US funding freeze upends global aid, brings Syrian civil society to a standstill
As the Trump administration slashes foreign aid, Syrian civil society is left reeling at a time when it is most needed.
4 February 2025
MARSEILLE — On January 20, United States (US) President Donald Trump threw the global aid architecture into chaos, issuing an executive order freezing foreign aid for 90 days pending review. The US is the largest donor of foreign aid in the world, spending $68 billion last year.
On Saturday, the website of the US government’s humanitarian aid body, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), went offline. Three US officials told CBS News on Monday that the agency would be absorbed into the State Department.
While foreign assistance makes up less than one percent of US government spending, Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk have made USAID and its $40 billion budget a top target of what they describe as efforts to cut wasteful government spending in recent days.
“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. “Time for it to die.” The US president, for his part, described it as an organization run by “radical left lunatics” on Monday.
Syria is particularly vulnerable to any disruption in global aid flows. Some 90 percent of the population needs humanitarian assistance, with Syria ranking second—after Sudan—for the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
While US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, announced a waiver for “life-saving humanitarian assistance” on January 29, the freeze has thrown organizations working on the ground in disarray, threatening and disrupting food, water and healthcare for millions.
Aid organizations are reeling, with some major international organizations laying off scores of staff members and, in some cases, filing for bankruptcy, humanitarian sources told Syria Direct.
For assistance that is not considered “life-saving,” the specific criteria for review as to whether it aligns with US foreign policy have yet to be announced, but civil society programming has come to a standstill. In Syria, many media, women’s rights and justice organizations were thrown into chaos overnight, just as they are needed most, nearly two months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Humanitarian organizations
In 2024, prior to the freeze, the US accounted for a quarter—nearly $400 million—of humanitarian funding in Syria. “But the total funding itself for last year was much less than what was needed, meaning we’re already in a shortage of funding,” humanitarian expert Mohamed Katoub told Syria Direct.
As of last month, the United Nations’ Syrian Humanitarian Response Plan for 2024 remained severely underfunded, with only 34.5 percent of the required $4.1 billion fulfilled.
Despite the exemption for life-saving assistance, the funding freeze has forced many humanitarian organizations operating in Syria “to suspend or scale back essential services, including food assistance, healthcare and livelihood programs,” Hassan Jenedie, an independent consultant for Syrian relief organizations, said on Tuesday. “Many of our planned interventions have either slowed down or been put on hold, impacting vulnerable communities that rely on our support.”
Most of the largest Syrian relief organizations have been impacted, including Shafak, the International Humanitarian Relief Association (IYD) and Takaful Al Sham.
“The freeze has created an environment of uncertainty, affecting both direct aid recipients and implementing partners. Some organizations have been forced to reduce staffing or halt long-term development projects due to the funding gap,” Jenedie added.
Communication from USAID to its partners has been scarce or nonexistent. Without clear directives, some organizations have decided to halt operations based on a leaked memo to USAID staff ordering the immediate issuance of stop-work orders, as they await further guidance from the agency.
“We received an email that some life-saving sectors will be unpaused, but until now the situation is not clear enough. For that reason, some NGOs have decided to pause everything temporarily to avoid any disallowed expenditures,” Jenedie added.
The freeze comes during the winter season—when demand for shelter, heating, and food assistance increases—and less than two months after the fall of the Syrian regime, which affected service provision.
“Syria at the current stage needs restoration of services. That doesn’t mean we don’t need an emergency response—we still need it at least for one or two years—but we need now to start more early recovery and stabilization interventions, as well as transitional justice and accountability programs,” Katoub said. Otherwise, he warns the country will remain dependent on aid.
Early recovery focuses on restoring basic services, while stabilization involves rehabilitating large-scale infrastructure, strengthening good governance and supporting livelihoods.
The language of the US waiver gives no indication that non-humanitarian programs will resume. “Hopefully we hear different news in 90 days, but so far I’m not optimistic,” Katoub added.
Rights organizations
Women Now for Development, a Syrian feminist organization founded in 2012, is one such rights organization that is affected. The organization supports the search for missing persons, provides psychosocial support to survivors of detention, funds grassroots women’s initiatives and supports victims of gender-based violence, among other activities.
One of their programs most impacted by the funding freeze is the support they provide to six groups focused on forced disappearance. These include the Caesar Families Association, Families for Freedom, the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), and Massar Families. Many have no independent funding beyond the support Women Now provides them.
“All of the activities to support the capacity-building of these victim groups have stopped—psychosocial support, case management, and advocacy activities have [all] stopped,” Riwa al-Hamwi, Women Now’s justice programs manager, told Syria Direct.
The Caesar Families Association was founded in 2019 by the families of victims identified in the Caesar pictures: more than 50,000 images showing the bodies of 11,000 detainees, many tortured to death by the regime. The photos were smuggled out of Syria by a military defector code-named Caesar in 2014.
The organization consists of a network of 130 members, and has quickly grown since the Assad regime fell in December 2024. “The fear was broken,” Basma Chaikh, the association’s programs manager, told Syria Direct. In the first month alone after the regime’s fall, 300 families contacted them to report missing relatives after their loved ones were not found among those freed from Assad’s prisons.
In addition to identifying victims, the association provides psychosocial support to their families, supports international justice proceedings and conducts advocacy campaigns aimed at the international community and Syria’s new government. “We are now pushing for the formation of special courts to fight perpetrators,” Chaikh said.
Since the US froze funding, the Caesar Association’s employees have lost 70 percent of their salaries. Core staff have decided to continue working on a largely volunteer basis, regardless.
“We’re lucky that our team is small and we have decided that we will continue working no matter what, but most of the people who work with us are in Syria or in Turkey and they’re not supported by any government like in Europe,” where social safety nets exist, Chaikh added. However, with such a small team, they will only be able to proceed with documentation and small-scale advocacy. Other activities, such as those that involve lawyers, are on hold.
Another Women Now program that is likely to be impacted is the case management they provide for newly released detainees of Syrian prisons, including psychosocial support. In a rush to provide immediate support, they have tapped into their private organizational funds to fund the program. However, al-Hamwi says these funds may now need to be redirected to support Women Now’s core staff.
The funding freeze was “very short notice,” al-Hamwi said. “Many of my friends lost their jobs immediately. Luckily, since it’s a feminist organization and they really try to support the people who work with them, we didn’t lose our jobs.” Still, she expects salary cuts. “It’s really unclear now, but we’re trying to find ways to seek other funds,” she said. However, it can take months—if not a year—to secure and start new grants.
For civil society organizations, the funding freeze comes at the worst possible time. “We have the opportunity to be inside Syria and support the people in different ways, we have more opportunities with more freedom of movement, but then the funds stopped,” al-Hamwi added.
Many, like her, have rushed back to visit Syria and expand their activities into former regime-controlled areas, where they were previously scarce or nonexistent due to widespread repression of civil society and restrictions by donors.
“It is very crucial to continue given the new context, it’s not the time because the new government has already started the transitional government and giving support for the families to [put] pressure on the government is [needed] now.”
“The path for justice is very long and should not be stopped at any point,” Chaikh echoed. “We want to ensure that any government formed in Syria prioritizes accountability, because we believe there is no transitional justice without this.”
Countering misinformation
The freeze could not have come at a worse time for Verify-Sy, a Syrian website founded in 2016 that focuses on fact-checking and identifying misinformation and disinformation from all parties. Verify-Sy relies on US funding for a significant portion of its activities, Rami Magharbeh, a program and development consultant at the organization, said.
“Our platform has experienced a lot of pressure, with the rumors and misinformation and disinformation currently present in Syria that appeared after the fall of the regime,” Magharbeh added. In particular, the former regime and its backer Iran have actively propagated disinformation to destabilize the country, he said.
In November, the month before Assad fell, Verify-Sy reached 30,200 people on Facebook. In December, this jumped to over 1.7 million people. Every day the organization receives between 200 to 300 messages on social media asking it to confirm or deny media reports.
“The loss of the journalist’s voice, any civilian voice, in this phase will mean we will lose it forever. Any civilian voice, anyone working in civil work, must be present so that there is balance and all parties are participating in Syria,” he added.
While countering disinformation may be less tangible than direct aid programs or legal support to freed detainees, “it’s important at this time because if the [information] space is left to one party, it will control everything,” Magharbeh said. “There won’t be accountability, we’ll return to the past, where there was the Baath party and the Assad family and there were no other voices and they were controlling all of Syria.”
With the future of US foreign aid uncertain, Katoub hopes Gulf states will step in to fill the gap. Magharbeh sets his hopes on the European Union (EU). But since Assad fell, the EU has been slow to act, whether in terms of loosening sanctions or providing new funding.
“Most countries in the European Union are still in the monitoring phase, they are not taking any action. We hope from now until three months there will be a change in the European role,” Magharbeh said.
“We don’t know what will come after these 90 days. There’s so much uncertainty,” al-Hamwi of Women Now said. “But our work will not stop.”