WASHINGTON (news agencies) — Day after day, Chinese rescue teams haul children and elderly people from collapsed buildings as cameras beam the thanks of grateful survivors around the world. Russian medical teams show off field hospitals erected in a flash to tend the wounded.
Notably absent from the aftermath of the 7.7-magnitude earthquake in the poor Southeast Asian nation Myanmar: the uniquely skilled, well-equipped and swift search-and-rescue teams and disaster-response crews from the United States.
At least 15 Asian and Western government rescue teams have landed crews reaching hundreds of workers in size, alongside initial pledges of financial aid reaching tens of millions of dollars, as the death toll of the March 28 quake tops 3,000, Myanmar’s government says. Cameras showed Vietnam’s team on arrival, marching square-shouldered to the rescue behind their country’s flag.
While Myanmar’s military junta and civil war have posed challenges, the U.S. government has worked with local partners there previously to successfully provide aid for decades, including after deadly storms in 2008 and 2023, aid officials say.
The American government dwarfs other nations’ rescue capacity in experience, capacity and heavy machinery able to pull people alive from rubble. But in Myanmar after the most recent quake, the U.S. has distinguished itself for having no known presence on the ground beyond a three-member assessment team sent days after the quake.
“We all worried what would be the human impact” of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development, said Lia Lindsey, a senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam, which scrambled to provide tents, blankets and other aid to quake survivors.
Now, Lindsey said, “we’re seeing it in real time. We’re seeing it in increased suffering and increased death.”’
The United States, the world’s largest economy, long saw its strategic interests and alliances served by its standing as the world’s top humanitarian donor. Myanmar’s quake is as close to a no-show as the nation has had in recent memory at a major, accessible natural disaster.
Current and former senior private and government officials say the Myanmar disaster points to some of the results — for people in need on the ground, and for U.S. standing in the world — of the Trump administration’s retreat from decades of U.S. policy. That approach held that Washington needs both the hard power of a strong military and the soft power of a robust aid and development program to deter enemies, win and keep friends and steer events.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Europe for a NATO gathering, rejected a suggestion that the administration was ceding influence abroad by canceling thousands of its aid and development contracts, including for disasters. He told reporters that those complaining were the aid groups, which he accused of profiting off past U.S. aid.
“We will do the best we can,” Rubio said Friday. “But we also have other needs we have to balance that against. We’re not walking away.”
He pointed to “a lot of other rich countries in the world. They should all be pitching in and do their part.”
Leading Senate Democrats wrote Rubio this week, urging him to scale up U.S. disaster aid to Myanmar — and fast. Separately, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke of watching a news broadcast of the disaster showing Chinese government teams at work.
“It hurt my heart to see where, instead of a USAID … team leading the response, there was a team from the PRC that was being celebrated for having saved some people in the rubble,” Coons said.
The 2 1/2-month-old Trump administration, through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams, has frozen USAID funding, terminated thousands of contracts and is firing all but a handful of its staff globally. It accuses the agency of waste and of advancing liberal causes. The Myanmar quake is the first major natural disaster since that work started.
The Trump administration and some Republican lawmakers say they will reassemble a reduced slate of aid and development programs under the State Department, fitting their narrower interpretation of work that serves U.S. strategic and economic interests.
Days after the Myanmar quake, the U.S. made its first announcement of help: It was sending a three-member assessment team of non-specialist advisers from a regional USAID office in Bangkok, Thailand. Coincidentally, like hundreds of other USAID staffers around the world, the three had received layoff notices from the Trump administration on March 28 within hours of the quake, current and former USAID officials confirmed.
The administration also promised $2 million in aid, and announced another $7 million Friday. But there’s a much larger number at play.
That $9 million total is dwarfed by the roughly $2 billion in payments for previously rendered services and goods that the Trump administration has owed nonprofit humanitarian groups and other contractors and government and nongovernment foreign partners, aid officials say. The Trump administration abruptly shut down USAID and State foreign assistance payments — including for work already done — on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.
Combined with abruptly terminated aid contracts and the freeze on the USAID and State aid and development payments, the U.S. back debt is forcing larger aid operations and businesses to scale back their services to people in need and to slash staff. Some smaller organizations were driven out of business. That was even before the Myanmar quake.
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