The United States halted all foreign aid projects for the next three months to review existing programmes, stunning Lithuanian NGOs and Belarusian opposition organisations based in Vilnius.
“We are going back to the dark ages, in one day human rights [in the US] have been wiped off the agenda,” said one Lithuanian non-profit representative who said he preferred to remain anonymous to avoid causing harm to their organisation. “This is a country we’ve been working with for 30 years, I hope this situation will only be for the next four years.”
The US is the world’s main provider of humanitarian aid. The affected NGOs range from demining and HIV treatment non-profits in Africa to investigative reporting and disinformation-tackling programmes in Eastern Europe or veteran support and public sector companies in Ukraine.
Washington sees the funding as a geopolitical tool to ward off Chinese and Russian influence, as well as a soft power tool to keep a global footprint and foster good relations with foreign states, especially with developing countries.
In Lithuania, Washington’s funding for human rights organisations usually involves grants from the US Embassy or other American donor organisations. However, much of that funding involves smaller, four or five-digit grants and most local NGOs typically rely on national and EU funding, several associations representing the non-profit sector confirmed to LRT.
However, multiple organisations contacted by LRT refrained from commenting, because the impact is yet to be assessed or they had been given direct orders not to speak publicly.
“The withdrawal of US support should not have catastrophic consequences for Lithuanian civil society, but it could have a significant impact on individual organisations and be a matter of survival,” Sandra Adomavičiūtė, director of Open Lithuanian Foundation, said in a written comment.
Vilnius is also home to dozens of NGOs working with the Belarusian and Russian opposition that receive US funding, including those helping evacuate opposition members facing persecution. Most of them approached by LRT refused to comment due to the sensitive nature of their work but admitted that their funding had been affected.
“It impacted us immediately and to a large extent – we are forced to stop activities on debunking Belarusian state propaganda, expert work, and journalist investigations,” Ecohome, a Vilnius-based NGO outlawed and declared extremist in Belarus, told LRT.lt in a written comment.
The funding freeze affected around half of Ecohome’s budget. “We had to cancel our education plan for democratic environmental activists. It also means that we might lose a part of the team who need to find work outside the NGO sector,” it said.
“There is a threat that the Belarusian state can freely flood everything with disinformation, [...] watchdogs will not be able to continue to do their work.”
Meanwhile, the work of USAID, the main American humanitarian aid organisation, which has its Belarus programme office in Vilnius and also employs locals, has mostly ground to a halt worldwide. In Washington, USAID staff were also given strict orders not to communicate about the freeze outside the agency, the BBC reported earlier this week.
According to Adomavičiūtė from the Open Lithuania Foundation, some NGOs in Lithuania have already turned to them for assistance to finish ongoing projects.
“The US Embassy allocates several hundred thousand US dollars a year for individual initiatives. All support, both for ongoing projects and for future calls for proposals, has already been suspended. This is pushing organisations into insolvency,” she said.
Programmes are also being paused in other Baltic states. For example, the Open Estonia Foundation had to halt some of its projects, according to Adomavičiūtė.
However, some non-profits downplayed the importance of the funding freeze, saying they do not solely rely on the US and will be able to continue their operations from money raised through donations and other sources of income.
Meanwhile, organisations worldwide are now scrambling to secure waivers in Washington to be able to continue their operations. On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio agreed to keep funding programmes that provide life-saving medical services, according to the Associated Press news agency.
“It is painful that funding has been cut off in Ukraine, where this money is extremely important [...] They have to lay people off because they have run out of funding here and now,” said Virginija Aleksejūnė, director of the Centre for Equality Advancement in Vilnius.
“[In Lithuania], there was supposed to be a big visit of Ukrainian experts, politicians, and specialists working in the field of violence against women, but I was told to stop organising it because all the funding has been stopped,” she added.
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