The-CCIJ/trump-africa-cuts

Analysis of cuts to U.S. foreign aid to Africa under the second Trump administration. # What Africa Lost Under Trump: At Least \$5 Billion. What It Got In Return: “True Chaos.” 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. ### Methods and code 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 los …