Once Samkelo accepted the terrifying truth, he stopped doomscrolling on Facebook, lay on his bed and considered his options. The first thing he did was bring out the bottles and sachets of pills that were in his bedside drawer. He counted them out: 62 pink ones, 62 yellow ones and 62 white ones. Enough antiretrovirals to suppress the HIV virus in his body for two months and two days.
Samkelo was barely in his thirties. He did not want to die. The medications he’d been taking since last September had started giving him strength again and, with it, hope. There was a certain haunted look in his eyes still, but these days he occasionally managed running, like he used to do every day. He no longer dyed his hair in outrageous shades of red or gold, but he’d begun insisting on stylish cuts whenever he could make it to the barbershop. Umlingo his family called him — Zulu for “magic” — and he still dressed sharply despite all his favourite shirts fitting more loosely.
Then, late in January, he saw the posts on social media: the American president, Donald Trump, had signed an executive order which was closing down all NGOs like the one where he got his free antiretrovirals. He knew of no way to get any more medication. But he did know what came next. The decree was essentially a death warrant. Without treatment, the virus multiplying in his body would weaken his immune system until every cell was an open goal for any opportunistic disease. Then would come the sores and cancers, the thrush, the rashes and dementia. There would be pneumonia, tuberculosis, wasting away until eventually he would be a skin-wrapped skeleton soiling himself in his own bed. He had seen it happen to members of his own family.
Samkelo began counting out the money in his wallet. He had enough coins to walk to the spaza shop on a potholed corner of Thembisa, a large township on the northern fringes of Johannesburg, and buy cigarettes. He had given up smoking two years earlier, but that seemed laughable now. There was one more thing he would pick up while he was there, but for that he needed the courage of company.
He called his friend Siphesile, whose toothy smile could light up an entire room, and that was what saved him. Smoking together in his tiny room, he confessed that he had wanted to buy rat poison and drink it. “Then I will have lost my friend,” Siphesile replied. The two men were inseparable even though they had known each other less than a year. Siphesile was living with HIV too and he was in a worse situation than Samkelo, with just two days of medication left. Without help, they were about to join the ranks of some two million HIV-infected people in South Africa who fall through the cracks and don’t receive treatment.
If the NGO where Samkelo usually went to get his drugs had been open, a counsellor there might have talked him through the process of accessing antiretrovirals that are available for free in South African public health centres. But Samkelo had never gone to one of these government-run clinics, nor did he know anyone who had. All he knew was that a doctor’s consultation cost money. Catching a bus anywhere cost money. Already, on many days, he had to choose between buying food and anything else.
On the spur of the moment, Samkelo had handed Siphesile one of the two bottles of antiretrovirals he had left — one month’s supply.
“What about you?” Siphesile had asked. Samkelo shook his head. “We will cross that bridge when we get there,” he said.
Each night since then had been a struggle. “I’m sure Trump never came to South Africa or anywhere in Africa so, like, he’s there taking this decision not knowing how it’s going to impact people,” Samkelo said, when I spoke to him last week in his home in Thembisa. “But for me, for so many of us, this has been three weeks in hell.”
Hours after his inauguration on January 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting all US foreign aid for 90 days, including through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The 10,000-strong agency, the main channel for administering $43bn worth of US aid and development programmes annually, was, or so Trump told reporters, run by “a bunch of radical lunatics”. With the stroke of a pen, the opening act of his “America First” policy tore up a decades-old script of how the US wields its soft power and began rewriting the rules of geopolitics in real time.
Since then the impact has swept every part of the world. In Afghanistan, women’s education programmes shut down. Health services were suspended for refugees from Myanmar taking shelter in camps in Thailand. In Colombia, anti-narcotrafficking helicopters were suddenly idle. But African countries were hit particularly hard. In Uganda, medical trials were halted. Life-saving medicines are gathering dust in warehouses in Malawi, where more than half of healthcare spending is dependent on US and foreign aid. Perhaps greatest of all has been the impact on the decades-long battle to end the Aids pandemic.
The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, known as Pepfar, screeched to a halt. Launched by George W Bush in 2003, a year in which Aids killed more than three million people, the multibillion-dollar health initiative is based on a simple premise that everybody deserves access to antiretrovirals that suppress the spread of HIV. “Many hospitals tell people, ‘You’ve got Aids, we can’t help you. Go home and die,’” an emotional President Bush said in 2003, announcing Pepfar’s launch in his state of the union address. “In an age of miraculous medicines, no person should have to hear those words.”
The initiative changed the trajectory of the Aids pandemic. To date, Pepfar has saved more than 26 million lives and prevented roughly 1,000 babies a day from being born with the HIV virus. Pregnant women can avoid passing on the virus to their babies by taking medications that either suppress their own viral load to undetectable levels, or pass through the placenta to the baby’s body.
“It was a huge relief. We had been burying children every single day and suddenly Pepfar enabled life-saving programmes for Africa,” said Linda-Gail Bekker, a professor of medicine and the CEO of the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation at the University of Cape Town. Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (Avac), a New York-based campaigning group, called Pepfar “inarguably the best investment ever in global health and development”. “We took 20 years to build up what has taken less than four weeks to dismantle,” he said, reflecting on the chaos caused by Trump’s move.
Within days, the 340,000 global healthcare workers whose salaries depend on the Pepfar programme — doctors, nurses, lab assistants and community outreach workers — received “stop-work orders”. More than 20 million HIV-positive people like Samkelo no longer knew when their next dose of antiretrovirals would come. Already, since January 24, at least 15,000 premature deaths have occurred because of the funding gap, according to a Pepfar tracker set up to monitor the impact.
“Everyone was panicking,” said Jorge Matine, country director for the international reproductive rights NGO Ipas in Mozambique, where some 20,000 health workers are Pepfar-funded in a country with roughly four health professionals for every 10,000 inhabitants.
In South Africa, which has 7.8 million people living with HIV, and the largest Pepfar portfolio in the world, promising trials of next-generation treatment have been iced. Each month of shutdown will mean almost 230 babies being born with HIV as pregnant women lose access to their medication, according to one estimate. One-third of those infants likely won’t survive past their first birthday.
“I cannot describe the punch to my stomach and the enormous pain,” said Zackie Achmat, an activist who in the 1990s co-founded a grassroots movement that helped bring down the prices of HIV treatment globally. “What immediately came back [to me] was how people were dying at the time when we were battling for antiretroviral medications, first against the drug companies, then against [politicians’] terrible denialism.”
Activists, health workers and researchers are in limbo. Some US funding has been restored to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Pepfar funds are distributed to most African organisations mainly through USAID and the CDC). But a UN goal to end the pandemic by 2030 will be harder without every link in a multi-country chain working. The fight against Aids has required the co-operation of diverse agencies, governments and researchers. That mesh has now been torn. “This here today, literally gone tomorrow is incomprehensible,” said Bekker.
Samkelo had felt this numb confusion before, back when he was a 12-year-old during the peak decade of Africa’s HIV epidemic. It was 2002 and more than two million people were dying each year on the continent. In the rural hills of KwaZulu Natal, a province on the east coast of South Africa, his uncle Hamilton was one of them.
The horror of that time lived on in the few vivid details he could remember. His uncle, lanky and smiling, would take him to practise football in the dusty red fields behind the village. If he’d had a bad day at school, they would sit and talk under the coral tree. Then one day, Hamilton started complaining of stomach pains. Visits to the traditional healer hadn’t helped. Eventually his girlfriend admitted she was HIV-positive.
“All we knew as kids was that HIV, you can’t treat it,” Samkelo recalled. That was more or less true, in those days. The antiretrovirals that had made the disease manageable for more than a decade in the west were so forbiddingly expensive to the vast majority on the African continent that only a fraction out of the 29 million people with HIV used them.
“Because we were ill-informed, the family was treating him differently. He had his own plate, his own spoon,” Samkelo said, closing his eyes at the recollection. The same week the family managed to scrape together enough money to buy antiretrovirals, Hamilton died. He was 24 years old.
After that, Samkelo saw the virus everywhere. By the time he and his mum and sister moved to Thembisa, 40km north of Johannesburg, in 2021, he’d been relieved to escape. He found a job at a call centre, earned enough money to rent a small bedsit and spent what was left on taverns and fashionable clothes. “Are you winning today?” was how he liked to greet his friends, hugging them tightly. On weekends he played with a local football team, and on weekdays he went on long runs through the narrow streets, climbing to top of the hills so that the town spread out below him. “I felt young, I felt invincible,” he said.
And then, one night last August he’d lain in bed coughing for three days before spiking a fever that refused to respond to medications. He got better, which is usual after an HIV infection, but any attempts to exercise led to more coughing fits. When the fever returned the following month, he dragged himself to the pharmacy. The sister on duty looked at him with pursed lips as she pricked his finger for the test, and the next thing he knew two pink lines had appeared, which meant that Samkelo, at 30 years old, had HIV.
He stumbled into the red-bricked church he went to every Sunday. All he remembered was that the pastor had read Psalm 91: “He is my refuge and my fortress . . . A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; But it shall not come near you.” Samkelo walked up to the podium under the bright fluorescent lights and raised his hands in supplication.
After that he took on more roles in church, which kept him busy as he started learning the new language of his illness. He learnt what “viral load” meant, and the difference between T-cells and CD4 counts. He enrolled in a small NGO-run healthcare centre where they handed out antiretrovirals, condoms and friendly advice. It was close enough to walk into daily meetings with a group of people who became his confidants. They accepted him so completely that he started thinking maybe it was time to be open about his illness to everyone else, so that, he said, he could start “living freely”.
Which was why, when the news came from America, it shook him in unexpected ways. He couldn’t stop thinking about the procession of people he’d known who had died of Aids. “There were a lot of them. They were bullied, like people would call at them — their bodies would be deformed.”
Since the clinic had closed its doors, he could no longer drop in whenever he was feeling low, and he felt exposed all the time. He wasn’t sure being open about anything was a good idea any more.
On January 29, Ntombifikile Mtshali was horrified as she read an official CDC notice at her office in South Africa’s capital of Pretoria. A doctor with flowing red dreadlocks and a wide smile, Mtshali is chief executive of the mobile clinic service Shout-It-Now, which provides free sexual and reproductive healthcare to young people around Pretoria. In two years of managing its fleet of mobile clinics, nothing had prepared her for what was unfolding.
Trump’s aid freeze wasn’t entirely unexpected by those in the industry. In the run-up to his electoral victory, the so-called Project 2025 manifesto, authored by prominent Trump allies and former staffers, had outlined a policy blueprint that included aggressive cuts in foreign assistance. Development agencies were to be hollowed out, which meant organisations like Mtshali’s, funded by the CDC, were also on the chopping block. But the haphazard execution was bewildering. Since the executive order on January 20, there had been no further communications from US officials for nine days, so Shout-It-Now had simply continued working. Now Mtshali tried to make sense of the orders coming through.
For the first time, US authorities were issuing official “stop-work orders”. But when Mtshali asked for more information, they couldn’t give her any answers. “What can we do? What can’t we do? Having to deal with our staff — you know, is it a temporary lay-off? Is it a full retrenchment?” she said when I spoke to her last week, listing the questions that had been met with silence.
After the call there had followed three weeks of legal and bureaucratic red tape that were “absolutely horrific”. Caught out by the global outcry against Trump’s announcement, on January 28 the US secretary of state Marco Rubio announced a “blanket waiver” for life-saving programmes, exempting them from the foreign-aid freeze. For health workers, who by now were terrified that a mis-step might cost their organisation funding in future, there was a deep uncertainty over which programmes and activities fell under the scope of “life-saving” assistance. How could a clear line be drawn? Pregnant women who were HIV-positive clearly needed medication to prevent their babies being born sick, but if a young girl had been raped, could emergency post-exposure prophylaxis be considered life-saving in her case? What about clean needles for drug users who might otherwise become infected, or pass on infections? Wasn’t procuring antiretrovirals in itself a life-saving act?
Rubio dismissed calls for clarification. “I would say, if some organisation is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organisation, or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” he told reporters in at a press conference in Costa Rica on February 4.
In the meantime, two US-based NGOs had successfully obtained a court order to unfreeze all CDC-linked federal grants around the world, including some 20 NGOs in South Africa. But the US administration simply ignored the ruling, and so nothing changed on the ground until a second district court enforced the order 10 days later.
As Mtshali deliberated whether Shout-It-Now could begin operating again with a skeleton staff, the Trump administration on February 7 imposed another freeze on all foreign aid — this time to South Africa specifically. That was over newly legislated land laws which, the president claimed on social media, allowed South African authorities to treat “certain classes of people VERY BADLY”.
Across Southern Africa, the region hardest hit by HIV, paralysis set in. Health workers fretted about losing clients to whom they could not give any concrete information. “It was like during the second wave of Covid, when no one knew what was happening. There was a lot of fake news, no one knew what to do, or who was a trusted source, or who to ask,” said Matine, the country director of Ipas in Mozambique.
On Valentine’s Day, Mtshali’s head of HR sent her a message. “Long, exhausting and emotionally draining for everyone involved . . . the past three weeks have been filled with moments of heartbreak and tears.”
In March 1999, Zackie Achmat and two dozen other activists lay down in front of what was then the world’s largest hospital, the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg. “We will fight drug companies, we will fight government, we will fight anyone!” Achmat declared, a mop of dark hair hidden under his rainbow-coloured baseball cap.
Achmat shot to global prominence as part of the Treatment Action Campaign, which became one of the most important and influential HIV advocacy groups in the world. Among the alliance’s stream of victories was a landmark court battle that forced 39 pharmaceutical companies to end their challenge to a law allowing cheaper versions of Aids drugs to be sold.
Now in his sixties, Achmat’s hair has silvered, but he still has a wiry energy. In the past decade, he’s mostly directed that zeal towards other social justice crusades. But watching recent events, a horrifying sense of déjà vu descended. Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has repeatedly peddled disproven claims about the safety of vaccines and recently questioned whether the HIV virus causes Aids, reminded him of former South Africa president Thabo Mbeki, whose state-sponsored denial that Aids was caused by a virus led to a years-long delay of rolling out treatments. One of Mbeki’s health ministers famously advocated garlic, ginger and beetroot as cures for the deadly disease.
All this has compelled Achmat to re-enter the fray. “Cutting foreign aid is an easy sell to Americans when you package it simplistically as ‘let’s stop feeding all these people around the world’,” he told me when I visited him in Cape Town.
On a recent Wednesday morning, we went down to the Greenpoint community hospital, a public complex housed in handsome Dutch Cape colonial-era buildings. A letter was taped to the shuttered doors of the USAID-funded Ivan Toms Centre for Men’s Health, where Achmat usually picked up his own treatment. “We were provided very little warning of this closure. For those of you receiving this news for the first time, we apologise,” it said, before advising visitors to try the health centre next door. An administrator messaged Achmat to say she was out interviewing for new jobs.
“I can always just call my doctor to get my supplies,” Achmat said, shaking his head. “But not everyone can navigate this bureaucracy.”
Health workers know that “adherence” — sticking to a regimen of taking daily pills — drops among patients on the peripheries of society, who often have patchy access to health services. Stopping and starting antiretrovirals can lead to drug-resistant strains developing. Tens of thousands of people living with HIV could now fall off the radar, reigniting new chains of infection. Transmission can occur after just one exposure, but a person can remain symptomless for a decade, meaning the long-term impact may not be known for years.
Ling Sheperd, an activist and director at the Triangle Project, which provides healthcare for LGBTQ people in Western Cape, said she was already seeing signs of a fall-off. She worried about reaching her clients, many of whom were homeless, faced stigma and didn’t have mobile phones. “Once people disengage from care, it’s incredibly hard to re-establish that connection, especially in vulnerable communities,” she said. There’d been a knock-on effect on services like abortion, family planning and mental health counselling. “These services are interconnected with HIV care. Cutting them weakens the entire healthcare system.” Prevention as treatment is also key to stopping infections, with nine out of 10 people globally getting pre-exposure prophylaxis through now largely shuttered Pepfar-funded programmes.
The continent’s reliance on foreign aid has long been a point of criticism. Still, experts say such an abrupt reckoning will have unpredictable consequences even in wealthier developing countries like South Africa that had already begun weaning itself off foreign aid. Some $440mn in Pepfar aid covers only one-fifth of South Africa’s wide-ranging HIV services, but it’s far from clear where that shortfall will come from. This month, the South African government delayed announcing its budget for the first time ever as it grapples with the trade-offs required to finance the country’s spending.
Last week, under mounting pressure, the government announced public health centres would, in some cases, begin dispensing six-month refills of antiretrovirals, up from one- or three-month refills. Campaigners had long advocated for the move, which means fewer clinic visits, in turn freeing up more staff. But such gains might be undercut by the very thing that spurred them. Avac’s Mitchell Warren said huge damage had already been done. “These programmes don’t have on and off switches. You can’t just turn it off one day and turn it on the next and think everything is going to be fine.”
Night was approaching as Samkelo sat exhausted in his friend’s bedroom. On the streets outside, the cacophony of car horns and children laughing as they kicked a football barely registered. It was February 19, and he was down to his last dozen pills. “The reality is loud as a bell in my mind,” he said. “I’ve been trying to avoid it but the truth is we don’t know what will happen to us.”
The night before, unable to sleep, he’d picked up his phone. He resisted going on social media — “it’s not a proper channel of information, I still don’t know what is happening after I use it” — and instead messaged Hajo, another friend living with HIV, who’d always been able to talk him down. He admitted that the darkness had started creeping into his mind again. Hajo had reassured him. “Apparently there is enough ARVs in the country so that supply won’t be short. Let me know if you struggle.”
Samkelo felt calm enough to sleep for a few hours. But in the morning, the rain was still lashing down and doubt began gnawing at his mind again. Hajo, he was certain, did not have access to any more medication than he did. He’d trudged through the downpour to the clinic just in case, but its doors were still chained shut. He went down to the barbershop and whiled away an hour there.
When there was nothing else left to do, he sat waiting for his friend to come back from work. Siphesile had promised to pick up something for his throat, which always seemed to be sore. Soon he would arrive at the door with menthol oil for a steam bath and orange-and-honey-flavoured drops to soothe the ache. All Samkelo had to do was wait a little longer.
Monica Mark is the FT’s Southern Africa bureau chief
Scenes from the global fallout
Russia
The news site facing ‘its darkest hour’
By Courtney Weaver
By Meduza publisher Galina Timchenko’s count, the Russian government has already tried to kill the investigative news outlet six times since it was founded just over a decade ago. Now the organisation is struggling for survival once again, following the Trump administration’s decision to freeze funding for USAID. On paper, USAID-funded organisations accounted for only 15 to 20 per cent of its budget.
In reality, the loss means a 15 per cent staff cut across Meduza and its subsidiaries, and instituting salary cuts across the board, she says. The site is headquartered in Latvia, but publishes investigative journalism in both English and Russian. Its unofficial motto is “Make the Kremlin sad”.
As a so-called undesirable organisation in Russia, “Every direct contact with Meduza, every direct connection, is a crime,” Timchenko says. While 60 per cent of the outlet’s audience is still reading Meduza from inside Russia using VPNs because access is blocked, even sharing a link to a Meduza article is a crime. “Our journalists don’t just put their lives and freedom at risk, but the freedom and wellbeing of their relatives inside Russia,” she says.
Many Meduza employees are Russian nationals with EU residence permits through their jobs, meaning those let go in the cuts will need to find a way to renew their legal status, through humanitarian or freelancer visas.
Founded by Timchenko and former independent Russian media colleagues, Meduza has repeatedly switched funding models, pivoting from traditional advertising to crowdfunding after being labelled a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities in 2021, and then to a more diverse funding structure after the Ukraine war began and donations dried up.
Inside Russia, it relies on proxy reporting, with unnamed journalists each working on a small piece of a story to avoid arrest. “Now we’re in the darkest hour,” Timchenko says. “It’s a war of attrition because the regime has unlimited sources and we are very limited . . . But we will try to survive.”
Courtney Weaver is the FT’s special correspondent for eastern Europe in Berlin
Colombia
A family shelter in complete crisis
By Joe Daniels
At a migrant shelter in Palmira that fed and sheltered 600 families last year, aid workers say they can only operate until the end of February. Pastoral Social — Caritas, a humanitarian group attached to the Catholic church, received most of the shelter’s $12,000 monthly budget from USAID. The funds went to paying seven staff members, alongside buying food and hygiene supplies.
The vast majority of the migrants there are Venezuelan, part of an exodus of nearly eight million people who have fled economic collapse at home. Some 2.8 million Venezuelans are now in Colombia. Unable to absorb the strain on public finances, the country has relied on NGOs funded by USAID for support. “We’ve been able to keep going this month with funds from the church, but from March we won’t be able to,” said Arturo Arrieta, the priest of the Palmira diocese. “Uncertainty is the best word to describe the current state of affairs.”
Roxanys Ramos left her home in the Venezuelan state of Guárico in 2022, bringing her young family with her, and eventually settled in Lima, the capital of Peru. When her husband died last year, she was unable to support her family, which included a new baby. This week, she stayed at the shelter in Palmira en route back to Venezuela. She and her children were given clean clothes, three meals a day and access to the internet to arrange the next step of their journey. “It’s been a long journey so far, but staying here has been a great help,” she said.
Another beneficiary was Edgar Berroterón, a Venezuelan migrant who received support towards rent and equipment to help his fledgling business selling corn snacks. He is anxious that he may have to leave now. “One of the horrible things about migration is that you’re never able to truly feel settled,” he said. “There’s always some part of you wondering where you will have to go next.”
Joe Daniels is the FT’s Andean correspondent in Bogotá
Egypt
University students stranded in limbo
By Heba Saleh
The funding suspension hit more than 1,000 Egyptian university students at 13 higher education institutions that might otherwise have been inaccessible to them because their families could not afford tuition fees and other expenses.
The idea behind the USAID scholarship programme was to remove such barriers in a country where some 60 per cent of the population fits definitions of poverty. Academically gifted students from poor backgrounds, disabled students with academic potential and young people from impoverished parts of the country have all been beneficiaries of the scholarships. Bursaries were awarded to an almost equivalent number of young women and men. These are now suspended with no certainty they will resume after the 90-day review period announced by the US government on January 24.
The awardees include 200 students enrolled in the elite American University in Cairo where annual tuition fees can top $20,000, vastly beyond the means of most Egyptians.
There was panic when the students were notified, but within two days the university’s board of trustees announced the institution would cover tuition and expenses for the coming semester. It is not yet clear if this will be extended beyond the current academic year. The last batch of students, who started in 2024, will need to find support for four years. Some 50 students who had been offered places due to start in February under the scholarship programme now have to find alternatives.
Nationally, the Egyptian government has stepped in to cover expenses until the end of the academic year for about 900 students who were funded by USAID to study in Egyptian universities, saying it would “remain committed to supporting them in facing any future challenges”.
Heba Saleh is the FT’s Cairo correspondent
liberia
A scramble to preserve rainforests
By Aanu Adeoye
In Liberia’s Sinoe county, where tropical rainforests are dense, people have relied on logging as a source of income for decades. Logging is illegal, the work is arduous and the money is paltry, but residents still cut down trees and turn them to charcoal for sale. Logging even partially funded rebel forces during the country’s ruinous civil war that broke out in 1989 and lasted nearly a decade.
Last November, an American NGO called GiveDirectly launched a pilot project to incentivise residents to stop logging, with direct cash transfers, funded with help from the Irish government. Instead of lecturing poor people about the importance of nature, GiveDirectly would offer payments to people living next to forests in exchange for preserving the trees. These individuals are mostly outside the government social safety net.
GiveDirectly was banking on funding from USAID to scale up the project, with a planned infusion of $5mn. The aim was to expand it to Liberia’s north. USAID had already partnered with GiveDirectly on numerous projects in the country, but the Trump freeze leaves the project with an uncertain future and the NGO is scrambling for replacement funders.
I spoke to a worker in the sector who said the impact had been hardest on local staff. “There are people making $1,000 a month, which is a decent amount of money in this part of the world, who not only have immediate family to care for but have dependants outside that family. Many of these people will find themselves out of a job and it will have a ripple effect on the wellbeing of communities and the work of poverty reduction,” said the worker, who asked not to be named. “Make no mistake, our industry is in a state of flux right now.”
Aanu Adeoye is the FT’s West Africa correspondent
India
Trump adds heat to ‘foreign hand’ debate
By John Reed
The outcry in Delhi began when India featured in a February 16 post on X by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) listing taxpayer-funded programmes, “all of which have been cancelled”. Among those apparently up for the cut was $21mn to promote “voter turnout in India”.
Word of this US government money for election-related projects caught fire. In government circles, the anger was not directed at the loss of the funding, but at the idea that it had existed at all. India has strict limits on foreign funding, including from USAID. Fear of the “foreign hand” meddling in politics is perennial. Writing on X, Amit Malviya, head of the IT department that curates the powerful online presence of the nationalist ruling Bharatiya Janata party, described the existence of the funding as evidence of “external interference in India’s electoral process”.
“Clearly some of these funds were used for things that were questionable and could be qualified as political interference,” said Sanjeev Sanyal, an economic adviser to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been vocal in criticising USAID. “Ask the US government to please tell us what this money was actually spent on.”
Donald Trump fanned the flames of speculation with remarks such as “18 million dollars for helping India with its elections”, when speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, in comments that clashed with the earlier $21mn claim. “Why the hell?”
Few of the people raising the alarm were able to pinpoint exactly what the money had been intended for or where it was really going. Meanwhile, India’s rival political camps continued to squabble about the chimerical funds.
Jairam Ramesh, Congress’s general secretary for communications, tracked down budget data showing seven USAID programmes in food, health, sanitation and hygiene and other areas. None covered voter turnout. Malviya, the BJP spokesman, hit back, insisting the “controversial USAID funding” was “routed through various George Soros-linked fronts and a labyrinth of NGO structures” to interfere with India’s electoral process. “It is now obvious who the beneficiaries are,” he said.
John Reed is the FT’s South Asia bureau chief in Delhi
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