A shrinking U.S. role in international disaster relief has left communities in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Sudan struggling to recover from recent catastrophes, aid workers and former officials say.
By Thursday, Afghan authorities and aid agencies had confirmed more than 2,200 deaths after an earthquake struck eastern provinces, with some remote villages still unreachable. The death toll rose as rescuers pushed into mountain districts where mud-brick homes collapsed and shuttered health clinics left survivors without immediate care.
Mushtaq Khan, a senior adviser for the International Rescue Committee, said he felt the quake from Kabul and woke to a steadily climbing count of deaths. Khan said four of the organization’s clinics in the hardest-hit province had closed earlier in the year after cuts to U.S. assistance, leaving roughly 60,000 rural Afghans without regular medical services. “The way we are responding now would’ve been way different,” he said.
At the start of 2025 the United States cut almost $1.8 billion in aid to Afghanistan, officials and analysts said, a reduction that the Afghan economy may feel sharply: some forecasts project the country’s gross domestic product will shrink by about 5 percent this year. Those losses in development funding, aid workers say, have tangible effects during disasters, when the presence of clinics, roads, water systems and pre-existing logistical relationships matters as much as rapid emergency donations.
What used to be a predictable U.S. surge in disaster assistance has weakened in recent years as Washington scaled back its global humanitarian commitments and restructured key agencies. Former and current aid officials describe a decline in capacity at the U.S. Agency for International Development and in specialized transport and search-and-rescue arrangements that previously sped responses.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran USAID’s disaster assistance office during the Obama administration and now leads the advocacy group Refugees International, said long-standing trust between U.S. agencies and nongovernmental organizations helped relief efforts move quickly. “Sometimes you need the relief to move faster than our grant processes,” he said. But he added that the U.S. government is largely out of the business of global disaster aid and that the shift has caused “huge damage.”
Aid workers point to several concrete examples. In 2022, the U.S. provided $55 million for food, health and sanitation after a magnitude-6.1 quake in southeastern Afghanistan; in 2023 it provided $12 million after another quake. This year, officials said, the U.S. provided no comparable emergency package following the latest temblor. In Myanmar, a magnitude-7.7 earthquake in March killed roughly 3,800 people; aid groups said U.S. logistical support was minimal, and a small American assessment team was dismissed days after arriving.
The U.S. subagency once responsible for global disaster logistics was moved into a smaller office within the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, officials said. Separate contracts that previously enabled rapid airlift of U.S. search-and-rescue teams to overseas disasters have been canceled, a change that makes it difficult to deploy heavy equipment and trained personnel on short notice.
Cuts have coincided with similar retrenchments by other donors, producing what Patricia McIlreavy, head of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, called a loss of “capacity and trust.” She said the result is an uncertain patchwork of actors attempting to fill gaps where seasoned U.S.-funded programs once operated.
In Sudan, a recent landslide that killed more than 1,000 people struck an area already battered by civil war and famine. Humanitarian access is difficult there, and the loss of experienced logisticians previously funded by U.S. assistance has complicated efforts to reach remote communities, McIlreavy said. Local volunteer networks have provided some relief, but international responders warn that volunteer efforts cannot substitute for sustained, well-resourced programs.
Aid specialists emphasize that long-term development investments — roads, hospitals, water and sanitation, early-warning systems — reduce the mortality of natural disasters as much or more than emergency deliveries after an event. Those investments tend to come from a steady flow of foreign assistance rather than ad hoc fundraising.
“Saving more lives is about more than money for any individual disaster,” said Khan. He warned that damage to water and housing infrastructure could increase disease and worsen conditions before winter, when shelter needs and food insecurity typically rise.
The broader pattern of retreat from sustained humanitarian funding raises questions about how governments, U.N. agencies and NGOs will coordinate responses when multiple crises occur simultaneously. Aid workers say the loss of institutional memory and relationships built over decades makes rapid, large-scale responses harder to organize and raises the risk that more lives will be lost in future disasters.
Donor fatigue is not uniform: the European Union, China, India and the United Kingdom provided some assistance after the Afghan quake. But aid officials say those contributions do not fully replace the logistical reach and long-term programming that the United States historically provided.
For now, aid workers and officials on the ground say humanitarian needs outstrip available resources. The immediate toll of the recent disasters has been high; the longer-term costs — in lost infrastructure, eroded trust and diminished capacity to respond — could make future emergencies deadlier and recovery slower.
Aid leaders warn rebuilding that capacity will take time and investment. In the meantime, communities and local responders continue to search for survivors and provide relief amid limits on supplies, transport and the clinical care many say used to be available from international partners.