The funds for vital health programs all over the world remain frozen and their work has not been able to resume, despite the order of a federal judge who temporarily interrupted the dismantling of the Trump Administration of the main foreign aid agency of the government.
Interviews with people who work on health initiatives in Africa and Asia have discovered that parents in Kenya whose children have tuberculosis are unable to make them test. There is no clean drinking water in the fields in Nigeria or Bangladesh for people who flew from the civil conflict. A therapeutic food program cannot treat acutely malnourished children in South Sudan.
“We have people who travel 300 kilometers from the mountains to try to find their drugs in other hospitals, because they are not there in which they live,” said Makele hair, who manages an organization that assists people who live with the HIV in the Tigray region in Ethiopia and was based on the funding of the United States Agency for international development. “Usaid was providing drugs and transported them to rural places. Now these people are thrown away without adequate information. “
A spokesman for the State Department said Tuesday that the office of the Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued more than 180 exemptions to allow life -saving activities to resume and that were most approved every day. The Department did not respond to a request to provide a list of 180 projects.
But also the programs with exemptions are still frozen, according to people of over 40 groups financed by Usaid, because the system of payments that Usaid used to provide funds for organizations has not operated for weeks. Without access to that money, the programs cannot work.
Thursday evening, judge Amir H. Ali of the United States District Court for the Columbia district denied a motion to hold the Trump administration in contempt for the court for continuing to freeze aid, recognizing that the government had recognized that ” A prompt compliance with the order “was required.
But he wrote that the restrictive order “does not allow the defendants to simply continue their general suspension of the appropriate foreign aid from the congress”, in order to have time to “find a new post-hoc rationalization for the Very suspension.”
Organizations usually receive their subsidies in small increases, presenting requests for activities that will do imminently. They are based on that rapid turnaround to continue working. Many of the groups concerned are non -profit organizations that have no other source of funds.
“Some NGOs have received exemptions, but the exemptions without money are only pieces of paper – and you cannot manage programs with only card,” said Tom Hart, CEO of interaction, which represents 165 organizations that offer foreign aid. “These organizations have not been paid for work dating back to December and have no guarantee that they will be paid for that job or any job in the future.”
Speaking in a meeting with aid organizations last week, Peter Morocco, appointed Trump who is now director of the foreign assistance office at the State Department, said that the payment system was offline but would have been restored by 18 February. He did not have been.
Morocco signed a declaration presented to the judge of the Federal Court, reporting on the conformity of the government with the restrictive order. In it, he claimed that the administration was acting on the basis of other regulations, not to the executive order, to continue to freeze the loans.
The Trump administration insists that the renunciation system allows the emergency work to continue without limits. But the process of issuing exemptions was complex, said the spokesman of the State Department, because the department had to verify that the organizations that seek them are not misrepresented their activities.
“The Department has discovered that many activities that have previously been described as life -saving humanitarian assistance have actually involved gender or gender ideology programs, transgender surgical interventions or other assistance and non -Lifetanti efforts that are explicitly against the first program of American foreign policy established the president, “says the declaration.
Usaid has not financed gender transition surgery; The programs that had a gender focus included efforts to protect women from domestic violence and prevent HIV infection in vulnerable teenage girls.
The organizations that have received exemptions report that one or two activities in larger projects have been approved to restart, while the surrounding and related activities are still frozen.
The CEO of a large organization that provides health care that he asked not to be identified because he was prevented from speaking with the media with the USAID stop-work order, he said that his agency received two out of 24 exemptions for which they applied. If the organization had all the exemptions, it would cover about five percent of its activities. So far it has not received funds. “I can’t buy drugs with a derogation,” he said.
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation is the only organization that the Times has found in a vast survey among the USAID recipients who resumed work after receiving a renunciation.
But the Foundation was not able to access any new money. To restart his HIV test and treatment programs, he used money he had received as a refund for the disbursements before the Stop-Work order, said Trish Karlin, executive vice-president of the organization. He said the Foundation received exemptions for 13 of his 17 projects.
“For the prizes in which we are not financed by Advances but rather we are paid in backward after turning on the United States government, we have not been paid and we have almost $ 5 million,” he said.
Karoun Demirjian Contributed relationships.