Trump’s foreign aid freeze halts funding for digital diplomacy bureau

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively put a freeze on most foreign aid.

One lesser-known effect of this 90-day freeze? Funding has been halted for the State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP), a fairly new bureau that utilizes diplomacy to create technological partnerships and tackle emerging cyber threats.

According to a new report by The Record, the freeze on foreign aid has effectively brought the bureau, which has tens of millions of dollars in funding, to a “standstill.”

The report notes some of the projects that the CDP has worked on such as deploying a “cyber incident response team” in Costa Rica, training with the Vietnamese government on nefarious cyber activity from North Korea, and landing a subsea telecommunications cable in Tuvalu.

In addition to the halt in funding, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace & Digital Policy Nate Fick left his position on Monday. Fick was the first cyber ambassador in the U.S.

Congress created the CDP in 2022 for the U.S. to build diplomatic relations around the world with a focus on cyber threats and working together on new technologies. Its more than $90 million in funds comes from the bureau’s baseline budget, the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, and its Digital Connectivity and Related Technologies Fund.

The CDP’s last post on its X account was a retweet of the State Department’s official account welcoming Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the position. The CDP account has not published a post of its own since January 17, before Trump’s inauguration.