Trump says the US will help in Asia quake. A former official says the
system is now in 'shambles'
[March 29, 2025]
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.
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Volunteers look for survivors near a damaged building Friday, March
28, 2025, in Naypyitaw, Myanmar. (AP Photo/Aung Shine Oo)
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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