This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As part of a broad effort to bypass Congress and unilaterally cut government spending, Donald Trump’s administration has all but shut down operations at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, the independent federal body that delivers humanitarian aid and economic development funding around the world. On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order pausing all USAID funding, and the agency subsequently issued a stop-work order to nearly all funding recipients, from soup kitchens in Sudan to the global humanitarian group Mercy Corps.
Since then, Elon