When then-U.S. president John F . Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development in 1961, it was meant primarily to administer health and food aid around the world. In the decades since, USAID expanded to become one of the world's largest financial contributors to conservation, providing nearly $400 million annually before the end of 2024.

However, that money is now completely gone after the current president, Donald Trump, gutted and shut down the agency in one of his first acts upon returning to office in January 2025. Since then, an estimated 834,000 people have lost their lives as a result of the ending of health programs, two-thirds of them likely children, according to an analysis from Impact Counter. Much of the agency's health focus was on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention.

"Support for HIV/AIDS treatment, malaria control and other initiatives have saved an estimated 91 million lives just over the past 20 years," says environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis.

Nijhuis, who joins Mongabay's podcast this week, says it's a similar story on the conservation front, with projects around the world suddenly losing their main — and in many cases their only — source of funding.

She notes that "$400 million [was] going toward really creative … successful conservation projects in some of the most endangered habitats in the world [that] were also stopped abruptly."

The impact is being felt in places and communities that relied on this funding, such as Ethiopia, the Congo Basin, the Amazon and Indonesia. Also affected are many of the world's largest conservation NGOs, some of which received tens of millions of dollars from USAID annually. The long-term damage from this, Nijhuis says, is very difficult to measure.

"Some of the effects we're already seeing, but some of the effects are going to be much slower to appear, much harder to measure," she says, "and in many ways we will not know what we've lost."

Michell Nijhuis is also the author of the recent book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. Initiatives mentioned by Nijhuis:

One Earth Partners

Reimagining Conservation Project

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Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

Image Credit: The WeMUNIZE program in Nigeria, significantly disrupted by aid cuts, used digital record keeping and community engagement to increase early childhood immunizations. Image by KC Nwakalor for USAID/Digital Development Communications via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

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Timecodes

(00:00) How USAID funded conservation

(05:10) Human health and conservation fallout after USAID shuts down

(13:52) Large NGOs feel the impact

(21:39) 'We will not know what we lost'

(31:45) How conservation groups are surviving

(37:34) The bright spots

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