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President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. was going to help with the response to Southeast Asia’s deadly earthquake.
But the effects of his administration’s deep cuts in foreign assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department will likely be tested in any response to the first big natural disaster of his second term.
Sarah Charles, a former senior USAID official who oversaw disaster-response teams and overall humanitarian work under the Biden administration, said the system was now “in shambles,” without the people or resources to move quickly to pull out survivors from collapsed buildings and otherwise save lives.
A powerful quake shook Myanmar and neighboring Thailand on Friday, killing at least 150 people and burying others under the rubble of high-rises.
Asked about the quake by reporters in Washington, Trump said: “We’re going to be helping. We’ve already alerted the people. Yeah, it’s terrible what happened.”
At the State Department, spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters the administration would use requests for assistance and reports from the region to shape its response to the quake.
“USAID has maintained a team of disaster experts with the capacity to respond if disaster strikes,” Bruce said. “These expert teams provide immediate assistance, including food and safe drinking water, needed to save lives in the aftermath of a disaster.”
Despite cuts, “there has been no impact on our ability to perform those duties,” Bruce said.
But it was also Friday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a former associate of Elon Musk now in a senior position at USAID, Jeremy Lewin, notified staff and Congress they were firing most remaining USAID staffers and moving surviving agency programs under the State Department.
The Trump administration, working with Musk’s teams, has gutted foreign assistance since Trump took office on Jan. 20. Mass firings and forced leaves and thousands of abrupt contract terminations have thrown much of the global aid and development work into crisis, with U.S. partners scrambling to fill the hole left by USAID and the billions of dollars owed for past work.
After an earthquake in 2023 in Turkey and Syria, USAID-backed civilian teams from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Virginia, skilled in urban search and rescue scrambled to the scene to help recover any survivors from rubble.
Those teams normally can be on their way within as few as 24 hours, Charles said.
But while intervention by lawmakers and others kept the contracts for the civilian search-and-rescue teams intact, contracts for the special transport needed to get the search teams, dogs and heavy equipment to a disaster area are believed to have been cut, Charles said.
Meanwhile, staffing cuts at USAID have “decimated” the teams that normally would be coordinating with allies to target rescue and response efforts in the field, Charles said.
Other foreign assistance contract cuts by the administration have hit disaster-response emergency services with the United Nations and others.
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AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed.
