In a village in Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa, Sasha teaches hundreds of children at a local primary school. A significant part of her work as an education volunteer at the US Peace Corps is to educate her students about HIV prevention. Almost a quarter of Lesotho’s 2.3 million population lives with HIV, giving it the second-highest level of HIV infection in the world.
At the beginning of February, Donald Trump halted virtually all US foreign aid. The 90-day pause left many agencies scrambling to follow the new guidance, affecting programs such as the one Sasha works for. In Lesotho, she and other volunteers work to mitigate the effects of HIV/Aids stigma through grant-funded programs like a soccer camp. All of that stopped.
Volunteers were instructed to stop any HIV-related prevention programming, according to emails reviewed by the Guardian. Many families also rely upon Pepfar– the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief – which provides HIV/Aids medication for more than 20 million people worldwide. Sasha said that Pepfar-focused nurses at the local clinic were told to stop coming to work.
Parents of the kids asked Sasha, who like others interviewed for this story has only given her first name due to a fear of retaliation, whether medicines would continue to be freely available.
“My [Lesotho] co-workers say, ‘don’t you work for the government? What’s going on?’ I’m scared and sad too, but I don’t know what’s going on either,” she said.
In the wake of Trump’s executive order, more than 12,000 USAid workers have been laid off or furloughed. The 90-day stop-work order has also dominoed into an estimated 100,000 global job losses for federal contractors who depended on USAid funding, according to the tracker USAid Stop-Work.
Many of these professionals working in Washington DC and abroad are asking themselves if a career helping others around the world in international development is still possible. They worked on projects such as supporting women’s education, HIV prevention, or democracy-building in conflict zones for US allies. Now, they are unsure what the future holds and are reconciling the ideals of American soft power with their new reality.
The weight of student loans
Marissa C worked at a private USAid-implementing partner company in Washington DC, focusing on economic and trade growth policy research in conflict zones. When Trump issued the executive order on inauguration day in January, she saw “the writing on the wall” and began messaging people on LinkedIn looking for jobs.
She and her colleagues also scoured Project 2025, which experts see as the blueprint for the Trump administration. She wrote justifications about how the projects she oversaw aligned with the new administration’s goals. Yet within two weeks of Trump’s order, everything they worked on was put on pause. A project in Colombia that helped to integrate Venezuelan refugees was cancelled.
She tried to obtain exceptions on humanitarian grounds for other projects, but they were rarely successful because there were not enough people remaining at USAid to process requests or payments. She and other colleagues have been furloughed since 10 February.
“It felt like being on the Titanic, and we were all the violinists playing as this ship was going down,” she said.
Marissa C had tried unsuccessfully to break into the international development sector for seven years before deciding to attend graduate school, working multiple unpaid internships and side jobs to improve her résumé.
“I feel like I just started in this field, and now it’s being ripped away for me, which is the hardest part,” she said. She currently has almost $170,000 in student loan debt. She plans on applying to jobs in local economic development and moving back home in the Pacific north-west.
“You have to be incredibly dedicated over years and years and years of your life in order to get here. This makes the people that work in specifically US foreign assistance some of the most hard-working, dedicated, kind and motivated people that I’ve ever met,” Marissa C said.
American democratic influence abroad wanes
Before being furloughed, Nathan worked as a programming associate at a non-partisan non-profit, which he did not wish to name, partially funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In the 1980s, Congress created the NED to strengthen democracies and American soft power during the cold war. Last week, two-thirds of the NED’s DC-based staff was furloughed.
Nathan conducted research focused on promoting democracy and parliamentary monitoring in Asia, such as helping non-profits set up by the Hong Kong diaspora, many of whom had fled after crackdowns of pro-democracy protests since 2020 by the Chinese government.
“We thought that a lot of it would fall in line with the administration’s posturing, especially around China,” Nathan said. “They wanted to dismantle it regardless.”
He said he would probably return to bartending to make ends meet while he figures out his next steps. He feels more fortunate than other more senior colleagues, many of whom have kids to support and have lived in DC for years.
“I’m only a year and a half into my professional life. This sucks so bad, but it’s not life destroying. For older people, it’s life destroying,” he said.
Moving away from soft power
A lot of foreign aid work is sensitive to disruptions. Those being treated through the Pepfar program in Lesotho, for instance, need monthly pills or shots to prevent HIV from developing into Aids. The treatments also reduce the rate of transmissions from person to person and from a mother to an unborn baby.
“It’s really important that you’re taking your meds,” Sasha said. “That kind of outreach is probably no longer happening, and that is going to cause issues with medication adherence and with more people contracting HIV.”
This week, Sasha said Pepfar nurses had resumed their clinical work in her village due to an emergency humanitarian waiver. But she and other Peace Corps volunteers were still not allowed to teach about HIV. She said she didn’t know why.
While her service in Lesotho does not end for a few months, she is already reconsidering whether to enter into the foreign service or development sectors in DC. She is the only American that most people in her village have encountered and said she had seen firsthand the positive impact soft power programs can have on people’s impression of the US. abroad.
“Watching this drastic shift away in the past three weeks from soft power and soft diplomacy, and to just completely forgo it after decades and decades of work by mostly Republican governments in the States, is so shocking to me,” she said.
