USAID has suffered massive budget cuts and nearly all employees and contractors have been fired.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake rocked Myanmar and surrounding countries at 12:50 pm local time on Friday, killing more than 2,000 people.

In Washington, it was a little after 2 in the morning when the tremors began, but an alert from the U.S. Geological Survey immediately landed in the inboxes of the disaster response team at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The team normally would swing into action, working with local organizations and sending aid workers from Thailand to respond to the disaster within hours — distributing potable water, emergency food and medical supplies, tents and cooking supplies.

USAID disaster managers in Washington would also contact independent U.S. search and rescue teams in Los Angeles and Fairfax, Va., which have spent years training for scenarios exactly like this.

That’s what would’ve happened — before the Trump administration dismantled USAID.

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Instead, the disaster management team received another email on Friday morning: they were being laid off.

The Trump administration notified Congress on Friday that it was officially dissolving USAID into the State Department.

And as of Tuesday, the U.S. had deployed no humanitarian workers to Myanmar or the surrounding area, as I reported for NPR yesterday.

“The capacity of the U.S. government to provide that kind of assistance right now is severely diminished, and we haven’t seen any of it so far,” said Sarah Charles, assistant to the administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance under the Biden administration.

On Monday, the State Department said it would send three USAID relief workers in coming days.

Compare that to the Turkey earthquake two years ago, when 225 humanitarian workers responded to the crisis and the U.S. led the global response.

The State Department maintains that it’s still able to offer some relief.

“The fact that we’ve got partners that we work with, that our goals can be achieved through the work that we do with others around the world, is something,” said Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department.

But USAID funding for many of these local organizations was terminated during the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency, so they’ve had to lay off staff and scale down or halt their projects.

In fact, many of the organizations still haven’t received previously approved payments, often numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, from USAID for existing work.

“This is disastrous,” said Jim Kunder, former deputy administrator of USAID who served under three presidential administrations. Dismantling USAID is “inconceivably chaotic and obviously disruptive to the ability to respond when an earthquake like this hits.”

That means other countries and organizations will need to step in and fill these major gaps.

There were many details I wasn’t able to include in my NPR story, but this one really struck me.

Charles said she was still in touch with workers who remain at USAID for at least the next few weeks.

“Every single one of them is focused right now not on the fact that they have been laid off, although obviously that hangs heavily over them. They’re focused on what could still be possible in terms of a response and the needs of people in Burma [Myanmar] and Thailand right now,” she said.

Even with the knowledge that their job is soon ending, even though they’re being restricted in what they can do, they still have a laser focus on what has always mattered about this work: helping other people.

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Top image: Lim Ashley