New report reveals the environmental cost of USAID’s destruction

Filed 4h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: UNCTAD · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A new 166-page report from One Earth Partners, founded by two former senior USAID officials fired in the agency's 2025 dissolution, tracks what happened after the Trump administration ended roughly 5,200 USAID contracts and pulled nearly $1 billion from global conservation funding. Projects that lost support include deforestation-monitoring training in the Amazon, anti-poaching enforcement at Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, and a two-decade effort to hand a Bangladeshi wetland's management to local communities, which reverted to the government instead.

In Kenya, the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Organization lost a five-year, $6.5 million grant, forcing 10 layoffs and a 72% budget cut, and shelving a plan to secure elephant migration corridors. The report's authors, drawing on interviews with 150 people across five countries, say the damage includes increased deforestation, poaching, and risk to environmental defenders. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

You cancel a grant and somewhere a wetland just quietly reverts to whoever's left holding the clipboard. Nobody voted on that outcome, it just happens when the money that kept the lights on disappears overnight and the folks who show up to comment are the ones who did the firing. The State Department's silence here says about as much as the report does.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Relent · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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