APRIL 2025
What Is Happening to U.S.
Humanitarian Assistance?
Will the United States
Continue to Save Lives?
By Michelle Strucke and Marc J. Cohen
W
hen disasters strike, whether from natural causes like earthquakes, hurricanes, and
typhoons, or man-made causes such as conict or famine, the United States has swiftly
responded by mobilizing funding, coordinating emergency responses, and deploying
teams to directly alleviate suering in countries around the world. The United States has reliably
mobilized when allies and partners are in need of aid during their most vulnerable moments, such
as its leadership during the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis, which led to fewer than a dozen cases being
treated on U.S. soil, and its emergency responses to devastating storms like the 2004 tsunami
in Aceh, Indonesia, and Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 in the Philippines, a key U.S. security partner.
This has caused nations the world over to look to the United States for leadership during crises,
understanding that the American people—among the world’s most generous—care about the lives of
their neighbors near and far.
This legacy has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress for decades, but has recently become a
ashpoint in the second Trump administration’s plan to “usher [in] a Golden Age for America by
reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people.” One
of the president’s day one executive orders imposed a “90-day pause in United States foreign
development assistance for assessment of programmatic eciencies and consistency with United
States foreign policy.” In the 80 days since, the order has already had serious consequences for
humanitarian assistance.
