Data, methods and code underlying this Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism article, documenting consequences for Africa of cuts to U.S. foreign aid and the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025 by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration has provided no comprehensive breakdown of its cuts to foreign aid. So to identify which projects have been lost and to put a conservative dollar figure on the sums involved, CCIJ turned to the “Wall of Receipts” first posted on the website of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in late February and updated regularly since then. The site lists projects that DOGE claims to have canceled.
Between March and July, CCIJ scraped this government log for canceled contracts and grants each week. Later, CCIJ obtained updates from the API provided by DOGE to access its data. This additional data was collected into late August. (Sample data acquisition scripts are in the folder data_acquisition). DOGE included a brief description for each project that it claimed to have axed, but this was rarely sufficient to identify the country where the work was to take place. But DOGE did provide project-by-project links to information in two other government databases — the Federal Procurement Data System and USAspending.
From these were were able to extract USAspending award ids for each project, which allowed us to use the USAspending API to gather data on the primary country where work under each grant and contract was set to be done, allowing us to filter down to cuts affecting African nations. CCIJ also checked its data against a list of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Department of State projects compiled by Wayan Vota, a development specialist who runs The Career Pivot, an online community for humanitarian workers across the globe who lost their jobs because of the Trump administration’s cuts. Vota’s list included a few dozen projects in Africa that CCIJ’s analysis had not identified — likely in part because DOGE in March censored information on its cuts to USAID contracts after the filing of lawsuits contesting the Trump administration’s actions. These projects were added to our data.
CCIJ found that some projects that DOGE claimed to have cut later disappeared from its list. To fully understand DOGE’s claims for savings, CCIJ included every project that DOGE said that it terminated, regardless of whether it remained on the Wall of Receipts.
For all of these projects, CCIJ examined when the project was supposed to start and end, removing any with end dates before the Trump administration came to power. We documented the amount of “obligated” spending, money for which there is a legal agreement to support a project, and checked how much money the government recorded as actually having been transferred to the recipient as of Sept. 30, the end of the 2025 fiscal year. We also downloaded transaction-level data for the same projects, selecting negative transactions, which represented the "deobligation" by the Trump administration of previously obligated spending.
Our final figures for potential cuts represent the total obligated funds before any deobligations, minus the money already sent out the recipients by Sept 30.
-
The script
obligations_outlays.R, run on the evening of Sept. 30, imported data on African contracts and grants/cooperative agreements, processed as described above, documenting the award id, recipient, and primary country of performance for each project, and pulled data on each from the USAspending API for current obligated funds and prior outlays, i.e. money already sent to the recipient. -
The script
deobligations.Rcompiled deobligations for the same projects made between Trump's inauguration and Sept. 30, 2025. -
The script
analysis_visualization.Rcombined the data from the previous two scripts, calculating potential cuts for each as described above. This script also generated the interactive web tables documenting potential cuts for each project and summarized by primary place of performance country published in the article (saved in theassetsfolder) and includes some summary analysis.
Contact Peter Aldhous for the analysis and use of APIs or Sotiris Sideris for scraping the DOGE website.