Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

9. Agency for International Development · Notable · Needs Congress

Work with Congress to make deep cuts in the IDA budget

Partially done

268 9. Agency for International Development

“Work with Congress to make deep cuts in the IDA budget by ending programs that do more harm than good in places controlled by malign actors, such as in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan, where our aid is consumed by fraud, diversion, and partner overhead costs.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Congress went further and abolished the account. The FY2026 appropriations act carries no International Disaster Assistance heading: it creates a single "International Humanitarian Assistance" account of $5,400,000,000 merging disaster relief with refugee and migration needs, and directs that the prior Emergency Reserve Fund provisions be applied "by substituting 'International Humanitarian Assistance' for 'International Disaster Assistance' and substituting 'Secretary of State' for 'Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development'". `partial` and not `done`: the Quote ties the cuts to ending programs in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan, and no allowlisted record shows those country programs ended - the national emergency with respect to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan was continued on 2026-01-20.

  2. Partially done

    Enacted in part. The Rescissions Act of 2025, passed on the President's special message of 2025-06-03, rescinded $496,000,000 of unobligated International Disaster Assistance balances at section 2(b)(14), with a proviso protecting commodity-based food aid. The same act rescinded $125,000,000 of USAID operating expenses, $500,000,000 of Global Health Programs, $2,500,000,000 of Development Assistance and $800,000,000 of Migration and Refugee Assistance.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • On the ladder for asks that need an act of Congress, enactment of part of the ask is partial. Two enactments are recorded as separate events because they are separate steps - a rescission of balances, then the abolition of the account itself.
  • The FY2026 figure is not directly comparable to a prior-year IDA figure because the new account merges two former accounts; we record this rather than asserting a percentage cut.

Researched 2026-08-28.

Action
restrict
Object
International Disaster Assistance (IDA) account
ID
696