Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: A year after the Trump administration began the dismantlement of USAID, it has initiated a new round of significant cuts to foreign assistance. This time, programmes that survived the initial purge precisely because they were judged to be lifesaving are slated for cancellation.
The humanitarian aid being cut was designed to help vulnerable civilians cope with conflict, displacement, hunger, and disease. According to an internal State Department email obtained by The Atlantic, the administration will soon end all of the humanitarian funding it is currently providing as part of a “responsible exit” from seven African nations, and redirect funding in nine others.
Aid programmes in all of these countries had previously been up for renewal from now through the end of September but will instead be allowed to expire. Each of them is classified as lifesaving according to the Trump administration’s standards.
Redirecting funds
The administration had already canceled the entire aid packages of two nations, Afghanistan and Yemen, where the State Department said terrorists were diverting resources. The new email, sent on February 12 to officials in the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, makes no such claims about the seven countries now losing all U.S. humanitarian aid: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, and Zimbabwe.
Instead, according to the email, these projects are being canceled because “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests.” The nine countries eligible for redirected funding are Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, South Sudan, and Sudan.
The Atlantic also reported that US officials will pull the plug on funding flows towards the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Previous US governments had funelled aid money towards the UN’s global humanitarian pool.
