WASHINGTON — The State Department intends to shift up to $125 million in foreign aid to defray soaring energy costs, including nearly $49 million that Congress had appropriated to supply contraception to women in low-income countries, according to a memo sent to lawmakers last month.
The memo, obtained by The New York Times, invoked a provision of the Foreign Assistance Act that allows the president to divert certain aid funds to address “unanticipated contingencies.”
The memo, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said the funds were needed to “support exigent energy security needs for partners facing coercive supply cutoffs, market disruptions and inflated costs.” It attributed such costs to “deliberate, extortionary actions of Russia, China and Iran,” but did not explain how the money would be spent.
Oil prices have spiked during President Trump’s war with Iran. Renewed hostilities between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have further disrupted markets, putting energy infrastructure at risk in a region crucial to global supplies of crude oil and its byproducts, including diesel and gasoline.
In a statement, a State Department spokesperson declined to identify the partners who would receive the aid, but said the administration was using foreign assistance to meet critical needs, and “reforming aid to align with national interests.” The department declined to respond to a request for comment specifically on the family planning funding.
Senators blasted the move, casting it as an executive overreach.
“President Trump and Secretary Rubio are raiding funding Congress set aside to support family planning and lower maternal and child mortality, all so they can pretend they are trying to stem some of the bleeding they’ve caused by starting a reckless war and creating a global energy crisis,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, the committee chair, said in a statement that she opposed the administration’s decision.
“These funds should be allocated as Congress intended,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump administration was able to shift program funding under a spending law enacted earlier this year. That law was supposed to make it more difficult for the White House to flout lawmakers’ funding allocations. But the legislative package kept a loophole for the administration under the unanticipated contingencies clause, which the State Department invoked.
Murray urged Republicans to join Democrats in imposing stricter spending limits on the administration.
“Republicans should join us in insisting these cuts get reversed and finally taking action in our spending bills to prevent this administration from ever being able to execute this sort of move again,” Murray’s statement said.
In the memo, the largest reallocation was $48.5 million intended for family planning and reproductive health care in low-income countries. Trump’s administration has repeatedly refused to fund family planning in its second term.
The funding was one of three streams of money Congress intended to provide contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples in developing countries. All three have been withheld, clawed back in a rescission or left unspent — labeled “to be reprogrammed” in the budget.
“The consequences of these decisions are not theoretical: Every dollar withheld has a human cost,” said Nabeeha Kazi Hutchins, CEO of Population Action International, a reproductive health advocacy organization.
For more than 60 years, US family planning aid had helped women in low-income countries space births and gain access to essential reproductive health care. In 2024 alone, this assistance helped prevent an estimated 34,000 maternal deaths, Kazi Hutchins said.
“Refusing to spend funds as appropriated by Congress puts lives at risk and undermines decades of American global leadership,” she said. “Congress holds the power of the purse, not the White House.”
A provision included in annual foreign assistance appropriations legislation for more than two decades required that any funding withheld from the UN Population Fund “due to the operation of any provision of law” should be transferred to the Global Health Programs account for bilateral “family planning, maternal and reproductive health activities.”
The State Department acknowledged in a document sent to Congress that it is obligated to reprogram the money withheld from the UN Population Fund to reproductive health, but asserted that it will “determine appropriate, administration-aligned uses for the funds.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.