When Fighting Blocks Aid: How USAID Operates in Active Conflict Zones

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In 2024, Sudan recorded 60 aid workers killed—the highest number ever recorded in any country except Gaza. That same year, people are dying and the situation is about to get much worse in South Sudan’s Jonglei State. Cholera spreading through overwhelmed treatment centers. Armed groups blocking roads and looting humanitarian warehouses. Aid workers can’t reach anyone at all.

This is the nightmare scenario for the U.S. Agency for International Development: a place where people desperately need assistance, where American taxpayers have committed substantial resources to provide it, and where aid workers can’t deliver help anymore.

Access and Security Collapse

Military operations between government forces and opposition militias have made it impossible for aid workers to reach people in Jonglei State. Aid convoys can’t move. Supply routes are blocked. The warehouses where supplies are stored have been ransacked.

The displacement creates its own chain reaction of crises. Cholera cases surge. Children separated from regular food sources develop acute malnutrition. Pregnant women can’t reach health facilities, and maternal mortality spikes. Violence against women and girls—already widespread in conflict zones—increases in the chaos.

Aid workers in South Sudan face persistent armed robberies, ambushes on convoys, and organized kidnapping. These aren’t statistics. They’re individual people—many of them South Sudanese nationals working for international organizations—making daily calculations about whether the risk of delivering food or medicine is worth potentially not coming home.

USAID’s Security Phase System

USAID has a system for rating how dangerous a place is and what activities can continue under those conditions. As security deteriorates, the agency moves through increasingly strict limits on what staff can do and where they can go. At some point on that spectrum, USAID orders people out entirely.

The decision involves formal risk assessments: the nature of the violence, trends in security incidents, whether local security forces can protect anyone, whether alternative delivery methods exist. The part of USAID that handles humanitarian aid is supposed to share lessons learned about risk management across conflict zones, so missions don’t repeat mistakes.

When direct staff presence becomes too dangerous, USAID shifts to managing aid from a distance. This creates conflicting priorities. USAID’s primary responsibility is ensuring American taxpayer dollars reach the people they’re meant to serve. The traditional ways of fulfilling that responsibility—sending staff to project sites, observing activities, meeting beneficiaries—become impossible when physical presence is too dangerous.

Third-Party Monitoring

To bridge this gap, USAID increasingly relies on hiring local people to check on projects: hiring local monitoring firms or trained local monitors to conduct site visits, collect data from implementing partners, verify program activities, and report back to USAID staff operating from secure locations.

Local monitors may face lower personal risk than international staff. They speak local languages and understand cultural contexts. Their presence is less visible, potentially reducing the security profile.

Monitoring firms describe using local third-party monitors who can access areas that USAID personnel often can’t, gathering data through visiting sites with GPS coordinates, talking to local sources, holding group discussions, and even satellite imagery analysis.

But hiring local monitors isn’t a perfect substitute for direct oversight. A satellite image can show that a health clinic exists. It cannot verify that it’s stocked with medicines or that patients are being treated effectively. A key informant interview provides insights, but can be compromised if the informant is under pressure from armed groups. Each step away from direct observation creates opportunities for mistakes. USAID must make consequential decisions about American taxpayer dollars based on information that is inherently less reliable than direct observation would be.

Counterterrorism Law and Humanitarian Access

USAID operates within a legal framework that can complicate humanitarian response. Federal law makes it a crime to provide any support to designated terrorist groups. The law only requires that you know the group is on the government’s terrorist list. It doesn’t require proof that you intended to further terrorist activity or even that you knew a specific transaction would support terrorism.

Humanitarian organizations operating in areas controlled by armed groups designated or rumored to be designated as terrorist organizations face potential legal exposure if they provide any assistance that could conceivably be diverted. Aid groups could face prosecution even if they accidentally help someone connected to a terrorist group.

So medical supplies fail to reach populations that desperately need food, clothing, water, and sanitation. The choice becomes impossible: provide aid anyway and accept legal risk, refuse to operate in those areas and let civilians go without assistance, or attempt to negotiate access with the armed group—which itself can be complicated if that group has terrorist connections.

USAID attempts to work around this through internal compliance procedures: organizations reporting problems themselves, checking who they work with, and making partners promise not to help terrorists, plus third-party monitoring. These mechanisms create additional complexity and cost for implementing organizations, potentially slowing aid delivery. Legal protections designed to prevent terrorism can make it harder to help people trapped in conflict zones.

Geopolitical Constraints on Humanitarian Operations

USAID doesn’t make decisions about conflict-zone operations independently. Decisions about USAID humanitarian operations can be influenced by considerations beyond pure humanitarian need: national security interests, diplomatic objectives, and military strategy. This means helping people isn’t the only consideration in the equation.

Alternative Delivery Mechanisms

When traditional aid delivery becomes impossible, USAID and its partners have developed alternative mechanisms. One increasingly important approach is giving people money or vouchers to buy what they need rather than receiving pre-packaged aid supplies.

In many conflict-affected economies, markets continue functioning even as security deteriorates. Local merchants maintain supply chains even when international organizations cannot. Giving recipients purchasing power respects their dignity and agency while supporting local economies.

Cash assistance programs come in multiple forms: giving people money to buy what they need, targeted cash for specific vulnerable populations like pregnant and lactating women, and cash assistance that requires people to do something in return. Cash assistance can be delivered through multiple channels—mobile money transfers, bank deposits, local merchants as intermediaries—reducing the need for USAID’s own logistics infrastructure.

Another alternative involves delivering aid from neighboring countries. Instead of operating directly within the conflict zone, humanitarian organizations base themselves in neighboring countries and deliver aid across borders, often in coordination with local partners. Neighboring countries must grant permission and often have their own interests in limiting humanitarian access, but this provides an operational alternative when it becomes too dangerous to operate inside the country.

Balancing Staff Safety and Humanitarian Obligation

Underlying all of USAID’s operational decisions in conflict zones are conflicting responsibilities the agency must balance constantly. On one side: the duty of care to USAID personnel and staff from aid organizations working on the ground—individuals who have families and don’t deserve to have their lives endangered unnecessarily. On the other side: the imperative to reach populations in extreme need, populations that didn’t create their own emergency and who face death or severe deprivation if aid doesn’t reach them.

Humanitarian workers do accept significant risk. In 2018, 36 aid workers were kidnapped. Yet aid organizations have generally continued operating because the alternative—abandoning the population to humanitarian catastrophe—seems worse.

But there are limits to what risk is acceptable. USAID operates under formal rules about protecting staff safety that require the agency to assess whether continuing operations puts personnel at too much danger to continue. U.S. law doesn’t require the government to provide aid everywhere; rather, it authorizes the President to provide humanitarian aid in countries where it advances U.S. foreign policy objectives while being consistent with U.S. law. This legal framework allows USAID to suspend operations when security conditions deteriorate to unacceptable levels. In some cases, USAID has done exactly that, evacuating staff and pausing operations until conditions improved.

Afghanistan and Evacuation Failures

According to a USAID Inspector General evaluation, USAID lacked a clear role and experienced challenges planning and communicating during the evacuation of staff from aid organizations from Afghanistan. The agency didn’t have defined evacuation-related roles and responsibilities or a mechanism to track staff from aid organizations. When the Taliban takeover came rapidly, USAID was unprepared to respond effectively. USAID’s Asia office didn’t review the risks that the mission in Afghanistan had identified before the evacuation, potentially weakening the agency’s response.

Recent Crises: Yemen, Ukraine, and Budget Cuts

The United States has been Yemen’s largest humanitarian donor, providing $768 million in support in 2024—half of Yemen’s overall humanitarian aid plan. When the Trump administration took office in 2025 and began cutting foreign aid programs, Yemen was among the countries affected. According to Amnesty International, the abrupt termination of foreign assistance put the health and human rights of millions of people who depend on humanitarian aid at risk. Aid workers described how President Trump’s decision to cut U.S. aid funding led to the shutdown of lifesaving assistance: malnutrition treatment for children, pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, safe shelters for survivors of gender-based violence, healthcare for children suffering from cholera. By March 2025, the funding cuts had forced the shutdown of dozens of safe spaces designed to prevent or respond to gender-based violence for women and girls across Yemen.

Ukraine has tested USAID’s capacity to operate in a conventional war between two countries with clear front lines and intense modern warfare. Congress appropriated $174.2 billion through five Ukraine supplemental appropriation acts from fiscal year 2022 through 2024, with total appropriations reaching $187.0 billion. USAID’s role within this massive assistance effort has been to provide humanitarian and development assistance distinct from military aid, yet connected to America’s larger commitment to Ukraine. The agency has faced challenges deploying staff, conducting monitoring, and maintaining program effectiveness in an active war zone, but has continued operations because humanitarian needs are immense and the U.S. commitment to Ukraine is central to American foreign policy.

The Trump administration, which took office on January 20, 2025, initiated a review of U.S. foreign assistance that dramatically changed what USAID does and how much money it has. On March 28, 2025, the State Department formally notified Congress it is shutting down USAID and moving its remaining work to the State Department. This reorganization came alongside dramatic cuts to humanitarian assistance programs.

According to the Aid Worker Security Report, USAID had developed an advanced approach to partner security support and was notable for higher overhead funding that allowed partners to build security teams. When USAID’s budget was cut and its organizational structure disrupted, these security support capacities deteriorated rapidly. Budget cuts eliminated shared security services that kept aid workers safe. While some larger organizations have in-house capacity to monitor local security incident trends for risk analysis, many others rely on external support services. Funding cuts threatened these services.

This occurred precisely when humanitarian needs were rising globally. An estimated 87 million people required emergency assistance in 2026, and an agreement between the UN and the U.S. in December 2025 committed $2 billion in humanitarian assistance for global relief programs, covering 17 crisis-affected countries including South Sudan. However, this commitment came against the backdrop of significant organizational disruption within USAID itself. The agency’s capacity to implement this funding was compromised precisely when needs were greatest.

Do No Harm in Conflict Zones

A final dimension of USAID’s operating challenge in conflict zones involves the principle that aid shouldn’t make things worse. Assistance can disrupt existing power dynamics, be perceived as a “resource” to contest, and armed groups can use aid as a weapon—giving it to allies and withholding it from enemies.

The approach to making sure aid doesn’t make things worse provides a structured method for analyzing these risks, involving seven steps: identifying dangerous conflicts, looking at what splits communities and what brings them together, reviewing the assistance program, analyzing interactions between the program and conflict dynamics, checking if aid makes divisions worse, and changing the plan if needed.

Does providing aid to one community create resentment in neighboring communities who also need help but receive less? Do the employment practices of aid organizations—hiring staff from particular ethnic or religious groups—reinforce divisions? Does aid make communities less able to help themselves? Does aid flow create unintended consequences that reward the wrong behavior, such as warlords who profit from war?

Humanitarian actors face significant, unpredictable financial and bureaucratic costs that delay delivery of services and divert funds from aid recipients. One international NGO estimated it spends approximately $350,000 per year on government fees and taxes—funds that could have gone to beneficiaries. NGOs have to ask permission from 70 different armed groups across the country, most of which demand different fees or conditions before granting access. These actors can change daily, invalidating previously negotiated access and starting the expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous process over again. This system inevitably creates incentives for armed groups to maintain control over territory and deny access to humanitarian organizations, using civilians as leverage.

Structural Challenges and Long-Term Questions

As the region enters what UN officials fear could develop into a humanitarian catastrophe, USAID and other humanitarian organizations face immediate decisions about how to adapt operations to deteriorating security conditions in Jonglei State and potentially other regions. The decisions made in the coming weeks will likely follow a familiar pattern: initial attempts to maintain programming through changing how they work, imposing stricter safety rules if violence spreads, possible evacuation of some international staff while local staff and implementing partners continue operating under extremely difficult conditions, more use of local monitors and cash assistance, and continuous negotiation with armed parties to keep the ability to deliver aid.

The longer-term question is whether the way humanitarian organizations are set up and funded is adequate for the reality of modern conflicts. The average humanitarian crisis now lasts nine years, meaning that emergency response plans must somehow shift to long-term aid programs. Yet USAID hired mostly short-term contractors, which provided rapid deployment capabilities but included slow hiring and lots of unfilled positions. Short-term deployments led to high turnover during critical responses, creating problems where people don’t know what happened before, and operations aren’t consistent. Precisely when continuity and institutional learning are most needed, USAID’s staffing model works against it.

The case also raises broader questions about whether humanitarian assistance can stay neutral when they depend on government money. The U.S. committed over $100 million in additional emergency food assistance in 2024, and the $2 billion UN-U.S. humanitarian funding agreement includes the country as one of 17 prioritized crisis-affected countries. This level of funding makes the U.S. government the force that controls most of the humanitarian aid. Inevitably, this raises questions about whether humanitarian organizations can stay politically neutral while depending on U.S. money and when their decisions about where to operate are limited by U.S. security decisions and policy goals.

For USAID personnel making immediate decisions about whether to keep working, change how they work, or stop in Jonglei State, these broader systemic questions are less pressing than immediate operational realities. They must assess whether the risk of continuing operations is acceptable. Whether alternative delivery mechanisms can effectively reach populations. Whether implementing partners can operate safely. Whether the organization has obligations to beneficiaries that override security concerns.

As long as humanitarian crises coincide with active armed conflicts—which history suggests will be frequently—USAID and other humanitarian organizations will face these impossible choices about how to balance the imperative to help with the reality that helping can be extraordinarily dangerous. The systems, policies, and personnel decisions USAID makes in the coming weeks will provide lessons that will shape responses to future humanitarian crises for years to come.

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