Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medications for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children and women battered by violence.

Now, that network is unraveling. The Trump administration froze foreign aid for 90 days and has planned to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development to just 5 percent of its work force, although a federal judge paused the plan on Friday. Given wars and strapped economies, other governments or philanthropies are unlikely to make up for the shortfall, and recipient nations are too hamstrung by debt to manage on their own.

Even the largest organizations are unlikely to emerge unscathed. In interviews, more than 25 aid workers, former U.S.A.I.D. employees and officials from aid organizations described a system thrown into mass confusion and chaos.

A tower of blocks may take hours to build, but “you pull one of those blocks out and it collapses,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the H.I.V. prevention organization AVAC, which relied on U.S.A.I.D. for 38 percent of its funding.

“You’ve gotten rid of all of the staff, all of the institutional memory, all of the trust and confidence, not only in the United States but in the dozens of countries in which U.S.A.I.D. works,” Mr. Warren said. “Those things have taken decades to build up but two weeks to destroy.”

Small organizations, some with as few as 10 employees, have folded. Some midsize organizations have furloughed up to 80 percent of their employees. Even large organizations — including Catholic Relief Services and FHI 360, among the biggest recipients of U.S.A.I.D. funding — have announced large layoffs or furloughs.

In one survey, about 1 in 4 nonprofits said they might last a month; more than half said they had enough reserves to survive for three months at most.

The damage is compounded by President Trump’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from the World Health Organization, forcing its leaders to announce cost-cutting measures of their own.

Global health experts said that the future suddenly looked uncertain, even dystopian, and struggled to articulate alternatives.

“We are quite clear that the future looks different,” said Christine Stegling, a deputy executive director at UNAIDS, the United Nations’ H.I.V. division. But “none of us yet has a real picture of what that means.”

The damage extends not just to the health of people abroad but to Americans and American businesses. Along with the roughly 100,000 positions cut overseas, an estimated 52,000 Americans in 42 states have lost their jobs.

The global health care supply chain market was valued at nearly $3 billion in 2023 and was expected to grow. Each year, about $2 billion in American agricultural products were purchased as food aid. The abrupt halt risks more than $450 million worth of corn, lentils, rice and other commodities that are in transit or in warehouses and ports.

“The economic impact of this is going to be astounding to people’s lives and businesses,” said Lisa Hilmi, executive director of CORE group, a consortium of large global health practitioners.

Ms. Hilmi, who worked as a nurse in many conflict and disaster zones, said that a lack of health services could drive poor health, malnutrition, epidemics, civil unrest and “a much broader meltdown of society across the world.”

“If America is the biggest superpower, then we need to act like it,” she said. “And part of that is acting with humanity.”

‘Dizzying chaos’

A week after the aid was paused, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving humanitarian assistance and medications. But stop-work orders for some programs, including food assistance, followed even after the waiver’s announcement.

Last week, one large organization got the go-ahead for some of its programs. But later that same day the Trump administration placed dozens of U.S.A.I.D. officers on leave, leaving the organization wondering whether the division that issued the waiver was still a viable entity and the officer who wrote the notice was still employed.

“It’s another example of the dizzying chaos that this administration has inflicted on us,” said a senior official at the organization.

The leaders of most organizations that depend on U.S.A.I.D. funding would not speak on the record, fearing retaliation from the Trump administration.

Even when organizations have received approvals to continue, no money has flowed. One large organization received less than 5 percent of its expected budget for the period, but others have received nothing.

“I obviously welcome that the secretary approved a waiver and put a post on the internet, but we cannot pay our bills with the post,” a senior official at a large organization said of Mr. Rubio.

Some groups feel morally obligated to continue to provide lifesaving services, hoping that they will eventually be reimbursed. But with dozens of small organizations shuttering by the day, damage to some of the world’s most vulnerable groups is accruing, some experts warned.

The ecosystem of global health is so closely interwoven that the pause has frozen the work even of organizations that receive no money from the U.S. government.

The nonprofit IPAS works with hundreds of organizations in dozens of countries to provide access to contraception, abortion and other reproductive health services. Many of the clinics have shuttered, some permanently, said Anu Kumar, the organization’s president.

The speed of the disruption did not allow clinics time to make contingency plans or taper their dependence on the funding, she said, adding, “This definitely has a ripple effect.”

After one week of the freeze, more than 900,000 women and girls will have been denied reproductive care, a figure that will grow to 11.7 million over the 90-day pause, according to the Guttmacher Institute. “That’s more than the entire population of North Carolina,” Dr. Kumar said.

As a result, the institute estimated, 4.2 million girls and women will experience unintended pregnancies, and 8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

Many H.I.V. programs were focused on “key populations” at highest risk, including transgender people and men who have sex with men, who are marginalized and even criminalized in some countries.

In Uganda, for instance, where a harsh anti-gay law can carry the death penalty for consensual homosexual activity for people with H.I.V., nonprofit groups funded by the United States have been crucial sources of financial and medical support.

“It’s something every American should be proud about, but I don’t think they know it,” said Kenneth Mwehonge, executive director of the Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development, which monitors the quality of other H.I.V. programs in Uganda.

“I don’t think they know how much they’ve contributed and the lives they’ve saved, and they don’t celebrate it enough,” he said. His organization has had to let go of 105 full-time staff members and community workers.

Childhood immunizations, malaria prevention and treatment and malnutrition programs are also stalled. So are programs on education, economic empowerment, preventive health services and family planning.

“This is a perfect storm for poor health outcomes, no getting around it,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, executive director of the Global Health Council, a membership organization of health groups.

Some U.S.A.I.D.-funded organizations provided clean water and sanitation, particularly for refugee populations. Others helped governments protect against diseases like polio and measles in conflict zones and among nomadic groups. Still others provided expertise in containing outbreaks of dangerous pathogens like Ebola and Marburg, which are smoldering in Uganda and Tanzania.

Any of these threats, if not contained, could easily cross borders and land on America’s shores, said Rebecca Wolfe, who worked at the U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit Mercy Corps for 15 years and is now a development expert at the University of Chicago.

The world “is so interconnected, and to try to divide it into ‘America first’ and the rest no longer works in today’s age,” she said.

‘It feels like grief’

Some U.S.A.I.D. employees and aid organizations said that the sudden unplugging of funding was antithetical to the goal: helping countries become independent enough to care for their own citizens.

In the past few years, U.S.A.I.D. has been working on training midwives, nurses, doctors, laboratories and hospitals to begin to transfer the responsibility.

Self-sufficiency would require small nonprofits at the local level to deliver services, but the smallest organizations are also the least likely to weather the current storm.

“The irony is that their priority in Project 2025 is localizing and moving away from big partners,” said Jeremiah Centrella, former general counsel at Mercy Corps. “But big international partners are the only ones with access to private donors and strong enough balance sheets to get through this.”

It’s unclear what will happen to the tens of thousands of workers who suddenly have no jobs and no industry in which to find one.

In Kenya, Mercy Githinji cared for 100 households in the Kayole neighborhood of Nairobi when the clinic where she worked, run by the U.S.A.I.D. Tumukia Mtoto Project, abruptly closed down. Now Ms. Githinji, a 52-year-old single mother of four daughters, is unsure how she will pay rent or school fees.

The clinic provided medical care but also helped residents with rent money, food and sanitary pads. “Now there’s no check, there’s nothing,” Ms. Githinji said. “It’s very bad. People are suffering.”

Even if aid were to resume next week, clinics and offices have already closed, people have moved, and trust has been broken, some former U.S.A.I.D. employees said.

Others said they were desperately saddened — not for themselves, but for the people they had pledged to serve.

“The only way I have been able to describe it is, it feels like grief,” one former U.S.A.I.D. employee said.

“Our mission is to save lives and alleviate suffering,” she said. “Not having the opportunity to contribute to that, and have it be taken away overnight, arbitrarily, without notice or reason, being called a criminal or radical lunatic, has just been deeply heartbreaking.”

Stephanie Nolen contributed reporting.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national ruling party appeared poised to win an important regional election in India’s capital where voters had rejected Mr. Modi’s Hindu-first platform for nearly three decades even as it was expanding its footprint elsewhere across the vast country.

Early results on Saturday in elections for New Delhi’s regional assembly suggested that the Bharatiya Janata Party was on track to have more seats than the Aam Aadmi Party. Aam Aadmi, a small party, has governed the capital area for the past decade, though it has increasingly struggled against Mr. Modi’s efforts to crush it.

The political fight over who governs the capital region has come to epitomize the cutthroat nature of Indian politics.

Mudslinging rival parties have been competing for votes with handouts as well as with pressure tactics that include A.I.-heavy disinformation campaigns and outright jailings of politicians.

Meanwhile, delivery of basic government services for a region of more than 20 million people appears increasingly paralyzed.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Benjamin Franklin, the consummate colonial wanderer, once observed that home was not just a place, or a thing, or a food. “A house is not a home,” he said, “unless it contains fire for the mind, as well as the body.”

Centuries later, J.P. Teti, Philadelphia’s own accidental ambassador to England, has learned this, too: A city — nay, a people — cannot survive on cheesesteak alone.

If the seat of American power in London resides at the embassy, a good chunk of its spirit can be found on Cleveland Street in central London, sandwiched between traditional British architecture, in the shape of a gritty Philly dive bar: Passyunk Avenue, named for South Philly’s famous thoroughfare.

To step inside is to be transported. Pendants from Philadelphia schools frame the windows; T-shirts and jerseys hang from the rafters. Dollar bills with scribbled signatures paper the walls. Among London’s many manufactured American bars, Passyunk Avenue stands apart for the simple fact that it isn’t a gimmick.

The brainchild of Mr. Teti, the bar is a Mecca of sorts for American sports fans far from home. Cozy, raucous and drawing heavily from Philly’s (in)famous sports obsession, Passyunk Avenue caters to nearly anyone hoping to watch mainstream American sports. But it has cornered one emerging market: the N.F.L., which is surging in popularity among international audiences. Commissioner Roger Goodell has said he is hopeful that the league might expand abroad and, someday, even see a Super Bowl played in Europe.

Such lofty aspirations, though, feel eons away from the comfortable perch of a Passyunk Avenue bar stool this week, days before the Philadelphia Eagles march into a championship rematch with the Kansas City Chiefs. Sitting among tchotchkes and trophies, it’s not really about football, or cheesesteaks. It’s never really been about any of that.

‘We’re not a sports bar. We’re a dive bar.’

Mr. Teti remembers exactly where he was in January 2018, just before Philadelphia’s last (and first) Super Bowl victory: sore and despondent under a rail arch in southeastern London, packing up his fledgling cheesesteak truck for good.

The truck had been a brief experiment for Mr. Teti, who grew up split between Southern New Jersey and South Philly, where he had a gaggle of Italian cousins, before moving to London for work. Convinced he could win the city over, he walked away from his corporate job in 2016 on the gamble that Brits might come around to the gloppy appeal of Philadelphia’s famed sandwich.

But slinging steaks out of a trailer hadn’t fostered the community Mr. Teti had hoped for.

“This isn’t what I imagined,” he recalled thinking at the time. “I want to move it away from being cheesesteaks. We’re going to create a cultural outpost in the form of a Philly dive bar.”

Despite the many pubs in central London, an authentic dive couldn’t feel farther. That hasn’t stopped plenty of pubs from trying, but the efforts often feel like a Disneyland American Legion. Lost are the time-tested details, only missed once they’re an ocean away: Flickering neon. Football in the background. Gummy stools and brash takes from chatty strangers.

These small touches are taken seriously in Philadelphia, where dive bar culture predates the country itself, and words like “grit” and “grime” are less disparagements than badges of honor. (An Atlantic City bar once sued Philadelphia magazine after a reviewer called it a “dive.” According to the magazine’s editor: “This is a case of a place that can’t take a compliment.”)

At the risk of dumping tea in the proverbial harbor: Pub culture just isn’t the same.

With a renewed sense of purpose, Mr. Teti rented a space in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London and opened its doors in March 2018. The business, known as Liberty Cheesesteak Company when it was run out of a truck, was rebranded as Passyunk Avenue after South Philly’s main artery, where Rocky Balboa trained and where Pat’s and Geno’s (overrated) cheesesteak houses still wage their generational war. Mr. Teti had bought the name as a website domain on a whim years before.

“I’m not selling cheesesteaks. It’s always been about, for me, sharing the cultural inheritance that made my upbringing special,” Mr. Teti said, hunched at a wooden table at Passyunk Avenue’s Fitzrovia location. It is now one of three — soon to be four — locations, all of which have waiting lists hundreds deep for Sunday’s game, despite the 11:30 p.m. local kickoff time. This Super Bowl is a lot different here, now, than it was in 2018.

“It really shouldn’t have survived six months,” Mr. Teti said of his bar, chuckling. “But it did.”

‘This is Philly, through and through’

Passyunk Avenue is not just about cheesesteaks, and, as Mr. Teti and any lifelong, righteously bitter Philadelphia fan would tell you, the Eagles aren’t just about football. The Lombardi is more Holy Grail than trophy, the end of what can only be described as a torturous emotional pilgrimage. Indeed, the Eagles are less pastime than religion, as inherent to the city’s collective identity as Benjamin Franklin, as soul music, as a citywide served from a scratched-up counter on Two Street.

Mr. Teti’s bar is a dutiful disciple. It hoards late-night licenses to solve the time difference problem for after-hours American games. The bar found a Dutch butcher who can slice the steak the right way, and developed its own Whiz when British food codes wouldn’t let the real(?) stuff in.

“This is a very specific Americana, you know what I mean?” said Jessi Riley, a South Jersey native and head of culture for the franchise. “This is Philly, through and through.”

Passyunk Avenue has star-studded bona fides. The Kelce brothers, including the retired Eagles center Jason, once recorded their popular “New Heights” podcast from the bar. The Phillies manager, Rob Thomson, stopped by to pull pints when the team played a series in London last year. Brent Celek, the retired Eagles tight end, once partied there with the Lombardi Trophy.

But Passyunk Avenue’s real credentials are its walls, with not a bare inch in sight. It is a sea of the familiar: Scribbled messages like “DELCO” or “Wooder from the crick,” in homage to Philly’s famously tricky accent. A South Jersey marching band jacket. A reusable Wawa shopping bag, perfectly crumpled as if pulled from a back seat and tacked to the wall.

(One intoxicated chancer once made off with what, to an outsider, probably appeared to be an innocuous prop: a stuffed Eagle head. It was, in fact, the donated costume head of Swoop, the official Eagles mascot. Internationally vilified by Philadelphia fans online, the mortified man returned the head, unharmed, the next day.)

Every piece of décor, Ms. Riley said, was donated, often from patrons so moved by the feeling that they took a jersey right off their backs at the bar.

“I’ve worked in several museums,” said Ms. Riley, a historian by trade. “I feel like I purvey more culture in this place than I ever did in any museum I ever worked in.”

‘Go Birds’

I wandered into Passyunk Avenue for the first time on the Tuesday before the Super Bowl, gloomy and pining for Philly’s riotous week. I left the city years ago but have trekked back regularly to watch big games with my brother. Stymied by an ocean, we’ll spend this Super Bowl apart.

Home is not a cheesesteak, or even a football team. Instead, I found it in this Fitzrovia dive’s subtleties, reserved only for those who know to look: The gentle stretch of an “o,” that turns it into “owh.” The casual “yo,” as punctuation and parting. The soft “shh” that Mr. Teti adds to the second syllable of “Passyunk.”

This is bone deep, for anyone who has ever left a place they love.

Ms. Riley will watch Sunday’s game in the same ’90s Starter team jacket she has had for decades — she pulls it off a chair and displays the internal name tag, still bearing the echo of a childhood scribble. Mr. Teti will be at the Leake Street tunnel, near Passyunk Avenue’s Battersea location. There, they’ve arranged for a tailgate-style party, in homage to the pregame scene at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ home stadium.

At the bar, we steer away from predictions, wary of jinxes. I’ll be back for a cheesesteak soon, I pledge, pressing the door forward into the gray London chill.

“Go birds,” I say over my shoulder.

Behind me, a familiar, parting chorus: Go birds.

During his latest presidential campaign, President Trump bragged about compelling Mexico to deploy 28,000 troops to its borders during his first administration to avoid tariffs.

This week, Mr. Trump and Mexico brokered another deal to send an additional 10,000 Mexican National Guard members to the border to stop the flow of migrants and drugs — a compromise to once again stave off U.S. tariffs. Mr. Trump has championed the agreement as a victory for the United States.

But analysts and former diplomats who brokered the first troop deployment in 2019 are doubtful that additional soldiers will have much effect thwarting the movement of migrants or drugs, particularly fentanyl.

Instead, they say, the deployment agreed to by President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico may be catering to Mr. Trump’s affinity for deal-making rather than being part of a well-thought-out military campaign.

“It’s a lot of shock and awe, but very little policy,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to Washington during President Felipe Calderón’s term from 2006 to 2012, an administration that aggressively pursued cartels inside Mexico, igniting extraordinary levels of violence nationwide.

The Mexican government appears to be echoing Mr. Trump’s fondness for a high-profile media blitz with its own.

After the deal was struck, photos and videos of Mexican soldiers waiting to board military flights and vehicles for their border deployment circulated widely. They mirrored Mr. Trump’s use of American military planes to deport migrants in recent weeks.

But what the Mexico troops will do on the border is unclear. The Mexican defense ministry is known for its lack of transparency, as it is not required to disclose its operations or funding details to Mexico’s congress or the public.

There are clues from Mr. Trump’s first term, when more than 20,000 Mexican troops were sent to the country’s northern and southern borders and were responsible for erecting checkpoints and breaking up large groups of migrants.

The Mexican defense ministry did not respond to questions about the deployment and Ms. Sheinbaum has so far said little about what exactly the force will be responsible for.

Mexico already has a significant military presence along the U.S. border. Sam Storr, a Mexico-based analyst who tracks military activity with the Citizen Security Project at the Ibero-American University, said that there was a monthly average of 1,115 National Guardsmen and 7,959 Mexican Army troops as part of immigration enforcement at the country’s northern border in the first half of 2024.

Adding 10,000 new National Guards members, Mr. Storr said, could “potentially be a significant increase,” but he also called it “extremely confusing.” He said it was not known if some troops would be rotated out. And, he said, based on public records requests, it is the Mexican Army that has traditionally carried out more drug seizures — and has a larger presence in northern states.

The National Guard, Mr. Storr said, “seems to be an auxiliary force,” filling gaps for state police and contributing to customs enforcement.

U.S. Border Patrol officials recorded roughly 71,000 illegal crossings at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term in December 2020. While crossings hit record highs under President Joseph R. Biden in 2023, they dropped to about 47,000 by December 2024.

The bigger question is what additional troops can do, if anything, to stanch the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

“It’s Whac-a-Mole,” said Mr. Sarukhan, the former ambassador. “Most of the fentanyl goes through legal points of entry into the U.S., not between them, and that’s where most troops will be deployed: at illegal points of entry.”

The challenge of fentanyl interception, analysts say, is threefold. First, fentanyl is compact, with only small quantities of the drug needed to get a lot of people high, unlike cocaine. It is much easier to smuggle into the United States in personal vehicles compared with other drugs. Mexican security forces do not search vehicles at U.S. ports of entry; that happens on the American side of the border.

Second, a majority of fentanyl smugglers are not illegal migrants, as Mr. Trump claims, but American citizens going through border crossings. In 2023, American citizens were responsible for 86 percent of fentanyl trafficking cases in the United States, according to government figures.

Third, although the National Guard is authorized to carry out inspections, significantly more soldiers would be required to effectively inspect the volume of vehicles, which would likely slow down bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico. In 2018, the port of entry at Laredo, Texas — where most trade flows — saw more than five million cars and 2.3 million trucks cross, carrying goods worth about $235 billion.

“Militarizing drug enforcement is nothing new,” said Stephanie Brewer, the Mexico director at the Washington Office on Latin America research institute. “If anything, this is doubling down on a failed war on drugs that has done nothing to stop drugs since it began decades ago.”

Analysts say that to crack down on fentanyl more intelligence is needed to go after labs or to identify American citizens who are smuggling it. The Mexican National Guard is a relatively new force and only established its own intelligence wing in late 2023.

Intelligence “is really the most effective tool, beyond 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000 National Guard members,” said Jonathan Maza, a Mexico-based security analyst. He said that increased cooperation between Mexican authorities and U.S. agencies — such as the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the F.B.I. — was crucial.

But that work needs to be done elsewhere, not at the crossings.

“Fentanyl production is happening not on the border, but in the hinterlands,” said Falko Ernst, a security analyst in Mexico.

“These are transnational organized crime networks that use both U.S. and Mexican territory,” he added. “What is needed is a transnational solution.”

The Mexican government announced that the 10,000 National Guard members would be stationed in 18 cities and towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, with the largest contingents deployed to Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.

Troops began being redirected to the north on Tuesday from southeastern Mexico, one of the safest regions in the country and a popular tourist destination. Others were pulled from states that have seen a recent decrease in crime rates.

“The plan that was made does not obviously put security at risk in the rest of the territory,” Ms. Sheinbaum said on Wednesday.

Inspector General José Luis Santos Iza, the coordinator of the 31st Battalion of the National Guard based in Ciudad Juárez, said there would be “permanent surveillance” of the border and all routes leading to it, with troops patrolling on foot and in vehicles.

Mayor Juan Francisco Gim Nogales of Nogales, a city bordering Arizona, said Wednesday that he was waiting for 400 troops to be deployed later that day.

He expressed hope that the additional forces would help tackle the organized crime operating in his city and curb the flow of guns entering Mexico. The deployment would double Nogales’s armed forces from some 350 to 700, Mr. Gim Nogales said.

“It’ll give citizens peace of mind,” he said.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City, Rocío Gallegos from Ciudad Juárez, Aline Corpus from Tijuana and Chantal Flores from Monterrey, Mexico.