In Myanmar, where famine looms and the U. Nearly three weeks into U. President Donald Trump's sweeping freeze on foreign aid, life-saving programs across the globe remain shut as humanitarian workers struggle to secure U.
After Trump announced the day freeze on January 20, U. But aid workers and U. This was proving nearly impossible, they said, due to a communication breakdown with U.
The breakdown appeared partly by design. On January 31, staff at the United States Agency for International Development, once the main delivery mechanism for American largesse, were told not to communicate externally about the waiver and what it may or may not include, according to a previously unreported recording of the meeting reviewed by Reuters.
The spiraling consequences of the aid freeze in developing countries underline the real-world harms from Trump's upending of decades-old U. Aid workers had a list of urgent questions going unanswered. Among them: Which programs could continue?
What qualifies as life-saving aid? And how do they keep people from dying when almost every aid service has been shut at once? With little guidance from U. Some described how U. S partners β often people they had worked with for years β no longer answered their phones or emails. One Geneva-based aid official who reached U.
