Norwegian Refugee Council NGO to suspend some aid work across 20 countries due to Trump policy

(This February 10 story has been corrected to show that NRC has not suspended all work, but some work, in nearly 20 countries, in the headline and paragraph 1)

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on Monday it would suspend some of its humanitarian work across nearly 20 countries worldwide after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a freeze on U.S. foreign aid worldwide when he took office on January 20.

The non-governmental organisation received just under 20% of its funding from the United States in 2024, or around $150 million, it said, with that funding helping some 1.6 million people worldwide.

"We have, in our 79-year history, never experienced such an abrupt discontinuation of aid funding from any of our many donor nations, inter-governmental organisations, or private donor agencies," the NRC said in a statement.

The agency said the consequences of suspending aid would become increasingly serious for people facing crises around the world.

Already in Ukraine, NRC said, it had to halt the scheduled February distribution of emergency support to 57,000 people in communities along the front lines and had to lay off staff worldwide.

The Trump administration said last Monday it would put on leave all directly hired employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) globally and recall thousands of personnel working overseas.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that the administration would reach out to USAID to identify and designate programs that would be exempted from the stop-work orders.

However, the NRC said it was unable to take advantage of the temporary waiver unless the U.S. government resumed payments to its partners for work completed before the foreign assistance pause.

"We currently have millions of dollars in outstanding payment requests to the U.S. government. Without an immediate solution we may, at the end of February, be forced to halt U.S.-funded lifesaving humanitarian programmes," it said.

That included supplying clean water to 300,000 people trapped in the blockaded city of Djibo in Burkina Faso, and cutting funding to nearly 500 bakeries in Darfur, Sudan, which provide food hundreds of thousands of people, the NRC said.

(Reporting by Louise Breusch Rasmussen; Editing by Gwladys Fouche, Angus MacSwan, Peter Graff)