On March 28 at 12:50 am local time, disaster struck war-torn Myanmar in the form of a 7.7-magnitude earthquake, the strongest to hit Southeast Asia in decades. This “once-in-a-century” earthquake was followed by strong aftershocks. More than 3,500 have died, and the toll is expected to rise, as many victims remain under the rubble. Current reporting is hindered by lack of internet access, which the military government censors to control its opposition. In a significant shift from past practice, Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of Myanmar’s military government, declared a state of emergency and is welcoming humanitarian aid from the international community. Previously, the military government refused and even blocked foreign aid for similar natural disasters, particularly after Cyclone Mocha in 2023 and Cyclone Nargis in 2008, the latter of which killed over 138,000 people.
However, already in the early stages of earthquake response, Myanmar’s military government has blocked aid workers’ access, likely contributing to loss of life. They are directing aid to areas under military control, not the areas in greatest need, which are under the control of the National Unity Government, Myanmar’s government in exile. The military also shot at a convoy of nine Chinese Red Crescent vehicles carrying relief supplies, later stating these were “warning shots” because the Red Crescent had not notified the junta of its travel plans.
This earthquake is the first major rapid-onset disaster facing the global humanitarian system since the Trump administration drastically cut U.S. foreign assistance. It represents the first test of the United States’ significantly reduced humanitarian leadership under the Trump administration.
Q1: What is the humanitarian situation in Myanmar, and how has the global community responded?
A1: Since its military coup in 2021, Myanmar has been embroiled in civil conflict, rendering its population in need of aid and protection. Before the earthquake, more than 3.5 million people across Myanmar were displaced from their homes. The earthquake-affected areas near Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-most-populous city, were already hosting 1.6 million displaced people. Civilians there face severe protection issues, food insecurity, and collapsing public health infrastructure. An estimated 20 million people need humanitarian assistance in Myanmar in 2025—more than a third of Myanmar’s total population.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, many local organizations that played a vital role in accessing vulnerable people have been negatively impacted by the global shock to humanitarian funding. Before the U.S. aid freeze, Myanmar was already one of the world’s most underfunded humanitarian crises: At the end of March, less than 5 percent of Myanmar’s $1.1 billion humanitarian response plan was funded.
Following the earthquake, countries near and far quickly mobilized emergency responses. Within the critical 72-hour window for rescue operations, after which the chance of survival goes down dramatically, China sent over 135 search and rescue personnel, as well as supplies, and pledged $13.8 million in aid. Russia’s Emergencies Ministry reported sending 120 rescuers with canine units and supplies. Within one day, Hong Kong dispatched 51 search and rescue personnel, brought nine tons of equipment, including life detectors and an automatic satellite tracking antenna system, and set aside $3.9 million to assist victims. Likewise, India flew in a field hospital unit, and the European Commission announced that it would provide $2.7 million for emergency assistance. However, this early response has been wholly insufficient. Reports have surfaced of local communities digging people out of the rubble with their bare hands, and most of the rescue teams in the country lack specialized search and rescue equipment to allow them to assist people safely. Due to a lack of adequate shelter and fear of further aftershocks, which can continue for months after a major earthquake, people are sleeping outdoors in inclement weather. This poses additional risks to women, the elderly, and families with young children.
On April 3, the Quad’s four members—the United States, Australia, India, and Japan—released a joint statement on their combined contribution of over $20 million in assistance. This followed the United States’ announcement two days after the earthquake of $2 million in aid to be dispersed through Myanmar-based humanitarian assistance organizations. On Friday, April 5, the United States announced an additional $7 million in aid, following initial assessments by U.S. disaster experts on food, water, shelter, and medical needs. These experts, a three-person USAID team, received termination emails on Friday, April 4—just days after arriving to the disaster zone. At the time of this writing, 10 days after the earthquake, no U.S. Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DARTs) are on the ground in Myanmar.
The timing of the earthquake is significant. The initial announcement of U.S. assistance came just two days after USAID terminated its 900 remaining staff. USAID officials received agency-wide layoff emails while coordinating the United States’ response to the Myanmar earthquake. It was also the same day that the State Department notified Congress of its intent to fold some of USAID’s functions into the State Department and eliminate others, foreshadowing a dearth of U.S. leadership in humanitarian affairs. Even before the earthquake, only 78 people remained at USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), leaving questions about who would have the expertise to administer the U.S. humanitarian assistance that is being moved into the State Department.
Q2: How has the United States historically addressed humanitarian crises?
A2: In 2023, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, the United States had personnel on the way in less than a day. The Turkey earthquake, similar in magnitude to the earthquake in Myanmar, resulted in over 50,000 deaths, with over 100,000 reported injuries. Within just 24 hours of receiving a request for assistance from the Turkish government, the United States dispatched two U.S. military flights carrying DARTs consisting of 159 Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) personnel, 12 rescue dogs, and 170,000 pounds of specialized equipment. These USAR professionals included structural engineers, doctors, logistics personnel, and K-9 and technical search specialists.
DARTs are a flexible, rapid-response mechanism that can be scaled to include a variety of skill sets depending on the needs resulting from the disaster. Compared to other countries, U.S. teams typically have the largest presence on the ground during major international disasters. In 2023, USAID managed 11 active DARTs in crises in Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela, among other countries. Past DARTs have deployed to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 after the tsunami-induced nuclear plant disaster. Their impact has been widespread: Between January and September, relief actors, including BHA partners, were able to reach approximately 9 million people across Ukraine.
The United States, via USAID, had previously contracted with two premiere USAR teams based out of Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles County, California. The teams maintain international interoperability so that they can work seamlessly within an international response and maintain readiness to deploy within four hours. Under the recent aid cuts, contracts with the USAR teams were canceled and then reinstated, but they do not have funding for transport to deploy to the Myanmar earthquake response.
Following President Trump’s aid freeze, the four U.S. DARTs that operated in Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, including their D.C.-based USAID Regional Management Team (RMT), could no longer function normally. Now, the United States’ ability to dispatch these teams to Myanmar, or elsewhere for future humanitarian disasters, is uncertain. As a result of the aid freeze, the United States has disrupted the operations of local organizations with whom DARTs work closely and who previously partnered to distribute emergency humanitarian aid in Myanmar and elsewhere. This will pose a challenge to meaningfully distribute the $9 million the United States pledged in aid for Myanmar.
In addition to infrastructure at USAID, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) supports USAID-led disaster response efforts when unique DOD capabilities are required to save lives. Funds for these efforts are appropriated to Overseas Humanitarian, Disaster, and Civic Aid (OHDACA), and the DOD uses these funds in the initial stage of disaster response after receiving a specific request from USAID for support. The DOD typically supports about 10 percent of the global disasters that USAID responds to each year and only does so when requested by USAID. In the past, these have included hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes, wildfires, and public health crises such as Covid-19 and Ebola.
The DOD can leverage a wide range of unique military capabilities to benefit disaster responses, when necessary, such as taking over command and control at Haiti’s airport, resuming port operations critical for the entrance of relief supplies, or sending planners to help coordinate a response. The DOD typically funds transportation or logistics of humanitarian response, calling upon U.S. military pilots, for example, to fly rotary aircraft to help DART teams survey damage or C-17 aircraft to transport a search and rescue team.
However capable DOD personnel are, DOD staff are not trained humanitarian professionals and therefore play a supporting role to the technical experts from USAID and partner organizations. This is an important distinction, because while a DOD pilot can fly a USAID DART to a disaster, the pilot is not an expert in understanding the differentiated needs among women, the elderly, disabled persons, or children in a disaster response, or in how to safely construct a temporary shelter that can accommodate families. USAID and its partners played the role of ensuring that any U.S. response was a value add and complied with the humanitarian principle “first, do no harm.” Now that nearly 100 percent of the professionally trained disaster relief staff at USAID have been notified of a reduction in force, it is unclear who in the U.S. government would provide this critical direction to interagency partners, including the DOD.
Q3: How does a capacity for emergency response advance U.S. interests and national security?
A3: Investment in humanitarian assistance generates diplomatic goodwill, demonstrates that the United States is a reliable partner, and enhances U.S. influence in regions of geopolitical significance, particularly regions experiencing crisis and conflict. It is an investment in protecting U.S. borders from infectious disease and other transnational threats that can spread from one country to another if unimpeded. U.S. support to countries affected by humanitarian health crises also helps the United States prevent the high costs of a domestic public health response should diseases breach U.S. borders. Supporting humanitarian assistance also helps protect American lives, including healthcare and front-line workers, as well as members of the general public, who could be exposed to diseases that spread outside U.S. borders.
Humanitarian aid is also preventative in other ways. Disaster risk reduction is a type of humanitarian aid that helps disaster-prone countries minimize or even avoid the costly effects of natural shocks such as deadly earthquakes. Investments in humanitarian capacity have also paid long-term dividends. For example, the Philippines, an important strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific, has benefited from decades of USAID-led capacity building that has ultimately made the country less reliant on U.S. assistance when disasters strike.
The provision of aid after a disaster can strengthen diplomatic relationships. After the 1999 earthquakes in Greece and Turkey, the phrase “earthquake diplomacy” or “disaster diplomacy” was coined. The terms highlight situations where pre-existing disagreements were set aside in order to collaborate on a response to humanitarian needs. In these cases, the countries reciprocally disbursed aid despite prior decades of tension and conflict. Whether or not the disasters created any future diplomatic breakthroughs for relations between Greece and Turkey has been the subject of a number of academic studies.
Earthquake diplomacy also occurred following the 2023 Turkey and Syria earthquakes when 20 EU countries, including Sweden, rushed to provide aid even though Turkey had recently challenged Sweden’s application for NATO membership. The United States’ ability to provide a quick and substantive emergency response to Turkey and Syria in 2023 reinforced its standing as a global leader in humanitarian response.
Q4: Amid ongoing cuts, which tools does the U.S. government have left to effectively respond to crises?
A4: The little we know about the Trump administration’s plans for humanitarian assistance raises more questions than answers. The proposed new format of USAID remains uncertain, but recent reports have suggested that USAID’s new shape under the State Department could center around humanitarian assistance. A document reportedly written by Trump administration officials details a proposed reorganization that renames USAID as the U.S. Agency for International Humanitarian Assistance (IHA) and ends its independent legal status. The proposed changes present “a reimagined U.S. international assistance structure and set of operating principles that promises measurable returns to America while also projecting America’s soft power; enhancing our national security; and countering global competitors, including China.”
In the proposed plans, it is unclear if the administration intends to continue to support specific key elements of U.S. foreign disaster response capacity such as DARTs and their corresponding RMTs. BHA was not listed among the 20 bureaus and offices slated for closure. Instead, it will be combined with other remaining bureaus under the newly named IHA and renamed the “Office of Humanitarian Assistance.”
The additional layoffs of critical BHA staff the day of the Myanmar earthquake may be a signal of the administration’s intent to reduce spending on robust foreign disaster response capabilities in the future. Or, as was the case for fired federal personnel working on critical issues such as bird flu response and food and medical safety review, they may later be reinstated. It is also possible that the DOD may be asked to play a larger role in coordinating future disaster response. However, current DOD capabilities would not be able to replace the expertise of USAID personnel in the region or the corresponding RMTs based in Washington, D.C.
Q5: What message does the reduced U.S. humanitarian footprint in Myanmar send to other countries?
A5: The three-person U.S. assessment team deployed to Myanmar last week sits in stark contrast with the 225 U.S. staff deployed to Syria and Turkey following an earthquake of similar magnitude in 2023. This tepid response sends a new message to the international community about the United States’ approach to disaster response: It moves only in concert with partners, does not use its gold-standard capacities to assist populations in need, and is slow and late to need.
As the administration works to promote its agenda of countering competitors such as China, key strategic partners in the Indo-Pacific—such as Japan, India, and the Philippines—are watching. Disaster aid represented an important mechanism for the United States to demonstrate its strength and leadership in the region and promote good will. Now, countries may be asking what role the United States will play in the future. When they experience their next crisis—be it a natural disaster, man-made crisis, or conflict—will the United States show up? The United States’ absence in Myanmar today spells uncertainty for tomorrow.
Michelle Strucke is director of the Humanitarian Agenda and the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Lily Kennedy is an intern with the Humanitarian Agenda at CSIS.
