The United States’ decision to freeze its foreign aid funding is forcing United Nations agencies to lay off thousands of people, according to UN officials.

Warning of further cuts to come, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has sent out pink slips to 3,000 of its more than 22,000 employees worldwide, it said in an internal newsletter seen by AFP on Thursday.

That represents more than half of the 5,000 employees reportedly working on the US refugee resettlement programme.

And the UNHCR refugee agency told AFP this week it plans to cut “some 600 staff positions” out of a global workforce of around 20,000, of which the vast majority work in the field.

A UNHCR spokesperson said it was “prioritising our life-saving work and reducing expenditures”, as it strove to understand the full impact of the US freeze.

In particular the agency was “stopping a range of activities more directly impacted by the US funding pause, including refugee resettlements to the US”, with the job losses affecting people working on those programmes.

Before the aid freeze, the United States was by far the largest donor to both the UNHCR and the IOM.

The cuts come just weeks after US President Donald Trump, on his first day back in office, issued an executive order halting most US foreign aid funding.

He also signed another order suspending refugee entries into the country under the US Refugee Admissions Program, USRAP.

Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden had embraced the programme, which was designed to help vetted refugees legally resettle in the United States.

In the 2024 fiscal year, more than 100,000 refugees were resettled in the United States — the most in three decades.

The loss of funding for the resettlement programme “meant we had to notify about 3,000 of our colleagues that their jobs will be ending,” IOM chief Amy Pope said in the internal newsletter, sent to employees on February 7.

The decision “hurts because the people who work on USRAP are some of our best and brightest”, she said, pointing out that “over the past year, many of them have worked around the clock on some of the largest movements of people in IOM’s history”.

“Lives have literally been changed for the better because of what our USRAP team did,” she said, warning that further cuts were likely.

“I wish I could say this is the end of the difficult decisions ahead. But I cannot,” she wrote.

“Additional adjustments, in missions and at headquarters are likely.”