Trump’s Disaster Aid Rebound

Sam Vigersky is an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

When Hurricane Melissa, a category 5 storm, barreled toward southwest Jamaica in late October, an unfamiliar foreign policy question loomed. Would the United States respond? And, even if it wanted to, could the United States still mobilize at scale so soon after dissolving the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)?

As it turns out, the answer to both questions was a resounding yes.

Based on fifteen key performance indicators assessing policy and operations—including response speed, logistics, funding, and interagency coordination—the United States delivered a textbook surge of humanitarian aid in the wake of a natural disaster of historic magnitude.

In a fortnight, U.S. assistance reached Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas. That is an impressive achievement under normal circumstances, and more so amid a government shutdown and major bureaucratic overhaul that transferred many of USAID’s responsibilities to the new International Disaster Response office at the State Department.

So how, after months of chaos and institutional demolition, did the Trump administration reverse course and pull this off? And what might this reveal about the United States’ recast humanitarian posture?

First Trump, then a well-worn playbook

“We’re prepared to move.”

Those four words, delivered by President Trump as Melissa made landfall over Jamaica on October 28, came sixteen minutes into a press gaggle aboard Air Force One that had already pinballed through his forthcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his just-completed swing through Asia, tariff policy, a need for targeted killings inside Venezuela, North Korea test missile launches, trade with Mexico, Taiwan, troops in American cities, Israeli strikes in Gaza, and Nvidia.

Like much of his foreign policy, Trump’s Melissa comment was less policy signal than improvisation: whether, and how, he would follow through was anyone’s guess. Indeed, when pressed for specifics about aiding Jamaica, Trump simply added, “on a humanitarian basis, we have to.”

As it turned out, movement came almost immediately. As the storm pounded the Caribbean, Washington began rolling out its standard disaster-response sequence, issuing a Declaration of Humanitarian Need in the four affected countries; deploying an elite group of career officials through a regional Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART); pledging coordination with UN agencies and NGOs (a notable tonal shift from the administration’s combative posture since January); and posting information to guide private-sector partners, volunteers, and donors. On the State Department’s Instagram account, more than 80 percent of its posts promoted content on Melissa during the initial nine days of the response.

The administration also took two additional bold steps by activating two urban search and rescue (USR) teams and mobilizing Joint Task Force (JTF) Bravo, a military company based in Honduras that has supported humanitarian operations in the Western Hemisphere for more than thirty years.

Normally, friction between the policy ambition and government machinery would be inevitable here given the haphazard cancellation of USAID humanitarian contracts and firing of seasoned civilian-military experts needed to catalyze bureaucratic instruments. Instead, an executive secretary memorandum from the State Department to the U.S. Southern Command requesting support—a highly technical document and necessary action—appears to have moved swiftly through the interagency process. JTF Bravo deployed U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopters to Kingston on October 30, with Black Hawk helicopters and Marines close behind. That same day, the State Department coordinated a USR deployment in Los Angeles: 42,000 pounds of gear, 34 first responders, 4 canines, and a charter plane bound for Jamaica, where it would join the USR from Fairfax, Virginia. California Governor Gavin Newsom, usually a Trump adversary, greenlit a USR deployment without delay, saying “compassion and solidarity truly know no borders.”

A response lands

On the ground, the DART marshaled the United States’ muscle into action. Chinook helicopters joined the Jamaica Defense Force Air Wing, transporting more than five hundred thousand pounds of food and supplies to devastated western parishes. USR teams conducted damage assessments, cleared roads, rehabilitated rural health clinics, and assisted in urgent recovery efforts. Tarps and hygiene kits were mobilized from U.S. warehouses formerly managed by USAID and distributed to communities in need. A Forward Arming Refueling Point was established to limit delays as aircraft scaled operations and pushed further into affected areas.

Back in Washington, just a day after Melissa’s landfall, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced $3 million in funding for Cuba—part of a total of $37 million delivered by the United States to the region over the first two weeks, which was divided between Cuba, Jamaica ($22 million), Haiti ($11 million), and the Bahamas ($500,000). These figures are consistent with past U.S. responses to hurricanes of similar intensity and devastation. It bears noting that disbursing funds across multiple countries and partners requires a prepared, well-functioning State Department Office of Foreign Assistance (F); that the F office delivered at scale and speed suggests that it was, in this case, both.

Unspooling the United States’ new humanitarian paradigm

The sample size is small, but a new U.S. aid paradigm is beginning to take shape. Since dismantling USAID, Rubio has repeatedly articulated that disaster relief will continue—albeit solely through the State Department, in closer alignment with foreign-policy priorities, and, like Trump’s NATO approach, with an expectation of greater burden-sharing from wealthier countries. It also involves cutting billions of dollars from life-saving programs with no drawdown or transition plan, leaving less high-profile countries reeling.

Of course, the administration’s disaster approach is shaped by Trump’s own tendencies as much as by any formal design. His television-driven policymaking is well documented, and vivid images—from storms in Jamaica to hunger in Gaza—regularly activate his instincts and, perhaps, his ambitions for a Nobel Peace Prize.

If the last two decades were characterized by humanitarian interventions every time, everywhere, all at once, the second Trump administration has taken a new, more à la carte approach—yes, deploying resources on a humanitarian basis, but only when it intersects with the president’s own idiosyncratic decision matrix and Rubio’s national security vision. Melissa checked several boxes: a Western Hemisphere disaster impacting a key security partner (Jamaica), a long-time adversary (Cuba), and a fragile state the United States is desperate to stabilize (Haiti). Add in ample television coverage of the storm’s impending devastation—not to mention a Secretary of State sympathetic to the plight of those in the region—and it’s unsurprising that this was Trump’s cause du jour.

The United States’ recent Gaza response, too, underscores how political incentives shape the Trump administration’s humanitarian approach. The president had tied his pursuit of a diplomatic breakthrough, and the international recognition that might accompany it, closely to the ceasefire negotiations; a humanitarian collapse in Gaza threatened that narrative. And so, in mid-October, weeks before Melissa, the United States deployed a DART to Israel to scale assistance into Gaza, in theory helping to stabilize conditions on the ground and create space for a peace process that Trump viewed as central to his foreign policy legacy.

There are, of course, core differences between the administration’s approaches in the Caribbean and Gaza. Namely, Melissa, though historic in scale, did not pose the same level of operational complexity as an active war zone. Most of all, while U.S. efforts in the Middle East have enjoyed little good fortune, luck played a meaningful role in the administration’s success responding to Melissa.

The storm’s most punishing winds and rain fell in Jamaica—one of the region’s wealthier countries—with infrastructure that, while strained, largely held. The main airport in Kingston weathered the storm and reopened quickly, enabling an immediate influx of U.S. personnel and supplies. The response benefited from a functioning government and the absence of violence.

Had Melissa tracked only slightly eastward and slammed into Haiti, the humanitarian demands—and the administration’s capacity to meet them—would have likely looked drastically different. Haiti’s physical infrastructure is far more fragile and gangs now control about 90 percent of its capital. And while the United States once provided nearly two-thirds of Haiti’s humanitarian funding, the Trump administration cut roughly 59 percent of life-saving programs this year. Those cuts eliminated the prepositioned food stocks and cash reserves that, since 2016, had allowed rapid response for up to half a million Haitians during hurricane season.

One final unknown cuts across both the Melissa and Gaza responses: who the United States funds moving forward. Partnerships with multilateral fixtures like the World Food Program were seen in Haiti and Jamaica, but a full list of grant recipients has yet to be released. Other long-standing partners, like the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, have lost all funding under the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse was highlighted by senior State Department official Jeremy Lewin during his November 10 visit to Jamaica, while in Cuba, Catholic Charities received support—both echoes of the first Trump administration, when faith-based organizations were routinely prioritized in humanitarian responses.

Credit where credit is due

Despite a sharp reduction in humanitarian ambitions since January, the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Melissa signals that the United States hasn’t entirely abandoned its vital role as global first responder. Credit belongs not only to the administration’s leadership for reasserting the United States’ footprint in disaster relief, but also to the scores of civil servants who worked nights and weekends without pay during the government shutdown. After months of being villainized and demoralized, these humanitarian professionals stayed on the job so that life-saving aid still stood a chance of reaching people in their hour of need. They are proof that, so long as they can continue working, America’s disaster response can, too.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.