'Severely Diminished' USAID Sends Disaster Relief Team Of Just 3 People To Myanmar
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-presidency-live-updates_n_67e55ccce4b0d5fb5f3d85c1
‘Severely Diminished’ USAID Sends Disaster Relief Team Of Just 3 People To Myanmar
Five days after a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake flattened high-rises in Myanmar and Thailand, killing more than 2,000 people, the State Department has dispatched a disaster-response team of just three people to the country, who will distribute $2 million in relief aid.
In the past, USAID, which used to be its own agency before it was gutted, likely illegally, by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and folded into the State Department, would have immediately dispatched Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DARTs) to the country to aid in search-and-rescue efforts.
The White House attempted to mobilize a DART team after the earthquake last Friday, but couldn’t, Andrew Natsios, who served as USAID administrator in George W. Bush's administration, told the BBC.
"The problem is they fired most of the 500 people that make up the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, so obviously there are no people [from the bureau] to be on the Dart team to be sent,” Natsios said.
He added that he was shocked Trump’s administration “didn't have the foresight to say 'Okay, let's retain these people'."
Jeremy Konyndyk, a former disaster response lead at USAID, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the U.S. missed the search-and-rescue window in Myanmar entirely as a result.
"It's not a case of worst-practice, it's really a case of no-practice," he said. “It just makes the US look, frankly, kind of weak and irrelevant to most of the other countries that have shown up in force to support the people of Myanmar."
For comparison’s sake, when a massive earthquake hit Turkey and Syria in 2023, USAID sent 225 people and $185 million.
"The capacity of the U.S. government to provide that kind of assistance right now is severely diminished, and we haven't seen any of it so far,” Sarah Charles, assistant to the administrator of USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance under the Biden administration, told NPR.
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