suspended, that uses U.S.-provided drones for surveillance, detection and interdiction of militants. The drones allowed Kenyan forces to discover caches of water in jerricans hidden in remote areas by al-Shabab, according to a Kenyan police report reviewed by The Washington Post. On another occasion, the report said, a patrol disrupted men trying to plant a bomb.
Also on hold now is a program to counter IEDs — including the creation of a database to detect patterns in bomb construction, forensically identify bombmakers and gather evidence for trials.
Kenyan security forces have a long record of human rights abuses. But American funding and guidance has made a real difference, current and former officials say, and U.S. funds support an independent police watchdog that prosecutes rogue officers.
Kenya’s abysmal performance during the four-day siege at Westgate — when inept security forces looted shops while victims lay dead, then attempted to destroy evidence — improved significantly during the 2019 hotel attack, when U.S.-trained teams secured the site within hours.
“U.S. and international involvement is a game changer as far as the local units are concerned,” said Sam Mattock, director of the Halliday Finch security company, who personally responded to the 2019 attack.
Few involved in foreign assistance take issue with the claim that the system needs reform. “I agree with Trump and wish my government had the balls to stop the foreign aid and focus on our people,” said the security expert who has worked extensively in Somalia. “But why not give everyone 90 days to plead their cases on an individual basis and if they cannot, then stop the money?”
‘The worst possible timing’
The funding freeze also has major implications for West Africa, which has become a global hot spot for extremism. Affiliates of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have seized vast swaths of territory, killed thousands of civilians and repeatedly attacked government and military targets.
In the coastal nation of Benin, a historically strong democracy menaced by al-Qaeda-linked militants, a multiyear program to train the army for counterterrorism operations has been put on hold, according to a senior U.S. military official. The country is reeling from deadly and complex attacks, including a Jan. 8 assault on a military post that killed around 30 soldiers.
“It is the worst possible timing to pause,” said Aneliese Bernard, a former State Department adviser who now runs Strategic Stabilization Advisors, a private firm that works with the U.S. military’s civil affairs team in Benin. “It is hugely disruptive to the government’s ability to repel terrorist attacks.”
In Ivory Coast, seen as a bulwark of stability in the volatile region, two four-year programs for U.S. contractors to train local troops have also been paused. Both initiatives had just begun in January; one focused on casualty care and the other on pre-deployment training, said the senior military official.
The programs were part of a pivot in U.S. counterterrorism strategy in the region — from going after militants directly to trying to contain them — necessitated by a rapid reduction in America’s military footprint.
Last April, U.S. forces left Chad, the last semi-stable nation in the Sahel; four months later, coup leaders in Niger expelled U.S. troops from their newly built $100 million drone base and invited Russian military instructors to replace them.
American influence in the Sahel was largely confined to humanitarian initiatives through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Most of that work is also on hold now as Trump tries to dismantle USAID.
“When you take that away, our ability to shape the environment is gone,” said the senior military official. “And if nature abhors a vacuum, we know that predator nations will dive in.”
Elusive exemptions
There are similar fears of a security void in northeastern Syria, home to two camps that house around 41,000 relatives of suspected Islamic State militants — a vestige of the U.S.-led bombing campaign that destroyed the group’s self-declared caliphate.
The funding freeze led to a three-day stoppage in humanitarian aid to the al-Hol and Roj camps before temporary waivers were issued to organizations working there, said an aid worker with knowledge of the situation. The guards’ waivers need to be renewed every two weeks to avoid further disruption, and aid work across the rest of Syria remains paused.
“When people don’t have the water, the food, the things that they are relying on, they’re going to look for someplace else to find it,” the aid worker said. “The concern, especially in Syria with [the Islamic State] looking for opportunities to regroup, is that they will step into that vacuum.”
The freeze has forced the Iraqi government to suspend the repatriation of families from al-Hol. The camp in southern Iraq where returnees were being sent for rehabilitation has ceased operations due to lack of funding, according to Evan Jabro, the country’s migration and displacement minister.
Under Trump’s executive order, programs that deliver lifesaving assistance or are judged to be “mission-critical” are exempt from the freeze. But members of Congress are still in the dark about how the administration is granting exemptions, said a congressional aide familiar with discussions.
“We’ve not seen criteria for the waiver process … and the few publicized waivers are barely being implemented,” the aide said. “We see no evidence of a review process.”
The State Department has said it is terminating $1 billion worth of programs, he said, but Congress has “no way to assess the legal, financial, or national security risks.”
Chason reported from Dakar, George from Dubai and Salim from Baghdad. Louisa Loveluck in London and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
