Cuts to U.S. Aid Impair Response to Earthquake

Global Rivals Rising In to Assist in America's Striking Absence

Author

Matt Davis
March 31, 2025

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Thanks. And my regular readers can skip the standard disclaimer and get right to the news below the image. 👇🏻 Standard disclaimer for those who are new: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”

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There are two stories at the top of the paper today. The one on the right is about how President Trump has stripped back refugee programs for those in need of a safe welcome in the U.S., apart from a new program to help white South Africans to come to the U.S. as “refugees”. That new program that is “being called racist”, the Times reports, presumably because it is. Deeply.

“There’s no subtext and nothing subtle about the way this administration’s immigration and refugee policy has obvious racial and racist overtones,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice. “While they seek to single out Afrikaners for special treatment, they simultaneously want us to think mostly Black and brown vetted newcomers are dangerous despite their background checks and all evidence to the contrary.”

The program also inserts the United States into a charged debate inside South Africa, where some members of the white Afrikaner minority have begun a campaign to suggest that they are the true victims in post-apartheid South Africa. Under apartheid, a white minority government discriminated against South Africans of color, and brutality and violence flourished, leading to torture, disappearances and murder.

I’ll leave this one there, I think, because I find myself wanting to throw up, run out in the street screaming and generally lose my sh*t as I read it. As if it weren’t enough to tell Germans to vote Nazi again, we’re now propping up white people in South Africa who are claiming they’re the “true victims.”

Our government is officially a racist, white supremacist, Nazi one. None of those statements is overblown.

I would also like to personally extend a “very” “special” “welcome” to any Afrikaner “refugees” who end up coming here through this so-called refugee program. Wouldn’t you?

We’ll go with the story on the left, then, simply because while the font is the same size, it’s in the most prominent position, and it only makes me want to throw up, run out in the street and start screaming and generally lose my sh*t as I read it, like, 80% as much as the one on the right. Here’s the intro:

China, Russia and India have dispatched emergency teams and supplies to earthquake-ravaged Myanmar. So have Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The United States, the richest country in the world and once its most generous provider of foreign aid, has sent nothing.

How gracious of us.

Even as President Trump was dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, he said that American help was on its way to Myanmar, where a 7.7-magnitude earthquake ripped through the country’s heavily populated center on Friday. More than 1,700 people were killed, according to Myanmar’s military government, with the death toll expected to climb steeply as more bodies are uncovered in the rubble and rescue teams reach remote villages.

But a three-person U.S.A.I.D. assessment team is not expected to arrive until Wednesday, people with knowledge of the deployment efforts said. The overall American response has been slower than under normal circumstances, people who have worked on earlier disaster relief efforts as well as on aid to Myanmar said.

Here’s a Chinese rescue team at work.

Forget what you may have read in the Bible about not letting the right hand see what the left hand is doing. There’s a strategic reason images like this matter:

“Being charitable and being seen as charitable serves American foreign policy,” said Michael Schiffer, the assistant administrator of the U.S.A.I.D. bureau for Asia from 2022 until earlier this year. “If we don’t show up and China shows up, that sends a pretty strong message.”

You couldn’t make the story up.

On Friday, as some employees in Washington in U.S.A.I.D.’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance were preparing a response to the earthquake, they received agencywide layoff emails. Career diplomats working for U.S.A.I.D. and other employees had been bracing for layoffs for weeks; Trump political appointees in Washington had already fired most of the contractors working for the agency.

The Times found people at U.S.A.I.D. who would have been on the ground in Myanmar who were, instead, fired. The agency has been telling people internationally that they shouldn’t expect the  “agency’s capabilities to be what they were in the past,” and the story goes into some depth on all the reasons we can’t get people into the country to help.

The bottom line is that the DOGE initiative has decimated the agency. Don’t forget we’ve been investing a lot of our time and energy spinning up a racist “refugee” program for resettling white South Africans instead. Excuse me one second.

🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

Thank you.

In Myanmar, there has been some er… geopolitical instability… lately. Myanmar’s military junta has closed the country off from Western influences, and the country is now embroiled in civil war. A loose coalition of opposition forces has wrested control of more than half the country’s territory, the story reports. The U.S. and other Western nations have responded to the junta’s “brutal human rights record” with sanctions. Meanwhile the military chief who orchestrated the coup, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, “has railed against the West, thanking China and Russia for ideological and economic support.” Here he is.

Always trust a military man with too many medals, eh?

Following the earthquake, Gen. Min Aung Hliang ordered military strikes against areas of the country that have held out in resistance to his coalition regime. Repeat: He bombed earthquake victims because they don’t like him. ✈️💣🩸

“It’s as if Min Aung Hlaing wants to make sure we die, if not from the earthquake, then from his attacks,” said one villager, Ko Aung Kyaw.

Yes. But Mr. Aung Kyaw said he did not expect foreigners, American or otherwise, to be able to alleviate the situation.

“In the end, we have only ourselves,” he said. “We’ve been resisting for four years now, and it’s clear that we’ll have to find our own way forward, no matter what.”

Classy move, America.

Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to.

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.