This story is originally appeared on Milling and is part Air conditioning cooperation.
As part of a broad effort to bypass the Congress and unilateral limiting government expenditure, the Donald Trump administration almost closed operations at the American International Development Agency or USAID, an independent federal body that provides humanitarian aid and financing of economic development around the world. On the first day of office, President Trump issued an executive order stopping all USAID financing, and then the agency issued an order to stop almost all financing recipients, from kitchen soups in Sudan to the global corps of the Mercy Corps humanitarian group.
Since then, the up-to-date government department Elon Musk closed the agency’s website, closed employees from E -Mail accounts and closed the agency office in Washington.
“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk wrote on X on Sunday. “Time to die.” (The agency is codified in federal law, and court challenges can argue that Musk’s actions are illegal).
While the criticism of sudden demolition of the USAid Trump largely focused on global public health projects, which have long enjoyed double -sided support, the effort also threatens billions of dollars intended for combating climate change. USAID climate financing helps low -income countries to build renewable energy and adapt to deteriorating natural disasters, as well as saving coal sinks and sensitive ecosystems. During the administration, Joe Biden Usaid accelerated its efforts focused on the climate under Ambitious new initiative It was supposed to last until the end of the decade. It seems that this effort ended suddenly when USAID contractors are preparing around the world Abandon critical projects and slow down employees.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took over the USiaid as a director of the duties, said that the sudden closing of musk “is not about getting rid of foreign help.” But even if USAID ultimately resumes activity to ensure emergency humanitarian aid, such as hunger support and HIV prevention, the agency can still end all its work related to the climate under the Trump administration. The result would be a blow to a breakthrough climate agreement in Paris as significant as the formal withdrawal of Trump USA from an international pact. Through the recovery of billions of dollars, which Congress has already committed to fight global warming, the USAs are ready to deraise climate progress far beyond their own borders.
“This is a torch of development programs for which the American people paid,” said Gillian Caldwell, who served as the Director of the USAID climate under the former president of Biden. “Many obligations arising from the Paris agreement are limiting financing, and this is a very danger.”
The United States spend less than 1 percent of their federal budget on foreign facilitate, but still makes the country the largest donor of facilitate in the world. USAID distributes from 40 to 60 billion dollars a year – almost a quarter of all global humanitarian aid. While in recent years the greatest actions of this facilitate have been found to Ukraine, Israel and Afghanistan, the agency also distributes billions of dollars to Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where it helps primarily promote food safety, health and sanitation and educational efforts.