When President Donald Trump’s administration announced a 90-day pause on all US foreign aid, there was at least one place that aid workers felt relieved to hear could be exempt: Myanmar.
On 6 February, the White House released a document entitled, “Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to the Situation in and in Relation to Burma.” That document referred back to a February 2021 Executive Order that said the military coup that had just taken place in Myanmar constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”.
Aid workers hoped the document, signed by Trump himself – combined with a Department of State waiver for life-saving assistance – would allow them to continue their work in Myanmar and, by extension, in the refugee camps in Bangladesh that are now home to more than one million Rohingya Muslims.
That sense of relief has been short-lived, according to aid officials and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Myanmar – most of whom only agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity, citing security reasons or the sensitivity of the topic.
USAID-funded projects in both Myanmar and Bangladesh have already been hit, with UN agencies, international NGOs, and local aid groups having to scale back some healthcare services, food aid, and educational programmes.
“Most NGOs and humanitarian groups will not be able to continue their activities in the very near future,” Peter Bouckaert, senior director of Fortify Rights, a rights organisation focused on Myanmar, told The New Humanitarian. “Many humanitarian projects have already been suspended, and humanitarian groups are letting go of staff in droves.”
Trump’s executive order, signed on his first day back in the Oval Office, 20 January, said he was suspending all US foreign aid programmes for 90 days pending a review by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
After a confusing stream of stop-work orders and waivers since, a Department of State spokesperson confirmed on 26 February plans to cut 92% of USAID foreign assistance grants.
Cuts to staff, and to aid programmes
An international organisation that has long operated in both Myanmar and Bangladesh told The New Humanitarian that the initial stop-work order from USAID meant they had to lay off 1,200 workers across their agency, which operates in dozens of countries.
By mid-February, the organisation said it had issued 30-day termination notices to half their staff in both Myanmar and Bangladesh.
“Basically, any programme that helps women or girls or youth, we were asked to remove that language.”
The country representative said their organisation was granted several waivers, but that they ultimately amounted to “political theatre” rather than actual assurances.
“We received feedback on some of our suspended awards. One said we had to remove any mention of ‘girls’, ‘women’, ‘youth’, ‘equity’, or ‘inclusion’… Basically, any programme that helps women or girls or youth, we were asked to remove that language,” he said.
Though this falls in line with Trump’s push to do away with any diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes in the United States, the country representative said such stipulations would make their work nearly impossible.
“I don’t know what we’re gonna replace those words with,” he said, adding that the whole point of many of their programmes was to be inclusive. Like most aid organisations, his group targets female students as part of its school lunch programmes exactly because “they’re the ones that usually drop out” at an early age.
According to UNICEF, 122 million girls are out of school worldwide. In Myanmar, only 26% of girls complete upper secondary school.
“What’s a better term, ‘human people’?” he asked mockingly.
Another stipulation from the White House – a ban on any multi-purpose cash assistance – may end up costing his organisation as much as $200,000 for only a week’s worth of cash distributions to farmers in Myanmar.
“The best, safest way for us to assist people is cash, but now we’re not allowed to do even that,” he said, citing reports of aid confiscation and diversion by the ruling junta.
“If we actively tried to distribute food or other items, they would just be confiscated by the State Administrative Council,” he said, using the official name that Myanmar’s military leadership goes by.
The fallout begins in the Rohingya camps
The situation in the overcrowded and dangerous camps in Bangladesh where more than a million Rohingya refugees live since being forced from Myanmar by the military’s allegedly genocidal campaign is no better.
NGO workers and residents in Cox’s Bazar, a coastal resort in Bangladesh that now hosts the world’s largest refugee camp complex, told The New Humanitarian they are just as confused by the fallout from the aid suspensions and stop-work orders.
Aid workers speaking to The New Humanitarian said the US provides more than 55% ($301 million) of all the international aid into the camps, and that the stop-work orders have had an immediate impact on a wide swathe of services.
The CEO of one local aid organisation said everything from vaccination to nutrition, from sanitation to skills development projects, has been hit by the cuts and stop-work orders. This, he said, will create serious health problems inside the camps.
Bangladeshi Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Mohammed Mizanur Rahman said a three-month suspension of emergency assistance to the camps will create “a humanitarian disaster” for Bangladesh and the region. He was speaking before the latest news of permanent cuts to nearly all USAID programmes.
He told The New Humanitarian in early February that at least 78,000 people in the camps had already been directly affected by the suspensions and aid cuts.
Due to the 90-day suspension, one international aid organisation with operations in Bangladesh said they had to halt outpatient consultations, inpatient services, and community outreach activities in the primary healthcare centres where they operate.
The NGO CEO said the Trump administration needs to realise that “these people are from Myanmar, and they are living in the camps with minimal facilities” and services.
The international organisation warned that the halting of these services would actually work in contravention of the Secretary of State’s 29 January waiver “to continue life-saving humanitarian assistance programmes”.
“Without emergency referral services, patients requiring advanced treatment may experience life-threatening delays, increasing the risk of preventable deaths,” the organisation said in an email to The New Humanitarian.
Camp residents flag healthcare and food impacts
Nur Bagicha said she has experienced the effects of the cuts on primary healthcare centres firsthand.
“I have a newborn baby, only four months old. I went to the nearby hospitals, but they said their services are closed now,” the 21-year-old told The New Humanitarian. Due to the complications of traveling from one camp to another and the bureaucratic hurdles that come with inter-camp assistance, she said she’s not sure how to get even basic neo-natal services.
Nur’s case is just one example of the many risks ahead the international aid organisation warned of for women and babies in the Rohingya camps: “The lack of maternity and newborn care deprives women and newborns of essential services such as skilled birth attendance and emergency obstetric care.”
A nurse working in the camps said health facilities have already had to cut back on staff and services. The waivers have done little to reassure anyone, she told The New Humanitarian. “We can only continue to provide informational services at this point,” the nurse said.
Ending the suspension of health services in the camps is all the more urgent because, according to several NGO sources, “everyone who arrives” from Myanmar faces health issues, while, inside the country, the junta is accused of targeting health facilities in airstrikes and hoarding basic medical supplies like vaccines and mosquito nets.
Even food assistance has been affected.
“We survive on monthly rations from the WFP, which are very limited for the entire month.”
The World Food Programme was allowed to restart the distribution of rice, but Bouckaert of Fortify Rights pointed out that this did not include permission for the supplies needed to boil and cook the rice.
“It’s a bit hard to see how people are going to cook the rice” without fuel for water sources and cooking oil, he told The New Humanitarian.
Even before the cuts, the food aid wasn’t enough to sustain families in the camp for an entire month, especially after the WFP’s previous cuts in 2023, which caused reductions in food assistance in more than 40 countries due to funding shortfalls.
Ziabul Hossain lives with 15 members of his family in one of the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. He said his family depended on the food aid, even if it often wasn’t enough, because they are not allowed to seek employment outside the camps.
“We survive on monthly rations from the WFP, which are very limited for the entire month,” the 30-year-old told The New Humanitarian. “It is very tough to survive with such limited food.”
Peter Saiful, another camp resident, warned that the funding cuts – combined with the lack of work opportunities for the refugees – could lead to greater insecurity inside the camps, which are already riddled with criminal gangs and arson attacks. “The only option left is illegal business,” he added.
Additional reporting from Ali M. Latifi in Kabul, Afghanistan. Edited by Andrew Gully.
