Throughout the evening, we’ve been bringing you updates as crowds gather outside the headquarters of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Our US correspondent James Matthews is outside the building and told our lead politics presenter Sophy Ridge employees were told by email not to turn up to work today.
“This place is going to be shut down, according to Elon Musk, who of course is in charge of DOGE (department of government efficiency) and is the unelected political ally of Donald Trump,” Matthews says.
“This is his brief and his way of cutting back on layers of bureaucracy, as he would have it.”
Trump’s freeze on foreign assistance has already shut down several of USAID’s worldwide aid programmes, including an HIV-AIDS scheme started by George W Bush.
Other programmes that would be shut down provided education to schoolgirls in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
“This is the first kind of gathering of its sort that I’ve seen, I suppose it’s a frontline of sorts in the fight against radical revolution scenery change,” Matthews adds.
“We’ll see how this evolves and how this develops alongside government policy. I suspect that all of this might end up in the courts, and that will be a challenge, a test of the strength of the courts to deal with.”