Trump’s USAID cuts cripple American response to Myanmar earthquake

Hours after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake devastated Myanmar last week, sending dangerous tremors across Southeast Asia, the American officials charged with responding to the disaster received their termination letters from Washington.

Most of the personnel who would have made up a US response team, including security and sanitation experts, were already on indefinite leave. Many of the US programmes that would have provided lifesaving materials, including fuel for ambulances and medical kits, were shuttered weeks ago. US planes and helicopters in nearby Thailand, which have been used before for disaster relief, never made it off the ground.

America’s response to the catastrophic earthquake has been crippled by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the US Agency for International Development, according to eight current and former USAID employees who worked on Myanmar, as well as former State Department officials and leaders of international aid agencies. Three days after the disaster, American teams have yet to be deployed to the quake zone - a marked contrast with other similar catastrophes, when US personnel were on the ground within hours.

The Trump administration has promised R37 million in aid, saying, “The United States stands with the people of Myanmar as they work to recover from the devastation.” But distributing this relief will be more difficult than ever, USAID officials said, because the US has severed valuable ties with local organisations and fired staff who could have restored relationships. The US commitment so far has also been dwarfed by the R250 million pledged by China, which borders Myanmar and is one of the few remaining allies of its military junta.

The situation unfolding in Myanmar, which has been battered by years of civil war and was the biggest recipient of US aid in Southeast Asia last year, is the clearest demonstration to date of how Elon Musk’s US DOGE Service has upended the global aid system - allowing Beijing and other rival powers to take the lead in providing relief.

“This is what the world looks like when the US is not a leadership role,” said Chris Milligan, who served as USAID’s top civilian official until he retired in 2021 and was USAID’s top official in Myanmar under former US president Barack Obama. “Other countries have mobilised, and we have not, and that’s because we have shut down parts of the US government that have the capability to respond.”

As the Trump administration moved to formally dismantle the agency, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that “USAID strayed from its original mission long ago. … Thanks to President Trump, this misguided and fiscally irresponsible era is now over.”

The powerful quake in Myanmar has killed more than 2 000 people, according to the country’s military junta, and the toll is still rising. As many as 20 million people in the country needed humanitarian assistance before the quake; millions more have now been displaced and will need food, clean water and protection from the scorching heat.

In the hard-hit city of Mandalay, quake survivors are sleeping in the streets. “We are suffering a lot,” said Than Aye, 64, who said she has spent the past three nights outdoors.

Typically, for a disaster of this scale, the US would have assembled a Disaster Assistance Response Team, or DART, within hours and deployed it as quickly as possible to coordinate with international aid agencies and local partners, USAID officials said. When a 7.8-magnitude quake hit Turkey and Syria two years ago, the US had a DART on the ground within a day, swiftly followed by two urban search-and-rescue teams.

By late Monday, three days after the worst temblor to hit Myanmar in nearly 40 years, the US had sent no one. A delegation of three USAID employees is scheduled to arrive in the coming days, but “at this time, we do not intend to deploy a DART,” an official at the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media.

The crucial 72-hour window after a quake, when rescuers are most likely to find survivors in the rubble, has already passed, current and former USAID employees said.

“We had the assets. We could have saved lives, and we missed it,” Milligan said.

Myanmar’s junta has plunged the country into isolation since it violently seize power in a 2021 coup, sparking a civil war against ethnic and pro-democracy militias. The junta has been accused of war crimes and has lost control over parts of the country. After the military’s top general issued a rare and desperate appeal for international help in the wake of the quake, Chinese rescue teams equipped with heavy machinery were the first on the scene in the most affected areas in central Myanmar, according to the United Nations.

Russia has also deployed a relief team, alongside responders from India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. But no country can come close to matching the disaster relief capabilities of the United States, which have now been paralysed, USAID officials said.

The few foreign aid workers and local journalists who have made it to the worst-hit areas say rescue efforts have been slow-moving. The stench of death has become overwhelming, they say, and few communities have received any help searching for their loved ones in the rubble.

The US has helicopters, planes and other transport vehicles stationed at an air base in eastern Thailand that have been used in the past for disaster relief, including to airlift heavy machinery like forklifts and excavators, said a former USAID official who worked on the US response to the 2015 Nepal quake, when U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield served as a base of operations.

“It would have been really easy for the US to mobilise that equipment … but we haven’t,” said the official, who, like some others in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared government retaliation.

The US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In February, the US cut 39 of 40 development projects in Myanmar, many of which would have pivoted to supporting relief and recovery efforts after the quake, said five agency employees and contractors who worked on Myanmar.

One of the terminated programmes involved helping ethnic minority groups and pro-democracy organisations respond to attacks from the junta, including by providing medical kits and gasoline for ambulances, which would have been diverted to earthquake response, USAID employees said. Another terminated programme involved helping grassroots organisations provide basic services, such as clean water, food and health care.

The abrupt cancellation of the programs meant the US has lost its network of trusted local groups that it would have relied on to disburse aid quickly and without interference from the junta, which has had a history of blocking relief to areas that are contested or under rebel control.

The US now has a “very limited ability to get money out the door in a reliable way,” said a USAID contractor.

Already, watchdog groups say the military has been routing rescue teams toward the capital, Naypyidaw, which serves as its command center, while largely abandoning rebel-held communities.

Fourteen of the 15 officials who made up “USAID Mission Burma” and who would have guided relief funding were placed on indefinite leave in February. Authorities have scrambled to bring back several of them since the quake, two employees said.

Before the disaster, a small group of officials at USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs in the Thai capital of Bangkok had been given exemptions to continue their work. On Friday, hours after sheltering from strong tremors that rippled across the city, the officials recounted rushing to an ad hoc situation room set up at the residence of the US ambassador to Thailand. They were coordinating an aid plan with Washington late into the night, they said, when they received their final termination letters, which went out to USAID employees worldwide.

“It was beyond cruel,” said a USAID official in Bangkok.

“You have extraordinarily talented people who have put on the sidelines,” said another USAID employee working on the Myanmar response. The costs of DOGE’s “thoughtless approach to efficiency … is being exposed right now, right here.”

The gutting of USAID has also slashed US support for the international aid agencies now left to lead the humanitarian response, which experts say is among the most complex they have had to execute in recent years. “The US has always been the biggest donor,” said Michael Dunford, Myanmar’s country director for the UN World Food Program.

Dunford was in a meeting with team members in Naypyidaw to discuss how to scale back the country’s bare-bones operations in response to the US cuts when the building started to shake, he said. The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tom Andrews, felt the tremors while he was on the Thai-Myanmar border assessing clinics for refugees that had lost American funding.

A decade ago, when major floods hit Myanmar, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, the US was the single largest provider of relief. An image went viral at the time of Derek Mitchell, the US ambassador to Myanmar, distributing seeds to farmers.

“We used to be the first or one of the first to respond,” Mitchell said. “Now, we’re simply not present.”