Alongside a model run by the UN, the system allows aid officials to target emergency food supply ahead of time, and is credited with mitigating the effects of a devastating drought in the Horn of Africa in 2016.
It has been used to try to target aid during the current famine in Sudan as the war continues there.
A briefing service provided by the network was stopped as part of Trump’s suspension of nearly all foreign assistance, according to a source familiar with Fewsnet’s operations.
Asked about the shutdown, USAID said it was “expeditiously processing exception requests” but could not “address every individual exception-related question”. It was not clear whether an exception request for Fewsnet was pending.
The network is “insanely important”, according to Dave Harden, who oversaw its operation at USAID during the 2016 food security emergency in East Africa.
“Because we had Fewsnet, and we had guard teams, we were able to pre-position food and supplies [in Ethiopia] and plant it in a way that was remarkably different than what happened in 1984,” he told the BBC.
Last Friday, the State Department issued a “stop-work” order on all US foreign assistance, worth nearly $70bn a year, with the exception of emergency food aid and military aid to Israel and Egypt, pending a 90-day review to ensure programmes’ alignment with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.
Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has expanded the scope of projects eligible for waivers to the order, including for life-saving medicine and shelter, but there remains widespread confusion in the global aid sector, significant parts of which have been upended by the freeze.
Fewsnet is operated by a USAID contractor, which declined to comment, while its website is run by another provider which did not respond to requests for comment.
Explaining the thinking behind the breadth of stop-work orders, Mr Rubio said on Thursday that “things that save lives” were being exempted, adding that others could apply for waivers to ensure their projects were not an inefficient use of US taxpayer money and were aligned with Trump’s priorities.
Proponents of the foreign aid freeze see US donations as bloated and carrying too much of the burden compared with other wealthy Western countries.
