Ask around various civil society organizations working in the Middle East and the answer is always the same. "Nobody really knows what's happening," one project manager running a Syria-based project told DW about the US cuts in aid funding. "They haven't put a complete stop to it yet so we're just spending the money on a monthly basis and hoping for the best."

"We still don't know if we're going to get the funding we were promised this year," the founder of an Iraqi journalists' network in Baghdad said. "We probably won't be able to pay some of our journalists. Right now, we're approaching other organizations to try to replace the money."

Neither interviewee wanted their names published because they didn't want to criticize their donors publicly.

They are not alone. Since US President Donald Trump took power, he has slashed US funding for what's known as "official development aid," or ODA. Often simply called foreign aid,the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developmentdefines ODA as "government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries." ODA can be bilateral — given from country to country — or multilateral, where funds are pooled by an organization like the UN, then disbursed.

The US is not the only country cutting ODA. Even before what insiders described as the US' "chaotic" budget cuts, reductions in ODA were a longer-term pattern. Global ODA fell by over 7% in 2024, as European nations and the UK also reduced ODA in favor of channeling more money into defense. Last year marked the first time in nearly 30 years that major donors like France, Germany, the UK and the US all cut ODA.

In 2023, countries in the Middle East got around $7.8 billion (€6.7 billion) out of the........

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