A sudden and sweeping halt to U.S. foreign aid by the Trump administration does not apply to weapons support to Israel and Egypt and emergency food assistance, according to a memo issued by the department to bureaus and U.S. missions overseas on Friday.
The same day, the White House told the Pentagon it could proceed with a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that President Biden abruptly halted last summer to try to dissuade the Israeli military from destroying much of the city of Rafah. Israeli forces went ahead with bombing the city.
The shipment has 1,800 MK-84 bombs, said a White House official who agreed to discuss sensitive weapons aid on the condition of anonymity. Such bombs are judged by U.S. military officers to be generally too lethal and destructive for urban combat. Until the halt, the Biden administration had shipped the bombs to Israel as its military fought Hamas in Gaza.
The memo on foreign aid was sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and lays out how the State Department, the linked United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., and other agencies are expected to execute an executive order halting foreign aid during a 90-day reassessment period. President Trump signed the executive order on Monday, soon after his inauguration.
The memo requires any employee working on foreign aid to refrain from designating new funding and taking applications, and to issue “stop-work” orders to groups that have received grants. The memo has circulated online and has ignited panic among groups around the world that rely on foreign aid from the United States for their programs — which range from disease prevention to curbing infant mortality to alleviating the impact of climate change.