Mohammed Ali Kalfood is a freelance Yemeni journalist. The former managing editor of The Yemen Observer, he has written for The New York Times, The Intercept, The New Humanitarian , The Telegraph and Al Jazeera.
When Donald Trump entered the White House in January 2017, Yemen's civil war had been raging for three years and had already produced the world's worst humanitarian crisis in recent history. When his first term was coming to an end in 2020, the situation in Yemen got even worse. Critical aid from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was temporarily suspended in April 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and in December 2020, in his last weeks in office, Trump designated Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels a "foreign terrorist organization"—a move that could have cut off any U.S. aid delivery to most of the country.
As aid workers and others warned against the devastating humanitarian costs for Yemeni civilians, Joe Biden's new administration quickly lifted the Houthi terrorist designation in early 2021 to ease humanitarian access into Yemen and facilitate talks to end the country's civil war. Last year, in response to Houthi attacks on U.S. ships in the Red Sea in response to Israel's war in Gaza, Biden re-listed the Houthis as a "specially designated global terrorist" organization, a category below "foreign terrorist organization."
Then, in late January, just days after returning to the White House for his second term, Trump issued executive orders that would not only upend the prospect for any peace talks aimed at ending Yemen's long-running conflict, but might also plunge the country into famine. Trump has already re-listed the Houthis as a "foreign terrorist organization" and unilaterally dismantled USAID, folding its functions into the State Department and imposing a "temporary" freeze on disbursing foreign aid that Congress had appropriated.
Trump's halting of foreign aid risks a host of dire humanitarian consequences in Yemen. "USAID's suspension in Yemen is another massive blow to Yemenis who have now survived 10 years of brutal conflict, displacement, hunger and disease," Scott Paul, Oxfam America's director of peace and security, told Democracy in Exile.
"The USAID freeze is impacting every corner of every humanitarian emergency" around the world, he said. In Yemen, "the humanitarian response was already underfunded," and Trump's aid freeze "will halt vital programs that deliver food, water, sanitation services, and medicine, along with longer term support for small businesses, peacebuilding initiatives, economic recovery and other efforts to build strong, resilient communities."
It is not an exaggeration to say that aid and assistance to Yemen through USAID have been integral to the survival of the Yemeni people throughout this conflict.
- Mohammed Ali Kalfood
Since Yemen's war began in 2015 when the Houthis took over the capital, Sanaa, and drove out President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi's government, USAID has been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to Yemen, with nearly $6 billion in aid since then. Under the Biden administration, Yemen was one of the largest recipients of U.S. humanitarian aid and economic assistance in the Middle East. USAID's programs fund United Nations agencies and other international NGOs in Yemen that reduce the risk of famine, severe malnutrition, communicable disease outbreaks and other life-threatening effects of Yemen's war, including its devastation of the Yemeni economy. It is not an exaggeration to say that aid and assistance to Yemen through USAID have been integral to the survival of the Yemeni people throughout this conflict.
The World Food Program has been USAID's top U.N. partner in delivering food assistance to more than 15 million people in Yemen, where half the population faces acute hunger. In 2024, when USAID provided Yemen with roughly $620 million in total aid, half of that ($323 million) was disbursed to the World Food Program. In 2023, when USAID's budget in Yemen totaled $811 million, 60 percent of that aid, roughly $541 million, went to the U.N. food agency.
"Dismantling USAID with no plan for what will replace it is a callous, destructive political power play that will have deadly consequences for millions of people living through dire humanitarian emergencies," Oxfam America's president and CEO, Abby Maxman, said in a statement. "It is cruel, intentionally harmful and directly at odds with U.S. interests."
In late 2023, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Steven Fagin, reissued a "declaration of humanitarian need" for Yemen for 2024, a formal request for additional funding for aid and assistance. In April 2024, the U.S. government signed a five-year assistance agreement with Yemen's internationally recognized government for additional funding worth nearly $220 million, including nearly $200 million through the USAID and nearly $20 million through the State Department, which was aimed to advance Yemen's political transition since a fragile truce between Yemen's warring parties, brokered by the U.N., took effect in 2022.
"The agreement reflects the unwavering commitment of the United States to Yemen's prosperity, stability, and people," the U.S. Embassy in Yemen said in a statement at the time.
Yet since Trump's "temporary" aid freeze, all USAID-funded efforts in Yemen have come to a sudden halt. New Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been made the acting director of USAID while the agency is dismantled, issued a waiver for life-saving humanitarian aid during the 90-day period when all foreign aid is supposed to be reviewed by the Trump administration. Yet aid groups around the world, including in Yemen, have said that their operations remain suspended, despite the waiver—because of confusion in the waiver process and, according to ProPublica, because of "little information from the U.S. government, where, in recent days, humanitarian officials have been summarily ousted or prohibited from communicating with the aid organizations."
As Karen Mathiasen, an expert at the Center for Global Development, has warned, "Is the 'pause' in fact a legitimate effort to assess U.S. foreign assistance programs, or a ploy for shutting them down?"
USAID's suspension in Yemen is another massive blow to Yemenis who have now survived 10 years of brutal conflict, displacement, hunger and disease.
- Scott Paul, Oxfam America
Yemen observers and experts in the aid community fear the looming humanitarian impacts in Yemen, where 80 percent of the country's population rely on foreign aid. "Yemen continues to grapple with a grave humanitarian crisis. Almost half of the population can't meet basic food needs, millions are displaced and cholera is at appalling levels," U.N. deputy emergency relief coordinator Joyce Msuya said on January 15, briefing the U.N. Security Council one week before Trump returned to office. "We remain committed to delivering aid but require support from the Security Council and donors," she said.
Recent U.N. figures indicate that 19.5 million Yemenis, some 70 percent of Yemen's population, are estimated to need humanitarian assistance and protection services in 2025. That represents 1.3 million people more than last year, including 12.1 million with acute needs, such as women and girls, persons with disabilities, refugees, migrants and internally displaced people.
In its 2025 Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan, the U.N. appealed for a total of $2.47 billion to provide life-saving assistance to 10.5 million of those most vulnerable Yemenis. But it is unclear how the U.N. would fill the funding gaps now that Trump has effectively shut down USAID, the largest donor in Yemen, on top of the existing funding gaps that U.N. agencies and international NGOs have been facing since 2020.
"This disruption to the response will put the most marginalized people in extreme hunger as food shipments and distributions are halted, the clean water spigot is literally turned off, and their last remaining means of resilience are worn away," Paul said.
The cutoff in U.S. foreign aid has already led to the shutdown of one of the world's most trusted warning systems for tracking famine, known as FEWS Net, which received $60 million from USAID last year. USAID launched the famine warning system in 1985 to track hunger across dozens of food-insecure areas, including Yemen. It has long been considered the "gold standard" in detecting famine outbreaks.
In a report issued in December, FEWS Net warned that "widespread crisis"—phase three on its five-scale famine tracker—"or worse outcomes are expected across Yemen through at least May 2025." According to the report, "persistent macroeconomic challenges—which stem from the nearly 10-year conflict amid stalled peace negotiations—continue to limit income-earning opportunities and household financial access to food, resulting in food consumption gaps for millions of people."
