The United States has deployed over 250 personnel and pledged $150 million in assistance to Venezuela after a pair of earthquakes struck the country this week, killing at least 920 people. The response represents a high-stakes test of the Trump administration’s revamped foreign aid policy, which has shifted humanitarian work from the gutted U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the State Department.
Massive Deployment and Funding
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the effort as a “big, fast, effective” and “whole-of-government” response. The State Department sent three specialized urban search and rescue teams and activated a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) with more than 250 personnel. A $150 million assistance fund was pledged within 24 hours of the incident, which Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the largest such commitment he had seen for a sudden-onset disaster.
“On a positive side, they immediately did declare a disaster and called for the activation of the DART, as well as the search and rescue,” said Susan Reichle, a former USAID counselor who worked on responses including the 2010 Haiti earthquake. She noted that the first 72 hours after an earthquake are critical for reaching survivors.
Political Context and Challenges
The earthquakes come just months after the Trump administration deposed Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in a January special forces raid, bringing him to the U.S. to face narco-terrorism charges. His successor, Delcy Rodríguez, has been more amenable to Washington. President Donald Trump said the U.S. now has a “great relationship” with Venezuela, adding that “outside of what happened last night … it’s a happy country again, people are dancing in the streets.”
However, the USAID cuts have severely reduced U.S. capacity. The foreign assistance unit in Colombia, for example, shrank from 144 staff to just 14, and ties with local NGOs and contractors have been severed. “This is their first real test, because of the magnitude of the disaster,” Reichle said, noting that the scale of the Venezuela quakes far exceeds previous administration emergencies like Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.
Response Pace and Empathy Concerns
Vigersky’s analysis of key indicators—including DART activation and urban search and rescue deployment—showed the State Department is keeping pace with past U.S. responses to earthquakes in Turkey (2023) and Haiti (2021). But the administration has faced criticism for its approach to public health and empathy. Health experts said the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization delayed notification of an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by up to 10 days. And during his first term, Trump’s visit to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, where he threw paper towels to families, was condemned by the San Juan mayor as “terrible and abominable.”
Rodríguez said Saturday that dozens of people had been rescued alive, which “brings us joy that they can embrace their families and loved ones.” The U.S. response appears calculated to pre-empt scrutiny. “They feel the pressure, and they’re throwing all the resources at this emergency in a way that hopefully delivers for people who desperately need help,” Vigersky said. “There’s obviously the political element to Venezuela. They have this relationship with the interim government, it’s in their interest to see them succeed and be stable.”
