South Sudan and the costs of American retrenchment

Within weeks of returning to the White House, President Donald Trump signaled that U.S. foreign aid would no longer function within its established operational framework. The administration framed the change as a corrective intervention, aimed at eliminating “waste” and restraining what it characterized as an overextended bureaucratic apparatus. This repositioning was presented not as a withdrawal from international responsibility but as a recalibration in service of “American interests.” The outcomes, however, diverged from that framing. Rather than a targeted reassessment of priorities, the shift produced a structural rupture — rapid in execution, expansive in scope, and largely inattentive to downstream consequences. As a result, the United States’ position as the world’s largest humanitarian donor was altered less through deliberate policy design than through systematic disengagement.

The administration has insisted that these changes amount to a rational restructuring of humanitarian assistance. That claim does not withstand scrutiny. What emerged instead was a governing logic willing to treat humanitarian collapse as an acceptable cost of ideological retrenchment. Human rights advocate Sarah Yager described the policy as “reckless” and “cruel,” while New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof warned that it had pushed “the world’s poorest children into a cauldron of confusion and cruelty.” These reactions do more than register moral outrage. They expose the distance between the language of “America first” doctrine and the material violence set in motion when aid systems are dismantled without replacement.

That distance became visible almost immediately. In January 2025, Washington announced sweeping reductions to foreign assistance, particularly programs administered through the U.S. Agency for International Development. By March 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that eighty-three percent of USAID programs worldwide would be cancelled. The scale of the decision was unprecedented, and its effects were neither theoretical nor delayed. Across conflict-affected and underdeveloped regions, services sustained for decades by U.S. funding began to unravel. American aid, it became clear, had not functioned merely as charity. It had operated as structural support.

The damage registered first in public health. Across Africa, already fragile systems buckled under the sudden withdrawal of support. In Ethiopia, funding cuts undermined responses to cholera, malaria, and other outbreaks. In Zimbabwe, the dismantling of USAID programs disrupted HIV/AIDS supply chains, eroding prevention and treatment efforts simultaneously. In Kenya, interruptions in HIV treatment heightened vulnerability to mpox, which surged alongside rising mortality. In Somalia, vaccination programs collapsed, and reported infectious disease cases — particularly among children — doubled. Estimates now suggest that hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million lives, could be placed at risk. These are not abstract projections. They are the foreseeable outcomes of treatment disruptions, food shortages, and empty medicine stocks.

Few places absorbed the shock as acutely as South Sudan. The world’s youngest nation is already burdened by prolonged conflict, economic collapse, and a state apparatus incapable of delivering even minimal public services. In such conditions, foreign assistance has never been supplementary. It has been foundational. For millions of South Sudanese, U.S. support underwrites emergency relief, healthcare delivery, food security, and education systems that would otherwise cease to exist.

Since independence in 2011, the United States has provided more than $9.5 billion in assistance to South Sudan. In the partially reported 2024 fiscal year alone, the country received approximately $755 million, the majority allocated to emergency response and humanitarian relief, with the World Food Programme serving as the largest implementing partner. Yet aid levels have fluctuated. Between 2020 and 2025, funding rose and fell unpredictably, before collapsing to roughly $52.5 million in 2025 — a contraction so severe it functioned less as a reduction than an erasure.

According to Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance (ALNAP,) global learning network focused on humanitarian action, the populations most affected by these cuts are women, children, the elderly, and displaced communities, including internally displaced persons, refugees, and Sudanese returnees. These groups already face the steepest barriers to basic services. The withdrawal of aid did not introduce vulnerability, it concentrated and accelerated it.

For young South Sudanese, the consequences were immediate and personal. The USAID-funded South Sudan Youth Empowerment Activity, designed to reach more than two thousand youth through skills training and community leadership, was halted without transition. The program had been years in development, operating across twenty-five bomas in Wau and Jur River counties — areas where unemployment, displacement, and conflict leave young people with few viable paths forward.

One beneficiary, selected as a trainer after completing his training-of-trainers course, told Geeska that he was preparing to teach others when the program abruptly stopped. Overnight, he lost his job. His trainees lost their chance to acquire skills. Entire communities lost one of the few structured investments in youth resilience. In a country where formal employment is rare and the state largely absent, the cancellation did not pause a project. It erased a future.

The health sector absorbed similar shocks. Save the Children had supported twenty-seven health centers in Jonglei State until U.S. cuts forced seven to close entirely and twenty to scale back operations, laying off nearly two hundred staff. A U.S.-funded patient transport service was also shut down. As a result, eight cholera patients were forced to walk for hours in forty-degree heat to reach medical care. Policy decisions made in Washington translated, with brutal clarity, into physical exhaustion and preventable suffering on the ground.

In January 2026, the U.S. Embassy in South Sudan suspended assistance in Ayod County, citing abuse, exploitation, and theft of aid by local officials. An aid worker was detained for refusing to surrender assets. Pharmaceutical supplies were blocked from transfer by state authorities. These incidents underline a difficult truth: humanitarian collapse in South Sudan is not driven solely by donor withdrawal. It is compounded by corruption, obstruction, and the absence of accountable governance.

Regions such as Jonglei and Bahr El-Ghazal illustrate this convergence of crisis. Seasonal flooding, recurring famine, and intercommunal violence over cattle and land have made displacement a permanent condition rather than a temporary emergency. In January 2026, the United Nation Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) reported renewed military confrontations in Jonglei and Eastern Equatoria, further destabilizing already fragile humanitarian operations.

Meanwhile, the state itself has largely ceased to function as a provider of basic services. Teachers, nurses, and civil servants go unpaid for months, sometimes more than a year. Inflation has hollowed out what little income exists. The South Sudanese pound has collapsed, with one hundred dollars now exchanging for up to six thousand pounds. Even when wages arrive, they no longer cover food, transport, or medicine.

This economic freefall is rooted in structural dependence. Oil accounts for nearly, about 98%, all government revenue, leaving the economy exposed to external shocks. IMF data shows that from 2012 to 2025, South Sudan experienced negative growth in 9 out of 15 years, with an overall shrinking economy. Projections of 24.34% and 22.35% growth for 2025–2026 depend heavily on oil performance and political stability, both of which remain unreliable. The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, disrupted pipeline infrastructure and sent more than a million refugees into South Sudan. Growth projections remain speculative, contingent on oil flows and political stability that have yet to materialize.

Political instability compounds the crisis. In February 2025, conflict erupted in Nasir, Upper Nile State, between the White Army and the South Sudan People’s Defense Army (SSPDF). A UN helicopter evacuating wounded soldiers was attacked on 7 March, killing one crew member and injuring two others, Major General Majur Dak and 27 soldiers were reportedly killed.

On March 26, 2025, Vice President Dr. Riek Machar was placed under house arrest, accused of supporting the White Army. His detention altered the political landscape and threatened the 2018 peace agreement that ended the 2013–2018 civil war. The government carried out bombardments in Nasir, Fangak, and Old Fangak, affecting humanitarian operations in those areas. A UN report from November 2025 stated that clashes in Western Equatoria displaced 37,041 individuals, while Eastern Equatoria recorded 9,253 displacements. Upper Nile State, particularly Adong Payam in Baliet County, displaced 6,305 individuals. Displacements resulted from local conflict and cross-border tensions with Sudan.

For ordinary families, foreign assistance has meant the difference between survival and starvation: stocked clinics, feeding programs, psychosocial support, and fragile networks of protection. When these systems disappear, the consequences ripple outward. Clinics close. Children weaken. Markets constrict. Prices rise beyond reach. Aid’s absence is not a statistic. It is a child too weak to walk.

However, the cuts in South Sudan reflect a broader recalibration of U.S. engagement with the world. In January 2025, the State Department announced the withdrawal of support from sixty-six organizations, including thirty-one U.N. agencies. Officials justified the move by invoking inefficiency and waste. Yet the decision aligns with a deeper skepticism toward multilateral governance itself — a belief that collective humanitarian commitments dilute sovereignty rather than protect shared stability.

What the suspension of U.S. aid to South Sudan ultimately reveals is not only the cost of donor withdrawal but the fragility produced by long-term dependence. Decades of assistance sustained essential services, but they did not build accountable institutions, diversify the economy, or resolve conflict. As funding recedes, women, children, and displaced communities pay first.

The lesson should be neither that aid has failed nor that the United States has abruptly chosen to alter its course without regard for the consequences such decisions impose on vulnerable communities whose lives have long depended on external support. Rather, it should be understood that aid was asked to compensate for what politics refused to resolve. While humanitarian assistance materially sustained tens of thousands of South Sudanese, it was never intended to be permanent. It was conceived as a bridge — a transition that the government of South Sudan failed to plan for, let alone strategically manage. As a result, thousands of lives now exist in a prolonged state of limbo. Without meaningful reform and domestic accountability, South Sudan will remain exposed to decisions made far beyond its borders. The erosion of USAID support, however abrupt and consequential, should be read as a warning: when survival is tethered to distant capitals, collapse is never far behind. Foreign assistance, however vital in moments of crisis, cannot replace the slow and necessary work of building institutions that function for, and are accountable to, the people they serve.