This article from ProPublica describes the chaos that has fallen upon all the aid groups that were providing life-saving humanitarian services to people around the world as a result of the Trump administration’s executive orders to stop everything at once.

On Friday morning, the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.

They chose the children.

In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.

American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.

Many groups doing such lifesaving work either don’t know the right way to request an exemption to the order, known as a waiver, or have no sense of where their request stands. They’ve received little information from the U.S. government, where, in recent days, humanitarian officials have been summarily ousted or prohibited from communicating with the aid organizations.
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Trump campaigned on an “America First” platform after unsuccessfully trying to slash the foreign assistance budget during his first term in office. The U.S. provides about $60 billion in nonmilitary humanitarian and development aid annually — less than 1% of the federal budget, but far more than any other country. The complex network of organizations who carry out the work is managed by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development.

Over the weekend, that system came to a standstill. There was widespread chaos and confusion as contractors scrambled to understand seemingly arbitrary orders from Washington and figure out how to get a waiver to continue working. By Tuesday evening, Trump and Rubio appeared to heed the international pressure and scale back the order by announcing that any “lifesaving” humanitarian efforts would be allowed to continue.

Aid groups that specialize in saving lives were relieved and thought their stop-work orders would be reversed just as swiftly as they had arrived.

But that hasn’t happened. Instead, more stop-work orders have been issued. As of Thursday, contractors worldwide were still grounded under the original orders and unable to secure waivers. Top Trump appointees arrested further funding and banned new projects for at least three months.

So now we have organizations doing life-saving work around the globe being suddenly abandoned. But that cruelty is the point, isn’t it? MAGA cultists want to see people suffer, which is why we see ICE agents beat immigrants and display them in shackles and dump them into military planes for deportation when it was not at all necessary. But it gives them a vicarious pleasure in being ‘tough’ against those ‘other’ people.

I really cannot do justice to the horrors in the article by providing that small excerpt above. You have to read the article. As Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran some of USAID’s largest programs under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said, its “Like a Russian nesting doll of fuck-ups.”

The sheer cruelty and pettiness on display is astonishing. Senior officials who tried to protect their employees from arbitrary and illegal dismissals were themselves dismissed. The director of labor relations at USAID sent a memo to those employees who had been summarily placed on leave pending firing, saying that he was revoking that order because he had looked at their files and found that they had not been doing anything that violated any policies and their summary dismissals violated their due process rights. (I cannot link to that memo but I urge you to click on the above link and read it for yourself to see how principled administrators behave.)

Then shortly afterwards, he sent out a notice that he too had been fired, no doubt because of his principled actions. (That memo can also be seen in the link.)

We also have the US cutting all ties with the World Health Organization. Not only that, everyone at the Centers for Disease Control have been forbidden to even contact any of their counterparts in the WHO, demonstrating a high level of micromanaging vindictiveness.

Staff across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were ordered Monday to cut off all communications with the World Health Organization, multiple federal health officials confirmed to CBS News, to comply with President Trump’s executive order last week. 

Beyond calling for the U.S. to begin the yearlong process to formally withdraw from funding the U.N. health agency, Mr. Trump’s executive order had also instructed federal agencies to “recall and reassign” any U.S. government personnel from working with the WHO.

The sweeping directive to implement the order was issued by the CDC’s Deputy Director for Global Health John Nkengasong in an email Monday, one official said, pending further guidance for when and how exceptions might be carved out.

CDC staff assigned to work for the WHO are also being told not to come into the office, the email said, pending further guidance from leadership. 

Scott Greer, professor of Health Management and Policy and Global Public Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health describes what the impact os going to be.

Leaving WHO is petty, self-defeating and bad for US foreign policy. Self-exclusion from the membership of one of the most broadly supported international organizations hurts the United States’ ability to promote its broad goals and influence while damaging an organization that is crucial in setting health care standards, vetting and promoting scientific advice to governments, and coordinating aid. 

Americans will often not have seen the benefits of WHO membership directly, but they are everywhere if you learn where to look. They are in disease outbreaks avoided, as with the containment of Ebola outbreaks, as well as more regular and less visible disease responses. They are in the dissemination of better practice in medicine, where WHO committees are part of the process by which doctors establish best practice. And they are in the reduction of critical risks from war and disease that can destabilize countries around the world and affect our interests. 

For what is by any standards a very small agency with a very small budget, it is inescapable and does a lot. 

It is the WHO that monitors global health trends that can be used to prevent epidemics, and helps determine which flu viruses are going around the globe in order to design the annual flu vaccines, monitors global threats such as bird flu. US scientists and health professionals, already hamstrung by these new restrictions, will have their public health efforts seriously harmed.

The old saying about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face seems disturbingly apropos here.