Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the “Ministry of Truth.” It was “government speech police.” It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher tapped to lead it, received death threats. The whole thing was shut down within weeks because of the outcry.
Of course, all of it was an exaggeration. That board was actually set up to coordinate efforts to counter foreign disinformation — not to police Americans’ speech. We said so at the time, even while criticizing DHS for the monumentally stupid way they named and rolled it out. The name was terrible. The communication around it was worse. But the underlying mission — helping coordinate the government’s own efforts to respond to (not censor) foreign influence operations — was legitimate and, frankly, important in this era of information warfare.
Well, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just signed a cable doing something that sounds vaguely similar, but way worse. Specifically, he’s directing U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide to launch coordinated campaigns countering foreign propaganda — and the cable explicitly endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool for the effort. It also admits that this is pure psyops work:
The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.
“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”
Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.
This is far more expansive than anything the Disinformation Governance Board ever even contemplated — and the same people who screamed about the Ministry of Truth are, once again, completely silent.
The idea that the State Department would issue a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy—let alone military psychological operations—would have been, until recently, almost unthinkable. But the structural transformation that has taken place over years has made the news feel almost ordinary today. It was a transformation that dismantled, piece by piece, the legal accountability, operational independence and institutional resilience that once made such a cozy relationship between government and platforms inconceivable.
And see if any of this sounds familiar:
Rubio identifies five operational goals—countering hostile messaging, expanding information access, exposing adversarial behavior, elevating local voices sympathetic to U.S. interests, and “telling America’s story”—and instructs embassies to recruit local influencers and community leaders to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed.
Why, that sounds quite similar to what the Biden DHS said about the Disinformation Governance Board. Except, suddenly: no partisan freakout. No weeks of stories on Fox News. No screaming in the NY Post about speech police. Gee. I wonder why.
The U.S. State Department is instructing embassies to recruit local influencers to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed. This is, by definition, a covert influence operation. It’s the kind of thing that, when other countries do it, we call propaganda. It’s the kind of thing the Global Engagement Center was specifically designed to expose.
Oh, right. About the Global Engagement Center.
You may recall that one of the early moves of the returning Trump administration was to shut down the GEC, the State Department office specifically created to help identify and counter foreign influence campaigns. At the time, Rubio — the same Marco Rubio who just signed this cable — framed the shutdown as a free speech victory:
Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving. This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.
That was always a lie. The GEC (just like the Disinformation Governance Board) didn’t “silence and censor” Americans. It studied foreign influence campaigns — the kind run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, by ISIS recruitment networks, by Chinese state-linked information operations — and helped expose them. It’s the kind of work that requires sustained expertise, institutional knowledge, and sophisticated analytical capacity. The kind of thing you can’t just spin up overnight when you suddenly realize you need it.
So all of the hand-wringing about the Disinformation Governance Board, the GEC, and the idea that governments were too close to social media platforms was a bunch of nonsense all along. It was always about trying to gain and then keep power, destroying the institutions that dealt with foreign disinformation campaigns until they could capture them for their own purposes.
Klonick traces how Twitter/X became susceptible to exactly this kind of capture:
Musk systematically dismantled Twitter’s trust, safety, and content moderation infrastructure. The teams that had worked, however imperfectly, to maintain platform integrity not just for commercial reasons but to limit the spread of coordinated inauthentic behavior, state-linked influence operations, and targeted harassment were gone within months of Musk’s ownership. With both the corporate accountability architecture and the internal operational safeguards stripped away, the platform’s amplification and suppression mechanics became, in effect, tools that could be deployed at anyone’s, but namely Musk’s, discretion.
Before Musk’s acquisition, the major US tech platforms — whatever their flaws — generally bent over backwards to avoid being captured as instruments of state messaging.
The Rubio cable, on the other hand, specifically endorses X’s Community Notes feature as a tool for countering “anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech.” Klonick correctly identifies this as:
…a remarkable exercise in circular reasoning: the government endorsing, for use in state-directed information operations, a moderation tool on a platform owned by a former (and perhaps still current) senior government advisor.
But it’s worse than circular reasoning. Community Notes is a crowdsourced system. Its outputs are determined by which users participate and how they coordinate. While it’s (actually very cleverly) designed to avoid brigading attacks, that does not mean it’s perfect in avoiding manipulation. If the U.S. government can organize sympathetic actors to use Community Notes to surface pro-American narratives as part of a formal PSYOP-adjacent campaign, then so can every other government on the planet. China can coordinate its own actors. Russia already runs exactly these kinds of operations. Iran has entire units dedicated to this. The cable essentially advertises to every adversary exactly how to game the system — and the people who actually understood these vulnerabilities, the trust & safety teams, the GEC researchers, the disinformation scholars, are exactly the people this administration spent years attacking and driving out of their jobs.
Oh, unless they expect Elon Musk to tilt the playing field to their advantage — which is exactly the kind of thing these very same people were loudly freaking out about when Biden was president.
Now, some might point out that the broader “censorship industrial complex” crusade wasn’t only about counter-messaging efforts like the DGB and the GEC. It was also about the Murthy v. Missouri case, which dealt with something categorically different: the allegation that the Biden administration pressured platforms to remove third-party users’ speech. The Rubio cable, by contrast, directs government employees themselves to use the platform for their own messaging. These are genuinely different things.
But the supposed animating principle behind the entire crusade was that the government had no business being entangled with social media platforms on matters of information and speech. Not just “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove user content,” but the much broader claim that any government-platform coordination on information amounted to a sinister censorship machine.
Jim Jordan’s “censorship industrial complex” hearings didn’t just target White House communications with platform trust & safety teams. They went after researchers. They went after the GEC. They went after nonprofits studying foreign manipulation. The message was that any institutional involvement in the information ecosystem was inherently suspect. That principle, it turns out, had an expiration date — specifically, January 20, 2025.
And remember, in the Murthy case itself, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Biden admin’s communications with platforms constituted coercion. The plaintiffs couldn’t even establish standing because they couldn’t show the government actually changed platform behavior. Meta felt totally comfortable telling the White House “no” — as Zuckerberg himself admitted repeatedly on Joe Rogan, just weeks before telling Elon he was happy to silence people at the Trump White House’s request.
So the same political movement that treated government staffers sending cranky emails — emails that platforms felt perfectly free to ignore — as an existential constitutional crisis now sees nothing wrong with a formal State Department cable directing coordination with a specific privately-owned platform and military PSYOP. If the principle only matters when your political opponents are the ones in the White House, it was always just about weaponizing the systems of government for your own benefit.
Klonick puts the broader structural picture together:
The privatization of Twitter removed all traces of public accountability. The gutting of content moderation infrastructure removed operational resistance. The political alliance between the administration and the tech sector removed institutional resistance. And now a formal diplomatic cable removes the last pretense of arms-length separation between U.S. government messaging objectives and the platforms that carry them.
The legal questions that Murthy left unresolved—about when government pressure on private platforms crosses the constitutional line—will almost certainly be relitigated in this new context. But the more immediate reality is that the internet Americans and global audiences navigate is increasingly shaped not merely by the preferences of platform owners and advertisers, but by the strategic communication objectives of the U.S. government, implemented through platforms that have every financial and regulatory reason to cooperate.
This is the pattern we’ve watched unfold for years: wrap your power grab in the language of the thing you’re destroying. Call fact-checking “censorship.” Call attempts to expose foreign influence campaigns “the speech police.” Dismantle the institutions that actually did the thing you claim to value, then use the resulting vacuum to do exactly what you falsely accused your opponents of doing — only bigger, more openly, and with military coordination.
The sheer audacity of the sequencing is what makes all of this so infuriating. They spent years pointing at the Disinformation Governance Board and screaming “Ministry of Truth!” They shut down the Global Engagement Center while Rubio called it censorship. They destroyed the research infrastructure and the institutional knowledge that actually helped identify and counter foreign influence operations. And now, having cleared the field of anyone who might push back, they’re running their own influence operations through a platform with no independent oversight, no transparency mechanisms, and no institutional resistance — and they’re doing it openly, through formal diplomatic channels, in coordination with military psychological operations.
Klonick closes with the right question:
The question is no longer whether the government can use social media as a tool of statecraft. It already is. The question now is whether any institution—legal, normative, or structural—retains the capacity to check it.
Given that the people who claimed to care about checking government entanglement with social media are now the ones wielding it most aggressively — and spent years systematically destroying every institution that might have served as a check — don’t hold your breath.
The State Department wants US diplomats to fight data localization around the world. The policy position is correct. It’s just that the messenger has spent the last few months systematically destroying every reason anyone might listen.
In the State Department cable, dated February 18 and signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agency said such laws would “disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship.”
The cable said the Trump administration was pushing for “a more assertive international data policy” and that diplomats should “counter unnecessarily burdensome regulations, such as data localization mandates.”
Now, if you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we’ve long been critical of data localization mandates. They really are bad for the internet. They fracture the global internet into national fiefdoms. They raise costs. They can actually weaken cybersecurity by forcing data onto local infrastructure that may be less secure. And in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries, data localization is often a thinly veiled mechanism for government surveillance and control of information. Requiring that data stay within a country’s borders makes it a whole lot easier for that country’s government to demand access to it.
So on the merits, the policy position described in the cable is basically correct. Data sovereignty mandates do tend to hurt the open internet, and the US pushing back on them has, historically, been a genuinely good thing for global internet freedom. Indeed, the US State Department has a long history of pushing back on such efforts.
But the US already blew its credibility on this issue before this administration even took office. Remember the TikTok ban? That was a bipartisan effort—both Trump and Biden supported it—to do the exact same “data sovereignty” nonsense we’re now telling other countries not to do.
While the justification kept changing depending on the day and who you talked to, many of its supporters (including those in the Supreme Court who blessed that travesty) insisted that it was perfectly legitimate to force a “data localization” plan on TikTok because “ooh, scary foreigners shouldn’t have American data.” Literally this was the Supreme Court’s conclusion:
But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.
So both parties, both of the last two presidents, and the entirety of the Supreme Court announced to the world “it’s totally fine to force a foreign company to not just be required to hold data locally, but even to be forced to sell off local operations to a favored oligarch.”
That alone would make this diplomatic push awkward. But let’s talk about why it lands as completely absurd right now.
The reason data sovereignty initiatives have been “gathering pace,” as Reuters puts it, is in no small part because of the behavior of this very administration. Countries—and especially our allies in Europe—are rushing to build digital walls because the US government has spent the last few months torching every alliance, cozying up to dictators, kicking off arbitrary trade wars, and generally making it abundantly clear that it has zero respect for the norms, rules, or institutions that underpin international cooperation.
You cannot spend your days insulting and threatening your closest allies, engaging in wildly protectionist trade policies, and signaling to the world that no agreement or partnership is safe from your whims, and then turn around and demand that those same allies keep the data pipeline wide open for American tech companies.
This would be like setting your neighbor’s house on fire and then asking to borrow their garden hose. And everyone sees exactly what’s happening:
Bert Hubert, a Dutch cloud computing expert and former member of the board that regulates the Dutch intelligence services, said Europe’s increasing wariness of America’s tech companies may be spurring Washington to take a more aggressive tack.
“Where the previous administration attempted to woo European customers, the current one is demanding that Europeans disregard their own data privacy regulations that could hinder American business,” he said.
And then there’s what the cable actually reveals about its real motivations. The cable reportedly frames data sovereignty as a threat to “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services,” which is a pretty revealing tell. It strips away any pretense that this is about internet freedom or civil liberties. What it actually says is: “American AI companies need access to your citizens’ data to train their models, and we’d appreciate it if you’d stop putting up barriers to that.”
This is the diplomatic equivalent of saying the quiet part loud. The US isn’t making a principled argument about the open internet here. It’s making a commercial demand dressed up in freedom rhetoric. And that’s not exactly a compelling pitch to countries that are already worried about the dominance of US tech firms and the lack of meaningful privacy protections in the US.
The cable also takes a swipe at the GDPR specifically, calling it an example of “unnecessarily burdensome data processing restrictions.” Look, the GDPR has plenty of problems and we’ve written about many of them. But when the US government is publicly calling Europe’s flagship privacy law a burden it wants to fight, while simultaneously offering no credible privacy framework of its own, it’s hard to see how that’s going to win hearts and minds.
Meanwhile, Rubio has also been ordering diplomats to fight against the EU’s Digital Services Act, and the US reportedly wants to set up a portal to help Europeans “bypass” content moderation rules around hate speech and terrorist content.
So the diplomatic message from the US to Europe is currently: ignore your privacy laws, ignore your content moderation laws, give our companies access to your data for AI training, and also we might slap tariffs on you tomorrow. Good luck getting anyone to take the “open internet” pitch seriously after that.
The deeply frustrating thing about all of this is that there really is a strong case to be made against data localization. The open, global internet has been one of the most powerful engines of innovation, communication, and human rights in history, and fragmenting it into national data silos is genuinely dangerous. But making that case requires credibility. It requires being the kind of partner that other countries can trust with their citizens’ data. It requires demonstrating, through your own behavior, that you believe in the rule of law, in stable institutions, and in respecting the sovereignty of your allies even while you advocate for open data flows.
Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore’s 2013 Foreign Affairs piece on “The End of Hypocrisy” keeps proving prescient. A huge part of America’s moral power around the world resulted from the clear hypocrisy between America’s stated values and the ones we repeatedly failed to uphold. But it was a convenient myth that we could pretend to hold the moral high ground, and use that as a form of soft power to demand better of others. That falls apart entirely with administrations like Trump’s, where the idea of soft power, or even the moral high ground, is seen as woke nonsense. The Trump administration refuses to understand the power of that myth.
But now it’s gone. And that has a real cost: the policy position in Rubio’s cable is exactly right. The US should be pushing back on problematic data localization and “data sovereignty” laws. They’re bad for the open internet and good for local surveillance. This is an argument worth making—and we’ve surrendered the ability to make it credibly at precisely the moment it most needs to be made.
Foreign diplomats aren’t stupid. They can see that we demanded TikTok localize or divest while telling them localization is bad. They can see that we’re attacking their privacy laws while offering nothing in return. They can see that we’re framing this as “freedom” while the cable itself reveals it’s about feeding data to American AI companies. The policy is correct. The hypocrisy is total. And the result is that we’ve handed every country in the world a perfectly reasonable justification to ignore us.
On Friday, the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs posted to Twitter/X condemning Nicaragua’s government for—and I quote—”detaining Nicaraguans for liking posts online,” calling it evidence of “how paranoid the illegitimate Murillo and Ortega regime is.” The Bureau demanded “the unconditional release of all political prisoners” and declared that “freedom means ending the regime’s cycle of repression.”
Stirring stuff. Very pro-free-expression. One tiny problem: the very same day, a federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the US government doing… essentially the same thing. Hat tip to the excellent Chris Geidner from Lawdork for calling out the contrast on Bluesky.
The lawsuit, brought by Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation along with two anonymous noncitizen students, challenges the government’s practice of revoking visas and initiating deportation proceedings against people lawfully present in the United States based on their speech—including, notably, their social media activity. As we’ve covered here at Techdirt, the State Department has made reviewing social media profiles a regular part of the visa process, and has been actively targeting people for their online expression.
The court’s ruling lays out in pretty damning detail just how aggressively the government has been going after people for their protected speech. From the order:
In March 2025, DHS and ICE began aggressively targeting lawfully present noncitizens for protected speech, particularly at universities. Plaintiffs point to the arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi as emblematic of the Government’s enforcement strategy.
And what exactly did these individuals do that warranted arrest, detention, and deportation proceedings? Let’s see:
Ms. Öztürk is a PhD student at Tufts University who is lawfully present in the United States on an F-1 student visa. Ms. Öztürk co-authored an opinion article in the Tufts student newspaper that criticized the university’s refusal to adopt several resolutions approved by the undergraduate student senate urging the University to, among other things, recognize a genocide in Gaza and divest from Israeli companies… On March 25, 2025, six plain-clothes federal officers surrounded Ms. Öztürk on the street outside her home, detained her, and transported her to a Louisiana immigration jail.
She wrote an op-ed in a student newspaper. A DHS spokesperson claimed her editorial “glorified and supported terrorists.” It did not. It criticized the university’s policies, and did nothing to glorify or support “terrorists.”
The court also details what government officials have been saying publicly about this enforcement strategy.
DHS posted on Twitter that anyone who thinks they can “hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism—think again.” Stephen Miller bragged that “The State Department has revoked tens of thousands of visas, and they’re just getting started on tens of thousands more.” The US government isn’t hiding the fact that they’re combing US social media to figure out who to detain.
One of the plaintiffs—Jane Doe—is on the Canary Mission website, a private list of people which MAGA folks claim are anti-Israel and which the government has apparently been using as a shopping list for who to kidnap and deport. From the ruling:
Jane Doe was listed on the Canary Mission website, which is an anonymously and privately run website that publishes personal information of individuals and organizations that the Canary Mission personally deems “anti-Israel.” In their motion and during the hearing, the Government explained that DHS had asked ICE to generate “reports” for the State Department on individuals listed on the Canary Mission website to aid in decision-making about visa revocations. Notably, before the Government brought enforcement actions against them, Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi all had profiles published about them on the Canary Mission website.
The US government is actively monitoring people’s social media, revoking visas over protected speech, and using an anonymous website that doxxes pro-Palestinian activists as a source for enforcement targets.
And then the State Department has the audacity to criticize Nicaragua for “detaining Nicaraguans for liking posts online.”
Remember, the State Department’s tweet said that this kind of behavior shows “how paranoid and illegitimate” the regime is. We agree.
The hypocrisy is coming so fast it’s hard to keep up, but this one deserves special mention because the State Department is literally condemning other countries for the exact policy it’s implementing, and getting called out about it in court.
Nicaragua is paranoid and illegitimate for targeting social media activity, but when the US does it, we’re… protecting national security? Fighting antisemitism? The framing changes but the underlying action is the same: using the power of the state to punish people for their online expression.
The court, for its part, found that the plaintiffs’ fears of enforcement were entirely reasonable given the government’s very public campaign of targeting people for their speech:
Jane Doe and John Doe have sufficiently alleged that their behavior falls into the crosshairs of the Government’s stated enforcement priorities. The Government has also not disavowed plans to continue invoking the Revocation and Deportation Provisions.
In other words: the government isn’t even pretending it won’t keep doing this. And yet somehow it’s Nicaragua that needs to be lectured about freedom?
Maybe someone at the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs should walk down the hall and have a chat with their colleagues about what “freedom means ending the regime’s cycle of repression” actually looks like in practice. Because right now, the State Department’s position appears to be: targeting people for their social media activity is evidence of a paranoid, illegitimate regime—unless we’re the ones doing it.
The Trump administration has spent months shrieking about EU “censorship” while actively censoring people themselves. While I’ve long been a critic of parts of the DSA, Americans—particularly MAGA officials—keep crying wolf over the DSA’s non-censorial aspects, then turn around and abuse their own power to silence speech they dislike. They seem to get a thrill out of the hypocrisy.
Want to see how differently the US and EU actually handle government overreach on speech? Look at what happened to two would-be censors: Thierry Breton and Brendan Carr.
If you don’t recall, Thierry Breton is the former EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, which made him the lead enforcer of the DSA, a role he took to gleefully, regularly threatening tech companies if their actions didn’t comply with what Breton wanted them to do.
He got so drunk on his own power that he demanded Elon Musk not platform Donald Trump. Clear attack on basic free speech principles, exactly the kind of censorial overreach that validates MAGA complaints about the DSA.
The system worked. Someone abused their power, the system caught it, corrected it, removed him. That’s how institutions are supposed to respond to overreach.
Now, let’s come over to this side of the Atlantic. Remember Brendan Carr? The same FCC chair who threatened to abuse the power of the FCC to punish Disney for not kicking Jimmy Kimmel off the air? That temporarily worked. Disney pulled Kimmel off the air that very day and only brought him back the next week after they saw millions of cancellations of Disney+ as the public protested.
Unlike Breton, Carr actually succeeded. He used his government position to censor speech he didn’t like, and it worked. And what happened to him? Nothing. He’s still there, still threatening TV and radio stations whenever they say things that upset Trump or MAGA. No consequences, no correction, just more threats.
Now, with the US government banning Breton from getting a visa to ever come to the US again as “punishment” for his “censorship” effort that failed and got him fired, it seems like maybe people should be asking why Trump and Rubio are punishing Breton and not Carr.
Carr succeeded where Breton failed. Carr is still in power and still threatening. Breton got fired and now banned from the US.
Of course, we all know how this double standard works. Carr is allowed to do this because he’s abusing his powers to stifle speech Donald Trump doesn’t like. Breton must be punished because he tried to stifle speech Trump does like.
There’s nothing more sophisticated to it than that, but the similar nature of both politicians’ attempts to abuse the law to silence speech they didn’t like is notable. Frankly, I don’t think either the US or the EU should have anyone who has the power to abuse laws to enable censorship.
But only one system actually responded to the abuse of power by removing the abuser. And it wasn’t ours.
The contrast here reveals something more troubling than simple hypocrisy. When Breton overstepped, EU institutions checked him immediately. When Carr overstepped, US institutions… did nothing. No real pushback from Congress (Ted Cruz whining doesn’t count), no internal accountability, no consequences whatsoever. The system that’s supposed to prevent government censorship just sat there and watched it happen.
So when you hear the next MAGA official shrieking about EU censorship, remember: the EU’s institutions worked. They caught the abuse, stopped it, and removed the abuser. Our institutions failed. They enabled the abuse, rewarded it with continued power, and are now punishing the guy from the system that actually worked.
That’s not a story about two bad actors. That’s a story about which democratic system still has functioning antibodies against authoritarian overreach—and which one doesn’t.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that America had toppled Venezuela’s government and would now “run” the country indefinitely.
Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed to the men standing behind him—his Secretary of State, his Defense Secretary, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—and said: “The people standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it.”
Running a nation of thirty million people. Indefinitely. Without congressional authorization. Without a declaration of war. Without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply.
When asked about the legal basis, Trump cited oil rights he claims were “stolen” from American corporations decades ago. When asked about resistance, he promised a “second wave” of military action. When asked who would govern Venezuela, he gestured at his cabinet and said they would decide.
This is the anti-Lincoln moment. Not because Trump expanded executive power—Lincoln did that too. But because Lincoln used emergency authority to preserve the constitutional framework, while Trump uses it to declare himself outside constitutional constraint entirely.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to save the Union. Donald Trump announced imperial conquest to extract oil. One defended the regime. One destroys it. Trump isn’t like Lincoln. He’s the structural opposite—doing exactly what Lincoln would have fought against.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Expanded executive war powers. Asserted federal authority over states claiming sovereignty. This is historical fact.
But watch what else he did.
He submitted the habeas suspension to Congress for ratification—which they gave. He accepted that courts could review his actions. He ran for re-election during war and accepted he might lose. He yielded power when constitutional process demanded it.
Lincoln’s logic was always this: the constitutional framework faces existential threat from secession, and extraordinary measures to preserve it are justified—within constitutional bounds and subject to eventual constitutional accountability.
The key word is preserve. Lincoln expanded executive power to save the framework that makes constitutional government possible. Secession would have destroyed the Union. No Union, no Constitution. No Constitution, no self-government. The emergency power served constitutional continuation.
And crucially, Lincoln submitted to the framework even while defending it. Congress could check him. Courts could review him. Elections could remove him. His question wasn’t “How do I escape accountability?” It was “How do I preserve the system that holds me accountable?”
That’s emergency power in a constitutional republic. Extraordinary measures, constitutional purpose, ultimate accountability.
Trump’s Imperial Declaration
Trump’s announcement Saturday inverts every principle Lincoln defended.
No Congressional authorization under Article I, Section 8. No declaration of war. No emergency requiring immediate action to prevent attack on American territory or citizens. Just the President deciding to wage war, seize another nation’s government, and announce indefinite occupation.
“Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms,” Trump said from his club. “The socialist regime stole it from us… Now we’re taking it back.”
This isn’t emergency power to preserve constitutional framework. This is imperial conquest announced as resource extraction. This is the President declaring he will “run” a foreign nation to compensate American corporations for assets nationalized decades ago.
The New York Timesgot it exactly right: the events “evoked memories of a bygone era of gunboat diplomacy, where the U.S. employed its military might to secure territory and resources for its own advantage.”
Trump hung a portrait in the White House featuring himself alongside William McKinley—the president who seized the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Now he’s acting out McKinley’s imperial playbook, but without even the pretense of Congressional authorization that McKinley obtained.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress—not the President—the power to declare war. This isn’t ambiguous. This isn’t a gray area. The Founders explicitly rejected giving war powers to the executive because they had just fought a revolution against monarchical power.
Lincoln understood this. Even while expanding executive authority to suppress rebellion, he sought Congressional authorization, submitted to Congressional oversight, and accepted that courts and elections could check him.
Trump’s position, articulated by his defenders, is different: Congressional authorization is irrelevant when the cause is just. Maduro is evil. Venezuela’s people are suffering. Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs. Constitutional process is pedantry when outcomes are good.
This is not Lincoln’s emergency power. This is Carl Schmitt’s sovereignty: the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The strong leader acts decisively. Constitutional constraint is obstacle, not obligation. Emergency is permanent condition justifying permanent exception.
Lincoln used emergency power within constitutional framework to preserve that framework from destruction. Trump uses emergency claims to declare himself outside constitutional framework—to wage war, seize governments, and extract resources without Congressional authorization, without declaration of war, without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply to him.
This isn’t isolated. This is the pattern.
When election results constrain him, he claims fraud, attempts to prevent certification, and incites assault on the Capitol.
When courts rule against him, he calls the judiciary illegitimate and promises to ignore adverse rulings.
When Congress investigates, he refuses subpoenas, claims absolute immunity, and purges inspector generals.
When the Constitution limits war powers, he wages war unilaterally from his private club while his defenders mock proceduralism.
Every emergency claim serves the same purpose: eliminate the constraint. Never preserve the framework. Always escape accountability.
His defenders make it explicit. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, said of Venezuela’s interim leader: “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”
Translation: do what we want, or face second-wave military action. This isn’t partnership. This isn’t liberation. This is imperial diktat backed by armada.
Trump himself was clearer: America will extract Venezuela’s oil, and the partnership with the United States will make“the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe”—if they comply. If they resist, he warned: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”
This is conquest. Announced from Mar-a-Lago. Without Congressional authorization. In explicit pursuit of seizing another nation’s resources for American corporate benefit.
Lincoln would have recognized this instantly as what he fought against. This is executive power divorced from constitutional constraint. This is sovereignty claiming exception to law itself.
We’re not in normal politics. Normal politics is policy disagreement within shared constitutional framework. Should taxes be higher? How should we conduct foreign policy? What’s the right balance of regulation?
This is regime crisis. One side claims constitutional constraints don’t apply when emergency or good outcomes justify exception. The other side keeps pretending we’re having normal policy debate.
When the President wages war without Congress, that’s not “foreign policy I disagree with.” That’s constitutional violation requiring constitutional response.
When the President announces from his private club that his cabinet will “run” a foreign nation of thirty million people indefinitely, that’s not “aggressive foreign policy.” That’s declaration that constitutional war powers don’t constrain him.
When his defenders argue the violation doesn’t matter because Maduro is evil and outcomes are good, that’s not “different political philosophy.” That’s rejection of constitutional constraint as governing principle.
Every act of “let’s debate the Venezuela policy” is collaboration with framework destruction. Not because debate is bad, but because they’re not proposing policy within the framework—they’re eliminating the framework while we debate.
You can’t defeat “constitutional constraints are optional” by following constitutional constraints politely while the other side wages war from private clubs. You can only defend the framework by using every power that framework provides.
This is the regime crisis I wrote about in the manifesto. This is what happens when democratic constraint disappears. This is what Lincoln fought to prevent.
And this is what defense of the republic requires us to stop.
We cannot treat this as normal politics.
Lincoln preserved the framework. Trump declares himself outside it.
Your grandparents knew which side they were on when the republic was threatened. They fought. They won. They built the middle class and the democratic alliance that kept the peace for seventy years.
We will do it again.
2026 begins now.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. This is an abridged version of a version originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Last week, Marco Rubio and the State Department revoked visas for five Europeans—including Imran Ahmed, a legal permanent resident in the US married to a US citizen—because they don’t like their speech about disinformation. The State Department’s justification? This form of speech suppression is necessary to protect free speech.
This is merely the latest episode in what will go down as the most anti-free speech, censorial presidential administration in history. Remember when Trump’s first executive order claimed to “restore free speech and end federal censorship“? We’ve since seen the administration repeatedly attack and punish people for their speech, but the Rubio move takes the hypocrisy to a new level: using government power to punish people for their speech while claiming to fight censorship.
The U.S. government just banned five people from entering the country because it doesn’t like their speech. This ban, according to the State Department, is necessary to protect free speech.
If that sounds insane to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension.
For the record: I’ve been a vocal critic of both Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate, which does ridiculously shoddy research (they once claimed photos of gum were “eating disorder content”), and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, about whom I’ve never said anything nice. But when the U.S. government bans people from the country for their speech, the quality of their work becomes irrelevant. Breton, admittedly, did try to abuse the law to censor Americans, but the EU spit him out and rejected such abuse immediately:
The most instructive case here is Breton himself. He did, in fact, try to abuse the DSA to suppress speech. In August 2024, he sent Elon Muska threatening lettersuggesting that Musk’s planned livestreamed interview with then-candidate Donald Trump could violate the DSA. It was a blatant attempt at censorship.
And here’s what happened: The EU rejected him. Completely. EU officials went on recordcondemning the letter, his fellow commissioners distanced themselves from his threats, and within weeks heresignedto avoid being fired. As EU free speech experts noted in arecent open letter: “Politically, the EU’s checks and balances worked.”
So even when Breton actually tried to censor Americans, the EU’s institutions rejected it. Meanwhile, Rubio is retaliating against Breton for that failed attempt by exiling him from the country—actual government punishment for speech.
But the truly egregious bit of the State Department’s move here was that they had Under Secretary Sarah Rogers go on X and claim that these bans were necessary to prevent “Murthy-style speech suppression,” which is an incredible admission, given that the ruling in the Murthy case showed there was no actual evidence of speech suppression.
As I wrote in the piece, this is bizarre revisionist history of a ruling that just came out last year:
Rogers is referring tothe Murthy v. Missouricase mentioned above, where two states and a collection of angry social media influencers sued the Biden administration, claiming social media platforms censored content at the government’s direction. The Supreme Courtrejected those claims6-3, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion finding the plaintiffs had no standing because there was no evidence the government suppressed anyone’s speech. The platforms, Barrett noted, were simply enforcing their own rules.
Even worse, in a damning footnote, Justice Barrett highlighted that the lower court’s finding that there was censorship was based on a “clearly erroneous” reading of the evidence.
So the State Department is citing a case that disproved government censorship as evidence of government censorship. That’s not even creative lying — it’s just citing your own loss as precedent.
As I wrote in that piece, this goes beyond routine lying. The State Department is weaponizing a Supreme Court case that explicitly rejected claims of government censorship to justify actual, unambiguous government effort at punishing people for their speech. They’re inverting the legal record—taking a ruling that said “no, the government didn’t suppress speech” and using it as precedent to suppress speech.
The State Department is literally using the judiciary’s rejection of censorship claims as permission to punish people for their speech. When an administration twists a loss into a win by doing exactly what the court said they didn’t do, we’re not just dealing with censorial hypocrites. We’re watching them test how far they can push before anyone stops them.
For what it’s worth Ahmed quickly went to court seeking a temporary restraining order on this decision, which he feared would be used to eject him from the country where he lives with his family. On Christmas day, the judge issued the TRO, with orders for a telephone conference later today to discuss further issues in the case.
Again, there are few things that Ahmed and I agree on (he’s spent months insisting that Section 230 needs to be repealed, based on his direct misrepresentation of 230). I think he’s wrong on a wide variety of issues, and that his advocacy is dangerous for speech and the open internet. But I’ll stand up and defend his right to say such things any day, without the US government punishing him for it.
Rose Natabo needs to leave one of her starving sons behind. At dawn, she squeezes her firstborn goodbye, then wraps her youngest, Santo, to her back, his legs akimbo at her waist. Taking the hand of her middle child, James, she hurries away toward help, her pink plastic sandals clapping over the dry dirt.
A couple hours later, the trio are in the back of an ambulance speeding by soccer fields, slums and footpaths. They turn through an iron gate and into the only hospital in Kakuma, a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya’s northern desert. After running from wars and natural disasters, this camp, the third-largest in the world, is their home. They have nowhere else to go. Rose joins a crowd of other mothers checking into the pediatric malnutrition ward.
It is July 8. Rose ran out of food less than three weeks ago after the World Food Program cut rations across the camp. At the hospital, she learns why: WFP lost its funding from the United States, the program’s biggest donor. What she doesn’t know is that aid workers and government officials from both the U.S. and Kenya spent the previous months begging and warning Trump administration leaders that families like hers depended on that food to survive. But for months, nothing changed. So Rose and thousands of other mothers watched their children starve.
Trump’s aides say the funding cuts were necessary to reform America’s broken foreign aid system, and they’ve begun making new investments into Kenya. “What you’ve seen right now,” one senior official at the State Department explains, “is there’s always some period of disruption when you’re doing something that’s never been done before.”
For WFP, that disruption meant telling 300,000 refugees in Kakuma that a little more than half of them will receive a meager portion of rice, lentils and oil some time next month, in August. The rest will get nothing. Rose doesn’t know which group she’s in. And she doesn’t know if her sons will survive that long anyway, especially Santo, who is only 2 years old.
Under the fluorescent lights in the malnutrition ward, nurses try to get an IV into him. But Santo is so swollen with edema — a result of severe protein deficiency — they can only find a vein on his head. Drained of color, his skin peels off in patches like burns. They drip milk into his mouth because feeding too quickly can be fatal. “Their bodies have adapted to starvation,” a nurse explains.
At night, Rose and Santo lie on a small vinyl hospital bed surrounded by a mosquito net. The swelling abates after a few days, but the little boy shrinks to 14 pounds and disappears into a loose, unstrapped onesie meant for a 9-month-old. The nurses tell Rose that God has performed a miracle, but Santo is still a long way from recovery. This is not his first time in the malnutrition ward this year.
Days pass. On July 16, the hospital discharges James, her 5 year old with dark marble eyes. He has somehow overcome a bout of malaria, which can be nine times more likely to kill a severely malnourished child like him. Without other options, Rose decides to send him home to her eldest, 7-year-old Lino, who is still staying with neighbors and relatives, even though she knows they have little food to spare. She has to stay behind at the hospital just a little bit longer, she tells James. Santo needs her.
July turns to August, and Rose becomes a fixture in the clinic. Five-foot-nothing and soft-spoken, she often enters and leaves rooms without notice. Every day, she sees other panicked mothers come to the clinic with sick children, a dozen a day on average. Some leave alone, after their children die.
Rose does laundry, bathes Santo and tidies up around their bed to stay busy. She wonders who, if anyone, is looking after James and Lino and what, if anything, they are eating. She starts asking staff any chance she gets if today is the day they will discharge Santo.
Some of the other mothers are so desperate to check on their children they sneak out at night and walk hours back home. Others abscond altogether. At least one baby died this year after her mother took her from the clinic before she was ready.
Rose considers leaving, too. “I don’t want my kids to suffer alone,” she says as her fingers work over black and white beads of a necklace she’s making for Santo, a traditional charm popular in South Sudan. Rose separated from her husband, who she says abused her, and now raises her boys alone. She inflates her cheeks and presses her face nose-to-nose with Santo. She’s the only one who can make him laugh.
Rose fled her home for Kakuma as a teenager in 2018, after South Sudan’s civil war found her village and left few survivors. She’s now about 23 — she doesn’t know her exact birthday — but still feels like an orphan in need of help.
On Monday, Aug. 4, a young, gentle nurse named Mark Kipsang walks through the pediatric malnutrition ward with a clipboard. Medical staff had promised Rose before the weekend that she and Santo would be discharged soon.
When Kipsang reaches their bed, Rose sits the boy upright and encourages him to greet their visitor. Kipsang offers a hand for a high five, but Santo doesn’t budge. His little feet dangle from the bed, still swollen with edema. Kipsang is worried Santo’s condition will worsen at home and that he’d quickly end up back at the hospital. This year, Kipsang’s ward has seen about six relapses every week on average.
“Has he had diarrhea?” he asks, inspecting the loose skin on Santo’s backside.
“No,” Rose lies.
“Can he walk?”
Rose nods and places Santo on the cold concrete, his shirt slipping from his shoulders. When he stands motionless, Rose holds his hands above his head and wills him forward, his feet barely shuffling. Santo starts to wail, and Rose sighs and lifts him back into her lap.
Santo is not ready to leave. Just then, Kipsang looks at Rose sitting cross-legged and notices what she has kept to herself all this time. Rose is pregnant.
Kipsang sends her straight to the hospital prenatal offices. She pads across the courtyard clutching a worn purple book that shows her first and only checkup was months ago. Rose speaks three languages but cannot read or write. Staff take her blood and conduct other tests and then explain the results as they jot them down in the book. She is extremely anemic, which means she is at risk for fainting, strokes or a preterm birth.
A third of the women in the hospital’s maternity ward have life-threatening complications that could be treated simply with food. They suffer from anemia like Rose, as well as dangerously high blood pressure. Their babies are born early, weighing too little and with underdeveloped lungs.
Jane Atim, a solicitous nutrition counselor, tells Rose that in order to avoid a dangerous birth, she needs to address her iron deficiency. Rose nods but otherwise sits still on a plastic chair, her fingers laced together. Atim flips through a ledger of two dozen other pregnant women she had seen in recent weeks, all with the same problem. There’s a diagram of a balanced diet on her desk. “How many times a day do you eat?” Atim asks.
Three, Rose lies again. She wants to end the conversation and figures there’s not much point in being honest or complaining. Instead, she lists peas, greens and lentils as her typical daily fare.
Atim knows it isn’t true, but she doesn’t think it does much good to despair alongside the starving mothers. So she tells Rose what she tells everyone: “The best thing for you to do is eat.”
The next morning, three days shy of one month in the hospital, Rose comes apart. “I am leaving today,” she shouts to a group of hospital workers who had gathered around her. The other mothers turn on their beds to watch. Her face is wet with tears. She tells them she doesn’t know who’s taking care of her other kids.
Her doctor relents and signs the discharge papers. “This is not ideal,” he says. He’s worried Santo might have contracted tuberculosis as well. But he says it’s better to discharge Santo than let Rose leave against medical advice and risk her ignoring their recommendations for treatment at home.
Later, Rose collects all of their belongings into the plastic wash basin she’s been using for laundry: two dresses, blankets, soap in an empty powdered milk tin, the iron tablets the prenatal ward had given her and papers describing Santo’s treatment plan. She doesn’t know what the files say, but she organizes them into neat piles anyway. The hospital had prescribed Santo 11 ready-to-use therapeutic food bars, and Rose keeps the packaging of one he just finished. She saves the empty wrappers to prove Santo has eaten them. Some mothers resort to selling theirs.
Rose ties Santo to her back with a blanket printed with monkeys, balances the basin atop her head and cups her lower belly with her free hand. “God help you,” another mother says.
As Rose reaches her sister’s house, Lino and James bound around the corner, through an open gate and beneath a clothesline made of concertina wire. Flanked by a posse of other children all coated in a film of dust, the boys beeline for Santo. They coo over their little brother before liberating a nutritional supplement wrapper from his hands to lick it clean. Rose inspects Lino’s dirty fingernails and picks up James, his brittle arms reaching around her neck; his body feels like an empty bookbag. He has a bad cough.
They look rough, Rose thinks, but they are alive.
It takes more than an hour to walk back to their house. James lost his shoes at some point after leaving the hospital. He struggles to stand, much less walk under the blinding East African sun. “He became so thin this year,” says Rose, whose own sandals have broken. “He’s usually fat.”
Strapped to her back, Santo falls asleep. Rose agonizes over being a mother unable to feed her children, with a pain so deep that she feels something like remorse for having had them at all. “There’s no happiness in it,” she says later.
They walk past the occasional house stripped to a husk. Those families, Rose explains, sold their clothes, chairs and even roofs to afford a ride over the border to South Sudan — a place they had not long ago fled for their lives.
Kakuma once felt like her only possibility for a future. She hoped to go into business for herself, selling food of all things. She’d raise money in case she and the boys were ever granted asylum in the U.S., where her sons could receive a good education.
But she’s abandoned that plan. Now she instead imagines joining those returning to South Sudan instead. “This sickness that came upon her baby has broken her,” Rose’s sister Sunday says, using a camp colloquialism for malnutrition.
“The only time she scared me,” Sunday adds, “was when she told me she wanted to take her kids back to South Sudan.”
On the morning of Aug. 11, Rose disappears into a crowd of hundreds of refugees under a pavilion about the size of a basketball court. Children lie across concrete benches while their mothers crane their necks toward the front, struggling to hear over the din. There, a small team of Kenya Red Cross workers holding clipboards call names on a bullhorn. One at a time, the mothers come forward to lift their kids onto a scale.
This outdoor clinic is functionally a pediatric malnutrition referral center. Community health workers fan across Kakuma to measure the circumference of children’s arms. Any kids in the area with arms thinner than 13.5 centimeters below the shoulder are sent here. They’ve made almost 12,000 malnutrition referrals this year.
Rose sits with James and Santo on either side of her, both half asleep despite the noise. Behind a folding table at the front of the crowd is a harried young Red Cross nutritionist. He said on a previous visit that the turnout shows how far malnutrition has spread. “It’s worse than last year,” he added, “because the food has been cut.”
Rose plops Santo on the scale: about 15 pounds. James is 21. Both weigh more than they did last check up, but still far less than what healthy children would at their ages. Each of their arms measures less than 12 centimeters, meaning the aid workers should prescribe them both therapeutic food.
The nutritionist tells Rose to follow him. He unlocks a heavy steel door that opens into a vault typically filled with nutritional supplements. Now, save for a couple boxes torn open on pallets, the room is empty. “We don’t have Plumpy’Nut anymore,” he says. (U.S. funding cuts disrupted the global supply chain that moves therapeutic ready-to-use food all over the world, The New York Times reported, stranding it in warehouses and at shipping companies.) He hands Rose a few bars of what remains for Santo and a different, less dense, supplement for James. They head back home.
Rose gives birth to her first girl two months later, on Oct. 5. It’s a Sunday, which is what Rose names the baby.
Her family still struggles to get food, even though WFP has started giving out more rations after a recent grant from the U.S. She rests under a tree with the children outside their dark, squat home, watching them sit listless in the heat.
All three of her boys have backslid. Lino and James are even thinner. The color has again drained from Santo’s skin and the edema returned to his legs, arms and face. He has lost 1 pound since the August weigh-in with the Red Cross.
Still wearing the black-and-white necklace his mom made him, Santo can hardly open his eyes or sit upright. It’s clear he needs to go back to urgent care. But she’s afraid to risk bringing her newborn to the hospital, where she might catch an infection.
They’ll all stay at home for now. This time, Rose has to choose baby Sunday.
On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.
They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.
The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.
The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.
This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.
Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.
But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.
On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.
Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.
In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.
But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.
WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.
Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.
Note: Rations and population sizes represent an Aug. 11 food distribution in Kakuma. ProPublica extrapolated the 100% ration amounts from the 20% ration. Amounts vary between distributions. Source: Documents obtained by ProPublica. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.
In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.
Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.
As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.
On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.
In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.
As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.
Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.
Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.
Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.
Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?
Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.
A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.
Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.
In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.
The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.
Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.
WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.The original has additional imagery which is worth checking out as well.
On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.
For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.
There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.
Despite the steps to insulate themselves, dire warnings poured in from diplomats and government experts around the world. The cuts would cost countless lives, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the other Trump officials were told repeatedly. The team of aides pressed on, galvanized by two men who did little to hide their disdain for the agency: first Peter Marocco, a blunt-spoken Marine veteran, and then 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, who, despite having no government or aid experience, often personally decided which programs should be axed.
By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction.
In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake.
Days later, on a remote patch of land in South Sudan, a 38-year-old man named Tor Top gathered with his neighbors outside the local health clinic. Surrounded by floodwaters, their hamlet of thatch and mud homes had been battling a massive outbreak of cholera, a deadly disease spread by poor sanitation. Around the country, it had infected 36,000 people in three months, killing more than 600, many of them babies. Top’s family lived in the epicenter.
The clinic, one of 12 in the area run by the Christian, Maryland-based humanitarian organization World Relief and funded by USAID, provided a key weapon in the fight: IV bags to stave off dehydration and death. The bags cost just 62 cents each, and in three months, the clinics had helped save more than 500 people.
Now, Top, who lived with his wife, children and mother in a one-room house less than 50 feet from the clinic, listened as World Relief staff shared grim news: The Trump administration had stopped USAID’s funding to World Relief. Their clinic, their lifeline, was closing.
Top’s usual gentle demeanor broke down. Why would the U.S. just cut off their medical care in the middle of a deadly outbreak?
By now the broad story of USAID’s ruin has been widely told: The decree handed down by Trump; Elon Musk, who led the new Department of Government Efficiency; and Russell Vought, who holds the purse strings for the administration as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, to scuttle the agency and undo decades of humanitarian work in the name of austerity. Publicly, the administration tried to temper international backlash by promising to keep or restore critical lifesaving programs.
But that promise was not kept. Instead, a cast of Trump’s lesser-known political appointees and DOGE operatives cut programs in ways that guaranteed widespread harm and death in some of the world’s most desperate situations, according to an examination by ProPublica based on previously unreported episodes inside the government as well on-the-ground reporting in South Sudan. In some cases, they abandoned vital operations by clicking through a spreadsheet or ignoring requests in their inboxes.
The abrupt moves left aid workers and communities with no time to find other sources of funding, food or medicine. Borrowing from a phrase used to describe the U.S.’ overwhelming military campaign during the Iraq War, political appointee Tim Meisburger told senior USAID staff that the strategy was “shock and awe.” (Meisburger declined to comment.)
Tibor Nagy, a veteran diplomat who was Trump’s acting undersecretary of state for management until April, has long been a critic of the vast networks of nonprofit organizations funded by American taxpayers. But he told ProPublica the administration never cared to differentiate between the “fluff” and vital humanitarian programs. “It was the most harebrained operation I’d seen in my 38 years with the U.S. government,” Nagy said, referring to the methods used this year. “Who knows how much damage was done.”
In public statements and congressional testimony, Rubio has repeatedly insisted that no one died because of cuts to U.S. foreign aid and that his staff had reinstated lifesaving operations. But ProPublica found that those claims were a charade: Lifesaving programs remained on the books, but the flow of money didn’t restart for months, if at all. Lewin blocked funding requests for programs like tuberculosis treatment in Tajikistan and emergency earthquake response in Myanmar, records show.
This meant that dozens of supposedly “active” operations were dormant throughout most of the year. Rubio’s advisers let other critical programs, which typically run on one-year grants, expire without renewing them.
Few places were hit harder than South Sudan, the youngest and poorest country in the world, as well as one of the most dependent on American aid.
After Trump’s inauguration, career USAID and State Department staff spent months warning top officials that the funding cuts would exacerbate a historic cholera epidemic ripping through the country. They needed less than $20 million to fund lifesaving health programs, including cholera response efforts, for three months at the beginning of the year — an eighth of what Trump recently approved to buy private jets for one cabinet secretary and just 3% of USAID’s budget in South Sudan last year. But Rubio, Marocco and Lewin failed to heed their own agencies’ assessments, according to internal records and interviews.
As a result, people in South Sudan died.
By denying and delaying those funds for months, Trump’s appointees incapacitated the fragile nation’s emergency response systems at the very moment when doctors and aid workers were scrambling to contain cholera’s spread. “We had to start rationing lifesaving interventions,” said Lanre Williams-Ayedun, the senior vice president of international programs for World Relief. “To have something like this happen in a place like this, where there aren’t mechanisms for backup, just means people are going to die.”
Villages and towns that had been reining in the outbreak suddenly lost essential services. Cholera came roaring back. “The trend was going down,” said a former U.S. official. “When we stopped the funding, it just surged.”
This summer, ProPublica journalists hiked and boated across Rubkona County, the epicenter of South Sudan’s outbreak and home to the country’s largest refugee camp, to interview families that the U.S. cut off from help. We collected medical files, diaries, meeting notes and photographs documenting cholera’s devastation after essential services stopped.
ProPublica also interviewed more than 100 government and aid officials and reviewed enormous caches of previously unreported memos, correspondence and other documents from inside the Trump administration. Many were granted anonymity due to fears of reprisal.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official said fast, drastic changes to foreign aid were necessary to reform a “calcified system.” The world, especially U.S. interests, will be better for it in the long run, the official said, despite “some disruptions in the short term.”
The official also said that Rubio was the final decision-maker for all aid programs. They also contended that they had a limited budget to work with, “which required some tradeoffs on what programs to continue,” saying OMB has ultimate control over new humanitarian funds.
The official maintained that nobody died as a result of the funding cuts. “That’s a disgusting framing,” the official said. “There are people who are dying in horrible situations all around the world, all of the time.”
“Who is responsible for the suffering of the people of South Sudan?” the official added. “The South Sudanese [government leaders] who take their oil revenues and buy private jets and fancy watches and don’t see to their own people? Or the United States? Are we responsible for every poor person all around the world?”
Officially, the death count in South Sudan is nearly 1,600, making it the worst cholera epidemic in the country’s history. But that toll is a dramatic undercount. ProPublica found newly dug, unmarked graves alongside roads and in backyards. In one town, community leaders showed reporters an informal cemetery with at least three dozen people who they said did not make it to medical facilities in time.
Tor Top’s mother, Nyarietna, was one of the uncounted. In March, the clinic doors had been padlocked for two weeks when she developed vomiting and diarrhea. Top bundled her into a rented canoe and began paddling toward the nearest hospital, eight hours away. Less than halfway into the journey, long after they had stopped reassuring one another that she would be OK, Nyarietna died.
Top turned the canoe around and made his way back home, where he buried his mom in their backyard. Now he alone tends the small garden where she grew corn and okra for their family. “If there was medicine here,” he said later, “maybe her life would have been saved.”
Aid to South Sudan
For years, Sudan’s Arab-led central government waged a campaign of brutal violence against its Christian minority in the south. Their persecution became a cause celebre of the American Evangelical movement, which convinced President George W. Bush’s administration to help broker a peace agreement that led to independence 15 years ago. Since then, the U.S. has given the fledgling nation nearly $10 billion in aid, according to federal data. That money subsidized virtually every corner of the health care system, among other institutions.
Still, South Sudan remains undeveloped. Political instability, corruption and dysfunction are rampant. The transitional government hasn’t paid public employees’ salaries for most of the last two years. U.S. officials had long been on alert to South Sudanese aid workers siphoning resources. Deadly political violence — left over from the civil war and threatening a new one — besets much of the country.
Well before Trump took office this year, the international community had broadly agreed that it was necessary to end the nation’s dependence on foreign aid, and U.S. officials were working on strategies to force its leaders to take responsibility for its citizens.
Some of the most vulnerable among them live in Rubkona County, an oil and cattle hub larger than Rhode Island near Sudan’s border. There, a refugee camp formed in 2014 during the nation’s civil war when thousands of people fled behind a United Nations peacekeeping mission to escape a massacre in the nearby town of Bentiu. As South Sudan’s political turmoil continued to spiral, tens of thousands more fled to the camp. In 2020, Rubkona was hit by a series of catastrophic floods that submerged the majority of the county. Generations of people are now essentially trapped there with nowhere else to go.
Previously, USAID gave the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration $36 million for work in South Sudan, which included keeping the Bentiu camp habitable and making critical repairs to the dikes that surround the camp and hold back the rising floodwaters. The group maintained the drainage system and paid people to pick up garbage and clean the latrines — essentially performing sanitation services for 110,000 people.
Despite those efforts, cholera began spreading late last year as new refugees poured in from neighboring Sudan. Rubkona County quickly became the outbreak’s epicenter. In a matter of days, hundreds of infections turned to thousands and the death toll mounted. U.S.-funded organizations raced to set up treatment units in the camp and surrounding communities.
The situation was dire, and people had few viable options to leave Bentiu, U.S. Ambassador Michael Adler reported back to Washington after USAID staff visited the camp to assess the outbreak in early December. The U.S.-funded cholera clinics and other programs were necessary given the “explosivity” of the illness’ spread, he wrote.
It was the kind of routine crisis response that USAID was renowned for handling. The last cholera outbreak in Rubkona, in 2022, lasted seven months, and government statistics say that just one person died while about 420 were sickened. An aggressive sanitation campaign, largely funded by the U.S., was crucial to containing the disease.
Now faced with a new outbreak, the embassy’s staff rushed to get the aid organizations in Rubkona more money, according to the organizations and former officials. By early January, humanitarians were preparing to expand operations. World Relief planned to expand its mobile clinics, Williams-Ayedun said. USAID told Solidarités International, which repaired water pipes, provided sanitation services and distributed soap, to aggressively spend the money it had to combat cholera, with the understanding that the agency would immediately review a proposal for more funds, according to two former officials. An additional $30 million for the U.N.’s migration office — which planned to use the money to continue maintaining the refugee camps — was already committed.
Then Trump took office, signing an executive order on day one to freeze all foreign aid pending a review of whether it aligned with the administration’s stated values.
It wasn’t true. Behind the scenes, Marocco and his lieutenants repeatedly obstructed USAID’s Africa, humanitarian aid and global health bureaus from restarting programs critical for responding to disease outbreaks, according to interviews and memos obtained by ProPublica. The money aid organizations in South Sudan were expecting by February didn’t come. Meanwhile, the appointees suspended nearly all of USAID’s staff, and those remaining said their bosses blocked payments even for approved programs.
Marocco was meant to be “the destroyer, and then someone else would come in to rebuild,” one former official said a senior political appointee had told her. “I guess the one thing happened, but not the other.” (Marocco did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The cuts were so frenetic that, for a brief time, the U.S. government stopped paying for the fuel that ran the electricity for the American embassy in Juba, including the security compound, just as violence was surging throughout South Sudan, according to former senior officials.
In response to questions about the episode in Juba, the senior State Department official denied it was a mistake or that Rubio’s review wasn’t careful. “Going back and looking at things again doesn’t mean that you’ve made a mistake,” the senior official said.
At one point in February, Marocco tried ordering the immediate return of foreign service officers stationed abroad. Several senior USAID officials protested, citing safety and logistical concerns for staff in war zones. During one meeting that month, Lewin responded, “You don’t want to get to know the lobsters. Just throw them in the pot,” according to an attendee and meeting notes.
Lewin joined the government via Musk’s DOGE and later took over for Marocco. He seldom came to the USAID office or met with his own staff experts, officials said. Publicly, he called the agency an “unaccountable independent institution” where secrets leak so quickly “we have to hand-walk memos around like we’re in the ’40s.”
In the weeks that followed, DOGE and Trump appointees forbade those who remained at USAID from communicating with aid groups and discouraged discussion internally, telling staff abroad not to approach ambassadors to advocate for programs, emails show.
Senior staffers said they were prohibited from meeting with congressional delegations to share basic information, which was critical to Congress’ oversight capabilities. The government’s health experts feared that taking any action to save lives could be a fireable offense.
Still, some spoke out.
“The consequences on lives lost and funding squandered will grow exponentially and irreversibly in many cases,” Nicholas Enrich, then an acting assistant administrator at USAID, warned in a Feb. 8 email to agency leaders, including Joel Borkert, the chief of staff, and Meisburger, who led the humanitarian affairs bureau. They did not respond to his plea, and Enrich was later put on administrative leave.
Crucially, even when USAID’s new bosses did approve organizations to resume lifesaving work, they at times denied requests for the money that would allow them to do so, internal records show. Other proposals to fund existing grants or reverse terminations languished in limbo.
The official responding on behalf of the State Department said Trump’s OMB ultimately has more control over approving new grants and extensions, but that it was never the administration’s intention to keep all of the lifesaving programs forever.
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false, and the State Department did not address when Lewin sought funds from OMB for South Sudan’s cholera response.
In early February, embassy staff in South Sudan provided Adler, the ambassador, with a list of the most critical operations there, warning that funds had not been released and lifesaving programs would cease when their money ran out.
A career foreign service officer appointed to his post by the Biden administration, Adler had long been critical of the government of South Sudan for ongoing violence and deserting its own people, according to embassy cables and interviews with people familiar with his thinking.
Still, early on he appeared to recognize that without U.S. intervention, the most vulnerable people in the country did not stand a chance against cholera. In a Feb. 14 memo addressed to the leadership of the State Department’s Africa bureau, Adler asked the administration to release money to keep people alive.
“Lifesaving medicine and medical care, as well as emergency water and sanitation services, play a critical role in controlling disease outbreaks,” the embassy wrote, “notably a severe cholera outbreak in South Sudan’s border regions hosting the greatest number of refugees.”
Adler declined to meet with ProPublica in South Sudan and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
Death by Spreadsheet
As humanitarian groups racked up unpaid bills, they began to file lawsuits challenging the foreign aid freeze. A federal judge ordered the administration to reimburse the organizations. But on Feb. 26, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the lower court’s order.
In a meeting with senior agency staff the next day, Lewin, who at that time was not yet in charge of USAID programs, indicated that he interpreted the recent legal decisions as a potential license to dispense with one of the key review processes for unfreezing operations, according to two attendees and meeting notes. One of those attendees took Lewin’s remarks to mean that “he had no intention to review contracts or implement lifesaving programs.”
In response, the senior State Department official told ProPublica, “No one meant that or said that.”
The next night, a Friday, staff at the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, the division of USAID that dealt with emergencies and ran nearly all of the programs in South Sudan, were working late, scrambling to keep emergency programs operational. Suddenly, they noticed Borkert making changes to a key spreadsheet.
To create the spreadsheet, DOGE had sidestepped career staff, pulling information from databases made for project management. It was so rudimentary that it was often impossible to tell what a program did from descriptions as vague as “extension No. 4” or “allocation of funds,” according to people who saw the spreadsheet.
Rubio and his aides had already terminated hundreds of programs in preceding days. Staff were bracing for another round of cuts, but many of the line items remaining in the file were for programs that provided food, clean water or essential medicines.
Veteran USAID officials watched as Borkert scrolled down the spreadsheet, turning rows red, yellow or green every few seconds, never asking a single question. Realizing the red programs were slated to be cut, they frantically started editing descriptions so that Borkert would at least know what those programs did. Within minutes, he’d flagged dozens of them for termination. (Borkert declined to comment.)
A senior staff member in the group raced upstairs and begged Borkert to reinstate them, according to two officials familiar with the episode. He relented on several. But the next day, Marocco and Lewin told the group they’d kept far too many programs, emails show. Lewin ordered 151 additional awards terminated, writing that he would “have strong objections to these awards being turned on.” Marocco followed up by email at 11:30 p.m. saying the reactivations were “far too broad,” indicating several more line numbers and writing “sound like terminations,” next to them, ultimately canceling even more programs.
On March 10, Rubio announced on X that the review was over. In response to lawsuits, Trump officials told the courts that the review was a careful examination of USAID’s operations.
More than 5,000 programs had been canceled, and fewer than 1,000 remained — a figure that many officials told ProPublica was arbitrary but binding. In reality, the administration still wasn’t releasing money and many of the surviving programs had no funds, according to interviews with humanitarian groups and government officials, as well as memos and spreadsheets documenting those decisions.
When asked about the current status of the 1,000, the senior State Department official criticized USAID’s former vetting procedures and said the administration is in the process of creating new programs.
Soon after the review ended, the cholera response in South Sudan came crashing down.
“God Is With Us”
Rebecca Nyariaka and Koang Kai were shrouded in grief throughout the upheaval in Washington. Their only child, 4-year-old son Geer, had been one of the first victims when cholera inundated the Bentiu camp in December.
The couple met in secondary school at a refugee camp in Kenya and got married after they’d both returned to their homeland in 2013. After violence broke out, they fled to Bentiu, finding occasional jobs working with health clinics.
Now, in early March, they prodded one another to stay hopeful: 28-year-old Nyariaka was once again pregnant.
In the refugee camp, the couple could see the signs of the funding cuts everywhere. Uncollected garbage barricaded the drainage ditches that encased their neighborhood. Human waste spilled out of the overflowing communal latrines near Nyariaka’s house and into the fetid water filling the culverts. Toilets crawling with rats, maggots and flies became so noxious that neighbors began defecating on the surrounding dirt roads. The stench was overwhelming. “Those who washed the latrines have gone,” Kai said. “And we are left here all alone.”
The U.N.’s new sanitation contract had been committed before Trump took office, but it hadn’t received any money since last year. On March 12, USAID staff in the region sent Washington field notes about the conditions in the camp, where health services faced “closure or severe cutbacks” because of the funding shortfall. Officials at the organization pleaded behind the scenes as well. They repeatedly called and met with embassy leaders to request help, to no avail. “What we have now is survival of the fittest,” one U.N. official told ProPublica.
WhenNyariaka gave birth to a healthy baby boy, cholera was rampant throughout the camp. Neighbors were dying around them, and Kai was worried for his wife and new baby. “When cholera enters your home, you know the chances of survival are very low. Very few people survive it,” he said later.
Nyariaka named the baby Kuothethin, “God is with us.” In her first days back from the hospital, her body still healing, the new mom used the bathroom frequently, teetering back and forth to the overflowing latrines close to her house. She soon developed violent vomiting and diarrhea, the hallmark symptoms of cholera.
Kai, tall and muscular, picked her up in his arms and raced to the camp hospital, but it was too late. Nyariaka died just after they arrived.
She had been nowhere except her house and the latrines since coming home from the hospital, Kai said. He’s certain the toilets are to blame for her death. Depressed and unable to care for their newborn, he sent the baby across the floodwaters to live with his mother-in-law on another side of the state.
Kai and Nyariaka had been best friends for years before they started dating, their lives intertwined for nearly two decades. “Her whole way of life was good. She loved our children and cared for them,” Kai said. “I am heartbroken.”
As the disease ripped through the camp, more services shut down, including transportation for the dead. Kai’s neighbor, John Gai, lost his father to cholera. Gai had to take him to the cemetery himself in a wheelbarrow, his father’s head bobbing at his knees. “Nobody should have to carry a dead body among the living,” Gai said.
“Gross Neglect”
On March 28, Rubio notified Congress that he was officially shuttering most USAID operations and transferring programs that survived his review, including several in South Sudan, to the State Department.
Staffers spent the next weeks repeatedly appealing to Lewin — who by then had replaced Marocco as Rubio’s top foreign aid official — for authority to perform the mundane tasks needed to keep the programs operating. In late April, the agency’s humanitarian bureau submitted a blanket request to fund grants that Lewin had already approved. Lewin refused, records show, and the humanitarian bureau had to submit country-specific proposals for consideration. That process dragged on for months.
In June, just before USAID was shut down for good, Lewin finally approved some of the funding the staff had advocated for. But by then it was too late. The officials had run out of time to transfer money already appropriated by Congress to remaining programs.
On June 26, R. Clark Pearson, a supervisory contracting officer at USAID, sent a scathing email to USAID offices around the world in response to an email from the top procurement officer for the agency listing the hundreds of programs that were meant to be active. He said there was no one who could manage the awards, which he called “gross neglect on an astonishing level.”
“In a time of unimaginable hubris, gross incompetence and failures of leadership across the Agency, this has to be one of the most delusional emails I have seen to date,” Pearson wrote. “Lives depend on these awards and for the [U.S. government] to simply not manage them because of an arbitrary deadline is inexcusable.”
That same day, a senior humanitarian adviser informed Adler that payment extensions for several programs, with the exception of food aid, weren’t processed because the “approval was received late.”
In September, the Supreme Court issued another emergency ruling that let the administration withhold nearly $4 billion that Congress earmarked for foreign aid.
Later that month, OMB released some new foreign aid funds. That’s when World Relief finally began to receive funding, allowing the clinic in Tor Top’s community to reopen, even though the administration claimed the program had been “active” for almost seven months.
The U.N.’s migration program has not received a new South Sudan grant. The organization will run out of money for dike maintenance in Bentiu by February, after months of some of the most severe flooding in years.
A spokesperson for the U.N.’s migration program said the organization was still in discussion with the State Department and “continues to engage with donors about the critical humanitarian needs in South Sudan.”
The Uncounted
During the first months of the cholera outbreak, a mobile health team run by the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that works in crisis zones around the world, visited Nyajime Duop’s remote village on the edges of Rubkona County twice weekly. The team brought soap and transported sick people to IRC’s nearby clinic for care.
At 27, Duop’s youthful face belied a life marked by war and poverty. She had arrived just a few months earlier, fleeing violence in Khartoum, Sudan, with an infant and toddler in tow, when Trump officials terminated IRC’s $5.5 million grant.
The IRC suspended its operations in the village in the spring. When Duop’s 1-year-old baby, Nyagoa, fell ill with cholera in July, on a day IRC would have visited, there was no one to help her. By the morning, Nyagoa was unconscious. She died that day, the Fourth of July.
Cholera has spread to nearly every corner of South Sudan, infected at least 100,000 people and killed 1,600, though cases began abating this fall. The true death toll is impossible to know, in part because clinics that would have cared for people and counted the dead were shuttered. The Trump administration also cut funding to the World Health Organization, which helped the South Sudanese government gather accurate data on the outbreak.
In a pasture a short walk from IRC’s clinic, ProPublica found at least three dozen mounds covered in sticks — the makeshift graves, village leaders said, of those who died of cholera before reaching the clinic. The clinic’s security guard told reporters he saw one man collapse and die just yards from the front gate.
“There are many more cases,” said Kray Ndong, then acting minister of health for the area, “many more deaths.”
The Trump administration recently announced a new era of foreign aid, where the U.S. will prioritize “trade over aid.” South Sudan, with a gross domestic product one-tenth the size of Vermont’s, has little to offer.
“The administration says they are committed to humanitarian needs,” one aid official in South Sudan said. “But we don’t know what that means, only that it will be transactional.”
The Trump Administration’s murder-in-international-waters program debuted far ahead of its legal rationale. Many people inside the administration were blindsided by this sudden escalation. Those expected to stay on top of these things — military oversight, congressional committees, etc. — found they were even further behind the curve than the late-arriving “justification” for extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” that used to be handled by interdiction efforts that left everyone alive and anything of value (drugs, boats, weapons) in the hands of the US government and its foreign partners.
This was something new and horrible from a regime already known for its awfulness. Even after the belated (and then hastily revised) justification was delivered by the Office of Legal Counsel, it was difficult to see how the US government could justify extrajudicial killings of alleged “terrorists” who were — at worst — simply moving narcotics from point A to point B.
The administration’s bizarre insistence that the mere existence of an international drug trade constituted a deliberate, violent attack on America was further undercut by a lot of inconvenient facts. First of all, most of those being killed had no connection to the top levels of drug cartels. They were merely mules tasked with transporting drugs. In other cases — including the one that involved a double-tap strike (which was actually four strikes) to ensure the survivors clinging to boat wreckage could no longer be referred to as “survivors” — the drugs allegedly being trafficked were headed to midpoints that suggested the narcotics were actually headed to Europe, rather than the United States.
To be clear, this administration doesn’t actually care whether or not it engages in murder or other acts of violence. What it does care about is allowing the killing to continue for as long as possible before the system of checks and balances finally gets around to dialing back the murders a bit.
A recent article from the New York Times gives the game away, even if the lede gets a bit buried. The headline mentions a White House “scramble” to “deal with” people who survived initial extrajudicial killing attempts. In one case, two survivors were rescued by the US military after failing to die during the initial strike. The White House said they should be sent to El Salvador’s torture prison. The State Department — currently headed by Marco Rubio — said this simply wasn’t possible. Both survivors ended up being sent back to their countries of origin.
Two weeks later, another murder attempt failed to murder everyone on the boat, leading to another hasty conference call between the White House, career diplomats, and Defense Department leadership. The ultimate goal was to get rid of these people as quickly as possible, which necessarily involved hasty arrangements made with government officials in their home countries.
The real reason for these hasty talks — and the secrecy surrounding them — is this: The administration definitely doesn’t seem confident that it’s fully justified in ordering military members to engage in actual war crimes; specifically, the murder of people military bylaws make clear they are supposed to be rescuing.
The two attacks discussed above happened nearly two months after the double-tap boat strike that definitely looks like a war crime. But the Trump administration definitely isn’t going to bring back survivors to face justice by charging them and giving them their day in court. If it does that, it might lose everything it likes about murdering people in international waters.
Legal cases in the United States involving survivors would force the administration to present more information to try to back up its rationale for the attacks.
[…]
“From the administration’s point of view, there are good reasons to be averse to bringing survivors to Guantánamo Bay or to the continental United States,” [former State Dept. lawyer Brian Finucane] said.
If the U.S. military brings the survivors to the Navy-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lawyers defending them could file a habeas corpus lawsuit in U.S. federal court questioning whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and cartels. Congress has not authorized the United States to engage in any such conflict.
To use the ever-popular poker parlance, that’s an obvious “tell” — something that indicates the administration has very little confidence in the legal rationale for these extrajudicial killings. If it thought it’s arguments had a very good chance of holding up in court, it wouldn’t be hastily returning “narco-terrorists” to their home countries as quickly and quietly as possible, where they’ll presumably immediately resume their “narco-terrorism.”
That’s also why the first double-tap strike occurred only days into Trump’s undeclared war on alleged drug boats. As far as we know, this hasn’t been repeated, despite everyone who hasn’t already resigned from the Defense Department (or been thrown under the bus by those whose positions are unassailable thanks to their deference to Trump) claiming either ignorance of the double-strike or saying lots of stuff about “saving” the country from being murdered by inanimate fentanyl (or whatever).
Any survivor is just another chance to prove the US government wrong. And if it isn’t immediately clear survivors have somewhere to be hastily dumped, you can probably assume the military will resort to Plan B: mob-style “hits” to make sure these witnesses can’t talk.
