The Manufactured Chaos Doctrine
The aid freeze, the fallout, and the future
I’m angry this week, no thanks to a combination of bad anniversaries and fresh horrors.
Jan 29 marked 8 years since U Ko Ni, a brave, principled, Muslim legal scholar was shot dead in broad daylight outside Yangon International Airport by Myanmar military’s hired guns.
Feb 1, meanwhile, marks 4 years since the same military staged a coup, unhappy with the results of an election where its party lost heavily. A few months later, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn actually said a similar coup “should happen” in the States.
And of course, this week brought fresh horrors, after the announcement of a 90-day pause on foreign aid. Drop me a line if you’ve been directly affected.
So yes, I’m angry at the demagogues of the world and their enablers, including the narrow-minded, self-serving, spineless acolytes who believe “the others” deserve their fate for being poor/from a different country/a different gender/follow a different religion (take your pick).
I have a special level of anger for Burmese people in America who voted for Trump, fully knowing what he's capable of, but choosing to turn the other cheek because they believe themselves to be the good migrants, and that they won't be affected.
I know outrage can be fuel but it can also be unhelpful and definitely not sustainable. But this week, I’m sitting with it.
The Orders
It all started within hours of Trump taking office.
The “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid”, issued on Jan 20, said the country’s “aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values”.
It ordered “department and agency heads with responsibility for United States foreign development assistance programs” to “immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds” pending a review which will be conducted within 90 days.
Four days later, on Jan 24 (Friday), Devex reported that the State Department sent “a stop-work order for existing grants and contracts”.
There were several waivers, including “foreign military financing for Israel and Egypt” and “emergency food assistance”. Absent were waivers for global projects like PEPFAR, a flagship programme on HIV, said Devex, which has made the memo available for all of us to read.
The next day (Saturday, Jan 25), these stop-work emails started arriving in the inboxes of many grantees, implementing partners and contractors who were working on projects funded by the American government. Their payments have been frozen.
On Sunday, Jan 26, the State Department released a press statement confirming the pause for “all U.S. foreign assistance funded by or through the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)”.
After two days of rising panic, the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio released another memo on Tuesday, Jan 28 for “an additional waiver” exempting “life-saving humanitarian assistance” from the pause. It also managed to create more confusion.
The Cull
On Monday Jan 27, NYT reported that about 60 senior officials at USAD, which has a budget of $22.6 billion, were put on administrative leave in response to their apparent resistance to the executive order.
A source told the paper that “the officials placed on leave included the leaders overseeing global health aid, one of the largest parts of USAID”.
The Fallout: General
The United States is the largest single donor of aid globally. According to Reuters, it disbursed $72 billion in assistance in fiscal year 2023.
Which means we’re talking about everything from food, nutrition, education, and health services to promoting human rights and gender equality, protecting the environment, and preventing crime and corruption.
It’s more a question of “what’s not affected” rather than “what’s affected”.
Of course, we can - and we should and we do - criticise the U.S. and its aid programmes when they’re top-heavy, tone-deaf, ineffective and not based on merit. I’ve had my own run-ins with USAID.
There are also valid questions to be had about the aid sector’s dependence on a single actor. An analysis by consultant Thomas Byrnes, using data from the U.N.’s Financial Tracking Service, showed that American aid money accounted for 43% of the humanitarian efforts spent globally in 2024. It was “greater than the combined contributions of the next ten largest donors,” he wrote.
But there currently isn’t any nation - or group - to step in, and the aid freeze will devastate great organisations and projects.
Civil society groups and exiled media outlets along the Thai-Myanmar border are already in a state of panic because this is an existential crisis for them. Many are cash-strapped and operating under extremely challenging circumstances.
Lifesaving health services for Burmese refugees and fearless journalism that’s exposing the military’s wrongdoing are just two casualties of this clusterfuck spearheaded by a vengeful narcissist.
“Fear is at an all time high, and hundreds of refugees are grappling with a growing sense of anxiety,” according to media outlet Myanmar Now.
I can imagine the same fear and anxiety coursing through Ukraine, pointedly left out of the waiver, where tens of millions of people are struggling under Russia’s assault. How about Gaza, Congo, Haiti, etc?
“Communities across the world who are experiencing some of the most urgent humanitarian crises, who rely on aid to access food, clean water, health care and more, will feel this cut immediately,” Abby Maxman, President & CEO of Oxfam America, told me in an email statement.
“We are going to see terrible impacts for people experiencing the most widely reported crises – like Sudan, Yemen, Syria, the Occupied Palestinian Territory – and those living through more forgotten emergencies like in the Sahel, or the Rohingya displaced in Bangladesh.”
Will the Jan 28 Rubio memo improve the situation? It’s anybody’s guess. “That guidance has reportedly seen PEPFAR programmes restart, but whether preventative drugs - rather than just HIV treatments - are covered remains unclear,” said the BBC.
The New Humanitarian parsed that memo but also asks an important question: is the humanitarian sector too quick to fall into line with these orders? Were aid agencies using the most conservative interpretations of the order, instead of viewing it as a way to pause only future programmes?
The Fallout: Food Systems
What about food systems, given that one of USAID’s flagship programmes is all about tackling the root causes of food insecurity?
“Feed the Future works hand-in-hand with partner countries to develop their agriculture sectors and break the vicious cycle of poverty and hunger,” the programme said on its website.
To find that information and the stats above, though, I had to use the Wayback Machine because the website has been down since Tuesday morning when I first checked. At first, a landing page said the site was temporarily unavailable. But by Thursday afternoon, the page has become a “404 not found”.
Its X account is still up - although no new tweets since Jan 17 - but for how much longer, I wonder.
This feels like it’s going beyond a temporary pause. It’s taking an axe to the food aid infrastructure and then scrubbing clean the aftermath to leave nothing behind.
The Jan 29 edition of Devex Dish has the most comprehensive round-up of what the aid freeze means for food and agriculture programs.
Senior Editor Tania Karas did a fine job trying to make sense of a bewildering and fast-moving situation where many people are unwilling or unable to speak publicly, but where fear, alarm, and confusion are taking hold.
This includes news that USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which works on crises such as in Sudan, Gaza, northern Syria, and Haiti, has furloughed at least 500 contractors, or nearly 40% of its team, and that furloughs have also hit the Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security which runs Feed the Future.
Devex also reported that FEWS NET, which stands for Famine Early Warning Systems Network, has gone offline, yet another casualty of the stop-work order.
As the name suggests, this is a pretty damn important tool that tracks food insecurity levels in 30 of the world’s most food-insecure countries.
I contacted the USAID press office about what’s happening to Feed the Future, including its website, and received this reply.
“At this moment, in order to do a thorough review, all programs and grants without a waiver approved by the Secretary of State using foreign assistance funding are paused.”
I assume that includes Feed the Future Innovation Labs which works with top American universities and developing nations’ researchers and scientists to come up with solutions to some of the most pressing issues of our time.
Examples of these labs include: research on climate resilient cereals at Kansas State U, identifying current and emerging threats to crops at Penn State, improving food safety at Purdue, looking at food systems for nutrition at Tufts, and conducting food security policy research at Michigan State.
They were all working with partners across Asia, Africa, and South America, many of them developing countries.
Again, there is warranted criticism of the U.S.’s general approach to agriculture: a tendency to focus on productivity, scale, and techno fixes, and less on equity and just transition.
But I also personally know people in these programs and would neither question their good intentions nor their commitment to help smallholder farmers across the world.
I fired off e-mails to the 16 labs listed on the page (thanks again, Wayback Machine) to see if they’ve had to stop work, and received an official response from one that it is indeed affected and has no idea when work can resume. Two people also told Tania from Devex their labs have been halted.
“Anything that's longer term, anything that's not emergency, is all being cut off, which actually pretty terrifying when you think about it,” Tania said when I called to ask her about the impact of these orders.
“For example, if you just look at food systems, you can give people in-kind food aid, like food packages. But can you do anything else, like, are food vouchers allowed? What about school meals? Or any of the services that are perhaps not emergency, but are triage-type services and still vitally important in order for food aid to be effective? How about WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene)?”
She said she’s also been hearing how the freeze could actually undermine both humanitarian and development aid in the medium- and long-term.
“The entire point of Feed the Future is to help communities stand on their own two feet to lessen their reliance on aid. So the U.S. funding the innovation labs is so important.”
“If all of that science goes to waste, and if all of that innovation is not allowed to continue, that ends up harming the entire point of Feed the Future (which is) helping smallholder farmers feed themselves, and countries to be able to grow their own food in light of climate change.”
The whole spectrum of aid, from humanitarian crisis situations to long term development, as well as a wide spectrum of people and organisations, are affected, she added.
“Today I read a press release from a credit union that provides loans to smallholder farmers through a USAID project. It affects local NGOs. It affects big development contractors.”
Food aid and agricultural development are just two aspects of the funding with food systems elements.
How about projects on environmental preservation, biodiversity protection, land and indigenous rights, and the empowerment of women, all of which overlap with establishing fairer, healthier, and more sustainable food systems? Those have been stopped too.
My contacts in Brazil said many NGOs working with human rights and climate change, including on food systems, have been affected. Some are facing the prospects of losing as much as half of their budget and it is likely they will have to stop their important work.
The impacts will be harsh and felt among some of the most vulnerable and needy groups, like indigenous communities and smallholders, a source told me.
90 days is a long time for small organisations to continue to operate without a major funder.
Unfortunately, it is a short time for the State Department to review such a big body of programmes and projects, and pretty much everyone I spoke to doubts the review will be completed during that timeframe. This is adding to the alarm and anxiety that many organisations are feeling.
“Something I keep hearing from people is that reviews are good. It is good to ensure that aid, whether it's development or humanitarian, is optimised… is being spent efficiently. So people are saying, they welcome the review,” Tania told me.
“But the “manufactured chaos” - this is a term I heard from someone - here is that they've turned off the funding as they do the review, and that is what people think is completely unnecessary. That is what people are most deeply concerned about because even in just 90 days you could have wide pieces of the aid infrastructure collapsing.”
The Future
There is a glimmer of hope that some programmes will be reviewed and allowed to continue within the 90-day timeframe if they’re found to be in line with American interests.
But given who’s now in power and the very clear stance taken by Project 2025 on the environment and sustainability, I would bet that anything involving climate change - such as programmes aimed at reducing food systems emissions - and gender are likely to be on the chopping block.
May I add that I would very much like to lose that bet?
"The aid community is grappling with just how existential this aid suspension is - we know this will have life or death consequences for millions around the globe, as programs that depend on this funding grind to a halt without a plan or safety net,” said Oxfam’s Abby Maxman.
“In this uncertainty, aid experts are unable to operate or plan without knowing when funding will arrive, or how much.”
"This decision must be reversed, and funding and programming must be allowed to move forward. But at the very least, the administration must communicate clearly so the aid community can plan for the future and determine how to carry on our lifesaving work."
Thin’s Pickings
How to measure famine - London Review of Books
Searing long read from Alex de Waal, an authority on modern famine and Executive Director of World Peace Foundation at Tufts University.
He traces the origins of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC) and our understanding of hunger and famine, and asks whether the IPC’s arcane formula is still relevant in a place like Gaza where Israeli officials play fast and loose with restrictions to keep a technical definition of “famine” at bay.
Shock and fear for food programs amid US aid freeze - Devex Dish
A comprehensive look into the impact of the U.S. aid freeze on food and agriculture programs. This more recent piece focuses on FEWS NET going offline.
We think we have a choice - The Food Archive
Eloquent musings from Jessica Fanzo, one of my favourite food systems experts, on the illusion of choice.
“The food system is like an invisible cage, constraining both farmers and consumers. Our choices are frequently predetermined by complex, interconnected systems that prioritise efficiency and profit over individual well-being and environmental sustainability. It's not just about willpower or desire. The barriers are systemic, making truly independent food choices incredibly challenging for most people,” she wrote.
Beware the sanewashing ahead on Trump's second term - American Crisis
Margaret Sullivan, former public editor of NYT and media columnist for WaPo, on mainstream journalism’s attempt to normalise the wrecking ball that Trump has set in motion and how viewers can resist.
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