When Donald Trump set about dismantling USAID, many around the world were shocked. But on the ground in Sierra Leone, the latest betrayal was not unexpected, according to a journalist who visited the country this spring.
Speaking to friends and former colleagues, the journalist found that the feeling most often expressed was not panic but resignation. “All of the Sierra Leoneans I spoke to – from mango sellers and electricians to health workers and senior politicians – expressed fear and uncertainty about the cuts. But they also framed the precarity of their situation as normal, even predictable,” she wrote.
One NGO driver who lost his job when cuts were first announced in January 2025, then regained it when some funding resumed in April, was unsurprised. He had seen many colleagues let go as aid money dried up after the 2014 Ebola outbreak. “Why should he expect anything different?” the journalist noted.
Mustapha Kabba, deputy chief medical officer at Sierra Leone’s ministry of health and sanitation, told the journalist he could not be too worried because he did not know how much money the US government gave Sierra Leone. The funding was so byzantine, funnelled through many NGOs with different budgets and timelines, that he had no comprehensive picture of what would be affected.
The cuts, overseen by 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, are part of a broader critique of aid. Lewin argued that the traditional “global humanitarian complex” did not help countries “progress beyond aid”, a view echoed by Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, who told the Financial Times that cuts were “long overdue”.
