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Trump administration moves to restore some terminated foreign aid programs, sources say
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce on Tuesday told reporters that the United States had concerns that WFP funding for Yemen and Afghanistan was benefiting the Houthis and the Islamic Emirate.
President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to reinstate at least six recently canceled U.S. foreign aid programs for emergency food assistance, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The quick reversal of decisions made just days ago underscored the rapid-fire nature of Trump’s cuts to foreign aid. That has led to programs being cut, restored then cut again, disrupting international humanitarian operations.
USAID Acting Deputy Administrator Jeremy Lewin, who has previously been identified as a member of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, asked staff in an internal email to reverse the terminations.
He asked to restore awards to the World Food Programme in Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Jordan, Iraq and Ecuador, five sources familiar with the matter said.
The administration has also resumed four awards to the International Organization for Migration in the Pacific region, two sources familiar with the matter said.
“Sorry for all the back and forth on awards,” Lewin said on Tuesday in the internal email seen by Reuters. “There are a lot of stakeholders and we need to do better about balancing these competing interests — that’s my fault and I take responsibility,” he added.
Reuters reported on Monday that the Trump administration had ended life-saving aid programs for more than a dozen countries including Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Syria, totaling over $1.3 billion.
According to Stand Up For Aid, an advocacy group of current and former U.S. officials, WFP contracts canceled on Lewin’s orders last weekend for Lebanon, Syria, Somalia and Jordan totaled more than $463 million.
Many of the terminated programs had been granted waivers by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio following an initial round of cuts to foreign aid programs. The State Department said those did not reflect a final decision.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about restoring the awards.
The decision to restore some aid followed pressure from inside the administration and from Congress, two sources said.
The World Food Programme said on Monday that the U.S. notified the organization it was eliminating emergency food assistance funding in 14 countries, warning: “If implemented, this could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation.”
The U.S. did not restore aid to Islamic Emirate-ruled Afghanistan and to Yemen, most of which is controlled by Islamist militants of the Iran-backed Houthi movement. Washington has been the largest aid donor to both countries, which have suffered years of devastating war.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce on Tuesday told reporters that the United States had concerns that WFP funding for Yemen and Afghanistan was benefiting the Houthis and the Islamic Emirate.
“There were a few programs that were cut in other countries that were not meant to be cut that have been rolled back and put into place,” Bruce said, adding that the administration remains committed to foreign aid.
Among the cuts over the weekend were $169.8 million for the WFP in Somalia, covering food assistance, nutrition for malnourished babies and children and humanitarian air support. In Syria, $111 million was cut from WFP food assistance.
The cuts have been the latest piece of the Trump administration’s drive to dismantle USAID, the main U.S. humanitarian aid agency.
The administration has canceled billions of dollars in foreign aid since the Republican president began his second term on January 20 in an overhaul that officials described as marked by chaos and confusion.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats on Tuesday wrote a letter to Rubio regarding plans to restructure the State Department, including by folding in USAID, which they said was “unconstitutional, illegal, unjustified, damaging, and inefficient.”
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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