On March 28, what is being called a once-in-a-century earthquake struck central Myanmar, devastating huge swathes of the war-torn country. The cities of Mandalay and Sagaing, along with the administrative capital Naypyidaw and villages in the famed Inle Lake region in Shan State have seen widespread and catastrophic death and destruction. The State Administration Council (SAC) junta has reported over 3,000 dead and thousands wounded or missing, but the broad consensus is that the death toll will likely be in the tens of thousands. Strong aftershocks, destroyed highways, power outages, and deep political cleavages are hampering rescue efforts.
Even as it continued bombing rebel forces in the quake’s aftermath, the military regime made a rare appeal for aid. Relief supplies and rescue teams have been trickling in from China, Russia, India, ASEAN member states and countries further afield. Amid the desperate search for survivors in a race against time, news platforms and commentators noted that while U.S. President Trump has pledged aid in response, there was a notable absence of American rescue or coordination teams on the ground.
Funding Freezes
The Myanmar earthquake is arguably the first major natural disaster to take place in the wake of the Trump administration’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). As with other countries around the world, Myanmar and various vulnerable communities living in or originating from the war-torn country have been adversely affected by Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid, announced on the day he was inaugurated for his second term. Despite being far-removed from Trump’s policy priorities and bugbears, Myanmar has become a repeat victim of Trump’s resurrected “America First” foreign policy and the actions of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk.
In a speech on January 29, Trump specifically mentioned DOGE’s cancellation of a $45 million scholarship for Myanmar. “We also blocked $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma. Forty-five. That’s a lot of money for diversity scholarships. In Burma. Can you imagine where that money went,” he said, drawing chuckles from the audience.
He brought it up again at his first address to Congress on March 5. Behind him, both Vice President J.D. Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson gestured derision at the scholarships.
In early February, Human Rights Myanmar announced that $39.5 million in USAID funding earmarked for human rights, democracy, and media support programs has been halted. It also said that $22 million in humanitarian funding, alongside $36 million for farmers, $22 million for health programs and $30 million for education, has been suspended. In a March update, the group said Myanmar was on track to lose around $1.1 billion in foreign assistance over the second Trump term.
Funding for some refugee camps resumed in late February but is being reportedly granted on a 90-day basis, leaving the future unclear. In mid-March, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83 percent of USAID projects would be cancelled with the remainder to be administered directly by the State Department. As of writing, it is unclear how this will impact programs for Myanmar.
Reuters also reported that USAID’s acting deputy administrator, who was put in charge of overseeing the dismantling of the agency, had proposed phasing out assistance to the Rohingya refugees currently in Bangladesh. An email from the administrator obtained by Reuters appeared to both express gratitude for the U.S. support and draw attention to “the odd dependency” of Rohingya refugees on U.S. aid.
U.S. Aid and USAID in Myanmar
Over the past 10 years, Myanmar has been among the top recipients of U.S. foreign assistance in East Asia. In 2024, the country was the fourth-largest recipient in the region and 37th globally in terms of disbursed U.S. foreign aid. Based on public foreign assistance data, the U.S. disbursed $825.9 million to Myanmar during the four years (2021-2024) of the Biden administration, which overlapped with the post-coup period. This averaged $206.5 million annually.
Of the disbursed funds over the aforementioned four-year period, around $268 million (32.5 percent) was categorized as being earmarked humanitarian and emergency responses; $194 million (23.5 percent) for civil society, including $13.6 million for media support; $151 million (18.3 percent) for health; $86 million (10.4 percent) for agriculture; and $43.7 million (5.3 percent) for education.
According to documents from USAID, the U.S. government has provided nearly $2.4 billion in response to the Rohingya crisis since 2017, including nearly $2 billion to assist Rohingya refugees and host communities in Bangladesh.
Almost all (96 percent) of U.S. assistance to Myanmar flowed through USAID to recipients, both inside and outside the country. Most went to groups or beneficiaries beyond the military government and the agency never provided direct budget support to government departments. Beneficiary programs include everything from critical health programs, emergency food aid for displaced persons, and shelter for natural disaster-affected communities and refugee camps, to support for civil society, exiled media outlets, and environmental groups in ethnic minority areas.
The funding has been critical amid the mass displacement, worsening conflict, and unmitigated natural disasters that have befallen Myanmar over the past few years, to say nothing of the fall in overall aid following the coup. According to the Center for Global Development, USAID accounted for 17 percent of the foreign aid disbursed to Myanmar in 2023. On the flip side, what Myanmar received during those four years is an infinitesimal 0.32 percent of the $258.8 billion publicly-reported foreign assistance dispensed by the U.S. for that period.
Indiscriminate Impact
Almost immediately after Trump announced the freeze on January 20, over 100,000 vulnerable refugees on the Myanmar-Thai border lost access to essential health services. This led to the first-reported global death of the aid shutdown. Seventy-one-year-old Pe Kha Lau, a refugee with chronic lung problems, died soon after she was sent home from a USAID-funded health facility on the Myanmar-Thailand border. The facility was among several serving refugee camps that shuttered after receiving a stop-work order.
In affected camps, critically ill persons and mothers with newborns were reportedly turned back from hospitals. Most patients were involuntarily discharged and those with chronic conditions were said to have been given only a week’s worth of medicine. Such actions border on a death sentence for refugees as they neither have the ways nor means to access life-saving medicines and care, and more deaths have since been reported. Some organizations did not receive stop-work orders but nonetheless face uncertainties as they have not received confirmation of additional funding.
Inside the country, over 50,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Karenni State, nearly 300,000 IDPs in Kachin and Northern Shan, and over 700,000 in Rakhine State have been reported affected. Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, home to around 1 million people, have also reportedly been affected despite the interim Bangladeshi government saying there was no pause in funding for Rohingyas. In early March, the World Food Program announced it was halving food rations to Rohingya refugees and that 1 million vulnerable people in Myanmar would have their food assistance completely cut due to funding shortfalls likely exacerbated by the USAID cuts.
HIV and tuberculosis-related programs in both regime and resistance-controlled territories are now under threat, raising fears that hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria patients could lose access to life-saving drugs. With various diseases and drug-resistance rebounding due to the health system’s near-collapse and fragmentation since the coup, the funding freeze could contribute to major health impacts that will reverberate for generations and beyond Myanmar’s borders.
In Malaysia, ethnic Chin refugees being resettled in the U.S. had their flights and visas cancelled. Some of those affected were in the final steps of the immigration process, having quit their jobs and returned their rented flats. Similar situations were reported among ethnic Karen refugees in Thailand. Meanwhile, the scholarship cancellation hailed by Trump left over 400 Burmese students stranded in the middle of their academic pursuits, including some studying in the U.S.
The situation is dire despite Rubio’s reported waivers for emergency life-saving aid. One review described the waivers as “all but worthless in practice because there are neither the staff to administer them nor the financial systems to pay for them.” The country representative of an international organization said they were granted several waivers but these ultimately amounted to “political theater.”
Aside from the humanitarian impact, the USAID funding freeze is threatening Myanmar’s media and civil society landscape. Forced underground or into exile as the regime cracked down on news outlets, Burmese media platforms have depended on grants from donors in order to relocate and re-establish themselves. One media group said that U.S. funding accounts for half of all support for exiled outlets and the freeze could sound the death knell for many. One decades-old platform that survived various tribulations has reportedly suspended key services.
Reactions
Amnesty International described the freeze to Myanmar as “recklessly abrupt” and said that it “poses existential threat to human rights.” At a February hearing of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, committee member Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA) called for a moment of silence for Pe Kha Lau – the refugee with lung problems who died after being sent back home. Former Representative Tom Malinowski, who served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor in the Obama administration, posted a scathing rebuke on the Myanmar scholarship cancellation.
Sentiments on the ground have been grim. UNICEF has warned that the price of the cuts to Rohingya camps will be “paid in children’s lives.” One aid worker described the situation as pandemonium. Human Rights Myanmar said the consequences of the cuts will be “catastrophic” and a “gift” to the regime and its authoritarian allies, China and Russia. An administrator from the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People said the cuts were devastating for people fleeing conflict. Organizations are scrambling to secure donor funds as well as cut costs but are learning hard lessons about fleeting international attention amid competing global crises.
A senior local staff member of an organization that supports IDPs told the author that projects are being hurriedly reprogrammed with “worst-worst case” scenarios in mind, while one observer said the funding cuts, combined with the junta’s characteristic incompetence, economic collapse and expected broad sanctions under Article 33 of the International Labour Organization, will lead to “suffering on a biblical scale.”
A member of the National Unity Government (NUG), which is coordinating the national resistance to the military regime, said that the funding suspensions would not directly impact the course of the civil war, as it does not receive direct international assistance. A member of the Independent Press Council Myanmar said that Myanmar journalists have survived decades of oppression and will persevere come what may. Some groups operating along the Myanmar-Thailand border are also transitioning their operational nature in order to stand on their own feet.
Among local NGO workers, there is also a sense of dread that international agencies will prioritize shielding well-compensated expatriates over local staff who earn considerably less yet face greater risks. Stateside arguments that USAID cuts will affect a large number of U.S.-based contractors, alongside grievances of employment inequities, sizeable overhead costs, and opaqueness in the humanitarian sector, are complicating how local aid workers process the fallout.
However, some are sanguine and hope that actively framing the civil war as a great power proxy conflict, combined with Trump’s stance towards Beijing and Rubio’s earlier actions on the Rohingya crisis, will translate into both a resumption of USAID funds as well as possible expansion to direct aid for anti-regime groups.
They also seek solace in the 2022 BURMA Act, the Congressional Burma Caucus that was launched last year, and Trump’s continuation of the “national emergency” on Myanmar that was declared shortly after the coup. That said, observers such as Scot Marciel, who served as U.S. ambassador to Myanmar during the first Trump administration, are more cautious about how things could pan out, while pro-resistance voices have complained of high overhead costs.
The Bigger Picture
As noted by various reports and commentators, the post-earthquake response is already highlighting the immediate geopolitical impacts of the USAID cuts. The optics of huge military planes, ships, dozens of rescue personnel, and vital supplies and equipment arriving from China, India, and Russia stand in stark contrast to the more guarded responses from Western countries. The U.S. is reported to be sending a three-member team but no Disaster Assistance Response Team. While Burmese audiences and Myanmar watchers might be able to contextualize the issue to some degree, these don’t really matter to the rest of the world and especially to the Global South.
And devastating as it is, the USAID saga appears only the beginning of a cascade that will fundamentally alter the global humanitarian aid landscape. Foreign aid is shrinking globally. The United Kingdom recently announced a 40 percent reduction in foreign aid and major European donors are following suit. Earlier reductions in aid, and the clipping of aid agencies’ wings, as seen with the U.K.’s Department for International Development, have had negative consequences.
In Myanmar, the USAID freezes are having a crippling effect on the country’s humanitarian landscape amid what the United Nations Development Program describes as an “enduring polycrisis.” The U.N.’s February 2025 humanitarian update reported that 3.5 million persons are displaced, while over 15 million are facing acute food insecurity, and 2 million are on the brink of famine. The figures are expected to jump in the wake of the earthquake.
It also comes amid escalating conflict where the military regime has little qualms about indiscriminately bombing and butchering its populace while resistance supporters make wild claims that the international community is eagerly waiting in the wings to throw Marshall Plan-level amounts of redevelopment grants at the country once the junta inevitably collapses.
But as the civil war drags into its fifth year and with Myanmar’s conflicts and crises having long faded from international attention, the country has faced substantive shortfalls in humanitarian funding. Donors met only 39 percent of the U.N.’s $994 million humanitarian funding requirement for 2024, making Myanmar the sixth-lowest funded humanitarian response plan globally. The estimated need for 2025 stands at $1.1 billion, and this was before the March earthquake flattened the country’s second commercial city and administrative capital. This means that for all the newly mobilized international relief efforts, and no matter how the conflict finally dies down, if ever, the Myanmar people will have an intergenerational humanitarian millstone around their collective necks.
USAID funding was intertwined with support for civil society and groups opposing the regime. Various observers and people directly affected by the funding cuts say that the developments are akin to the U.S. handing over Myanmar on a silver platter to China and Russia. Other cuts and purges, such as to the National Endowment for Democracy and to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, are amplifying the political fallout. Non-political surveillance, including for agriculture, food insecurity, climate vulnerability and economic needs, is also being affected.
Some fear a decline in U.S. assistance and attention will fundamentally tilt the power dynamics towards authoritarian members of the multi-stranded anti-junta resistance like the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BA), while groups seen as more “democratic-leaning” such as the NUG and the K3C grouping could become sidelined. The 3BA’s ultimate ambitions currently remain unclear, but their actions and rhetoric do not bode well for a democratic, federal, and intact Myanmar.
For all the issues and complaints about its efficacy, USAID transformed the lives of countless people around the world and in Myanmar. Hopefully, the country’s dire situation and the earthquake will convince the Trump administration to be more lenient to Myanmar in allotting what remains of USAID’s gutted portfolio. But for people like the friends and relatives of Pe Kha Lau and the communities affected by the recent earthquake, the cuts have already left an indelible and traumatic mark.
