A former US aid chief has suggested that the death toll from catastrophic glacial floods in Nepal could have been lower if not for the actions of Donald Trump's administration. The floods have killed at least 800 people and left around 3,000 missing.
Glacial Collapse Triggers Devastation
Wednesday's flooding event saw whole towns and villages washed away by millions of tonnes of water, rocks and ice which broke free following a glacial collapse in the Himalayas. Satellite images indicated that bedrock underneath a glacier high in the mountainous region broke apart, taking a huge chunk of the glacier with it.
The rockfall was so extreme that it registered as a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. The massive outpouring of rock and meltwater swelled the rivers in the valleys below, causing a torrent that swept away buildings, bridges and earth downstream in Tibet and Nepal. Many scientists agree that unprecedented warming in the region caused by climate change may have been a trigger for the disaster.
Former Official Points to DOGE Cuts
Writing on X, former USAID disaster-response chief Jeremy Konyndyk claimed that the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created by Donald Trump to slash public sector spending, would have used keyword searches "like 'climate' to terminate federal grants". Mr Konyndyk said that one of the "victims" of DOGE was "a collab between USAID and NASA for flood prediction, early warning, disaster readiness, glacier inventories, and mapping dangerous glacial lakes... in Nepal."
USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, is where Mr Konyndyk previously worked. It is a department which came under increasing pressure from the DOGE cost-cutting drive under Donald Trump's tenure. RawStory reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who oversaw DOGE at Trump's behest, slashed around $60 billion from US foreign aid.
Climate Programs Canceled
Mr Konyndyk added: "Nepal is a disaster-prone country (I oversaw USAID's response to the 2015 quake there)... AID worked extensively on disaster risk reduction there. DOGE canceled all 7 other DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) projects there as well. And DOGE killed $420m worth of climate work at NASA."
"Could these programs have helped foresee or mitigate this week's glacial flooding catastrophe? Hard to say with an outlier event like this. But that was their purpose. Sadly, it's hard to anticipate or mitigate climate hazards which your ideology has decreed do not exist."
Mr Konyndyk may have been referring to the Trump administration's well-publicised scepticism on climate change. In recent months, Mr Trump has said ocean windfarms drive "whales crazy" and said there was "a little conspiracy out there" concerning global warming. He also said climate change was the "greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world."
Nepal Calls for Global Response
Nepal's foreign minister called for a global response to climate change, saying Nepal was bearing a disproportionate share of its impact. "Despite having only 0.1% contribution to the global emissions, people of Nepal have become major victims of climate change," Shisir Khanal said on Saturday. The Himalayan mountains are warming considerably faster than many other parts of the world.
