In the race to save lives after the Myanmar quake, U.S. rescuers are notable for their absence

奥础厂贬滨狈骋罢翱狈&苍产蝉辫;—&苍产蝉辫;Day after day, Chinese rescue teams haul children and elderly people from collapsed buildings as cameras beam the thanks of grateful survivors around the world. Russian medical teams show off field hospitals erected in a flash to tend to the wounded.

Notably absent from the aftermath of the magnitude 7.7 earthquake in the poor and war-racked Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar: the uniquely skilled, well-equipped and swift search-and-rescue teams and disaster-response crews from the United States.

At least 15 Asian and Western government rescue teams have landed crews reaching hundreds of workers in size, alongside initial pledges of financial aid reaching tens of millions of dollars, as the death toll from the March 28 quake has risen to 3,564, with 5,012 others injured and 210 missing, Myanmar’s government said Sunday.

Complicating the rescue and relief efforts, quake-stricken areas were bracing for thunderstorms late Sunday, after heavy rains and winds the previous night disrupted operations and added to the misery of the many who lost their homes in the disaster. Myanmar’s state-run MRTV reported Sunday evening that rain and thunderstorms were possible across the country for the coming week, with 100-degree heat also in the forecast.

Meanwhile, cameras have recently shown Vietnam’s team on arrival, marching square-shouldered to the rescue behind their country’s flag.

While Myanmar’s military junta and civil war have posed challenges, the U.S. government had worked with local partners there for decades to provide assistance, including after deadly storms in 2008 and 2023, aid officials say.

The American government dwarfs other nations in rescue experience, capacity and heavy machinery able to pull people alive from rubble. But in Myanmar after the most recent quake, the U.S. has distinguished itself for having no known presence on the ground beyond a three-member assessment team sent days after the quake.

“We all worried what would be the human impact” of President Trump’s dismantling of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development, said Lia Lindsey, a senior humanitarian policy advisor for Oxfam, which scrambled to provide tents, blankets and other aid to quake survivors.

Now, Lindsey said, “we’re seeing it in real time. We’re seeing it in increased suffering and increased death.”

A retreat from decades of U.S. policy

The United States, the world’s largest economy, long saw its strategic interests and alliances served by its standing as the globe’s top humanitarian donor. Myanmar’s quake is as close to a no-show as America has had in recent memory at a major, accessible natural disaster.

Current and former senior private-sector and government officials say the Myanmar disaster points to some of the results — for people in need on the ground, and for U.S. standing in the world — of the Trump administration’s retreat from decades of American policy. That approach held that Washington needs both the hard power of a strong military and the soft power of a robust aid and development program to deter enemies, win and keep friends and steer events.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Europe for a gathering of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
rejected a suggestion that the administration was ceding influence abroad by canceling thousands of its aid and development contracts, including for disasters. He told reporters that those complaining were the aid groups, which he accused of profiting off past U.S. aid.

“We will do the best we can,” Rubio said Friday. “But we also have other needs we have to balance that against. We’re not walking away.”

He pointed to “a lot of other rich countries in the world. They should all be pitching in and do their part.”

Leading Senate Democrats wrote Rubio this week, urging him to scale up U.S. disaster aid to Myanmar — and fast. Separately, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, spoke of watching a news broadcast of the disaster showing Chinese government teams at work.

“It hurt my heart to see where, instead of a USAID ... team leading the response, there was a team from the [People’s Republic of China] that was being celebrated for having saved some people in the rubble,” Coons said.

The 2?-month-old Trump administration, through billionaire Elon Musk’s team known as the Department of Government Efficiency, has frozen USAID funding, terminated thousands of contracts and is firing all but a few of the agency’s staffers globally. It accuses the agency of waste and of advancing liberal causes. The Myanmar quake is the first major natural disaster since that work by DOGE started.

The Trump administration and some Republican lawmakers say they will reassemble a reduced slate of aid and development programs under the State Department, fitting their narrower interpretation of work that serves U.S. strategic and economic interests.

A delayed response

Days after the Myanmar quake, the U.S. made its first announcement of help: It was sending a three-member assessment team of non-specialist advisors from a regional USAID office in Bangkok, the Thai capital. Coincidentally, like hundreds of other USAID staffers around the world, the three had received layoff notices from the Trump administration on March 28 within hours of the quake, current and former USAID officials confirmed.

The administration also promised $2 million in aid, and announced $7 million more Friday. But there’s a much larger number at play.

That $9-million total is dwarfed by the roughly $2 billion in payments for previously rendered services and goods that the Trump administration has owed nonprofit humanitarian groups and other contractors and governmental and nongovernmental foreign partners, aid officials say. The administration abruptly shut down USAID and State Department foreign assistance payments — including for work already done — on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.

Combined with abruptly terminated aid contracts and the freeze on USAID and State Department assistance and development payments, the U.S. back debt is forcing larger aid operations and businesses to scale back their services to people in need and to slash staff. Some smaller organizations were driven out of business. That was even before the Myanmar quake.

Under court order, the administration is slowly making good on those back payments.

In the meantime, nonprofit groups are having to draw on reserve funds they would normally use for sudden unplanned disasters like the Myanmar quake to pay the bills that the U.S. should have paid, said Lindsey, the Oxfam official.

Asked about the burden that the nongovernmental organizations say USAID’s unpaid back bills are placing on their work, the State Department said in an email, “The U.S. government cannot comment on how NGOs manage their financing.”

Typically, the United States government would have provided $10 million to $20 million in the initial phase of response to a disaster like the Myanmar quake, with more later for long-term aid and rebuilding, said Sarah Charles, who ran disaster response and overall humanitarian affairs at USAID in the Biden administration.

“We have a long history in Burma,” Charles said, referring to Myanmar by its other name. “It’s an environment that the U.S. government has been operating in over the last many decades.”

Normally, the United States also would have had 20 to 25 specialized disaster workers on the ground in as few as 24 hours, Charles said. That number would have jumped to 200 or more if USAID had flown in urban rescue teams from California and Virginia. They deploy as self-contained units, with dog handlers and the capacity to feed and provide clean water to the teams, Charles said.

The Trump administration preserved contracts for the California and Virginia rescue teams under pressure from lawmakers. But the contracts for their transport are believed among the thousands of USAID contracts that the administration canceled. That left the U.S. no quick way to move search-and-rescue crews when disaster struck, Charles said.

Britain has pledged $13 million in aid and said it will match up to $5 million in private donations, and China and others have promised financial aid. At least 15 countries sent dozens or hundreds of rescuers or aid workers, including Russia, China, India and the United Arab Emirates, according to Myanmar officials.

China shares a border and close ties with Myanmar. Chinese rescuers had their first success March 30, less than 48 hours after the quake, when they joined hands with local people to pull an elderly man from a badly damaged hospital in the capital city, Naypyidaw.

By Wednesday, Chinese rescuers had pulled out nine survivors, including a pregnant woman and a child. In Mandalay, Chinese rescuers saved a 52-year-old man who had been trapped for five days.

Knickmeyer and Rising write for the Associated Press. Knickmeyer reported from Washington and Rising from Bangkok. AP writers Matthew Lee and Didi Tang in Washington and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.