What Trump's Move to End Central American Aid Will Look Like

President Trump’s recent decision to cut off aid to three Central American countries over a surge in migration from those nations is creating major operational challenges at a critical time for U.S. officials charged with managing those aid programs.

The details of how and when the administration will stop sending assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and El Salvador are still unclear, and the State Department is itself still looking for answers to those questions. The controversial decision  sparked bipartisan pushback, with stakeholders suggesting the move would likely upend the president’s goal of curbing migration from the Northern Triangle countries. The aid, detractors have said, is instrumental in improving the situations in those nations and must continue to allow that progress to continue. The House Foreign Affairs Committee planned to hold a hearing on Wednesday titled “The Importance of U.S. Assistance to Central America.”

Administration officials, none of whom will testify at that hearing, have defended the policy as necessary to motivate the governments of Northern Triangle countries to more aggressively stymie migration. While Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars that are now at stake, the administration has some flexibility in spending that total due to the conditionalities lawmakers included on the funding. The aid can be canceled, for example, if the United States determines the receiving governments are not achieving certain key markers of a fair and open democracy.  

Executing those rollbacks, however, will come with a series of challenges. The United States began ramping up its aid to the Northern Triangle through the State Department and the Agency for International Development as part of an initiative called the Alliance for Prosperity. The aid programs are designed to address the economic, social, political and institutional roots of the migration crisis. That led to the largest contribution of money and diplomatic resources to Central America since the 1980s, including $2.1 billion in fiscal years 2016-2018.

“There has been a significant staffing up and pipeline of money starting in 2016, and increasing in 2017 and 2018,” said Daniel Runde, the former director of the Office of Global Development Alliances at USAID. “With these sorts of changes, it’s going to be a challenge for our government, for USAID people in the field to respond.”

Runde, now a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that U.S. missions overseas have spent several years responding to and preparing for the influx of funds. USAID has staffed up procurement personnel and experts in the region, Runde said, and began issuing contracts for various services. Those contracts were set with certain fixed periods and will now likely have to be paused midstream.

Additionally, USAID staff have hired local personnel to support those contracts. Those individuals may not wait around for the funding to resume, Runde said. American experts that USAID has contracted to lead certain programs in those countries, who the agency spent upwards of six months hiring and finding housing for, may decide to go back home and pursue different opportunities.

Given those potential consequences, Mark Feierstein, USAID’s former assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, predicted the agency is looking for ways to fulfill Trump’s mandate with as little impact as possible. He said there are a number of unanswered questions, including whether existing programs will continue or if the administration will simply zero them out immediately. It was also unclear, Feierstein said, whether foreign service personnel who have recently began three-year tours of duty will now have to come home.

“They just settled in with their families,” he said. “Where do they go now?”

USAID referred all questions to the State Department, where an official said those details are still being sorted out.

“At the secretary’s instruction, we are carrying out the president’s direction to end foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle,” the official said. “We are engaging Congress as part of this process. We will provide further details as this process moves forward.”

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, USAID Administrator Mark Green suggested it was the president’s prerogative to cut off the aid and his agency would be ready to restart its work once it receives the green light.

“We look forward to the day that the White House is satisfied that our host country partners are making the necessary commitments that we can take on some of these issues again,” Green said.

The decision has drawn bipartisan condemnation. Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the policy would “make things tragically worse,” while a series of Democrats leading that panel and others vowed to “do everything in our power to push back on the president’s misguided approach to Central America.”

The impact of the decision would likely be felt throughout federal operations. Five former U.S. military combatant commanders who oversaw the Pentagon’s efforts in Central and South America as leaders of U.S. Southern Command, released a statement this week decrying the cuts.

“We have seen firsthand that the challenges in the region cannot be solved by the military alone but require strengthening investments in development and diplomacy," the former commanders said. "Cutting aid to the region will only increase the drivers and will be even more costly to deal with on our border.”

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, speaking to CNN, recently defended the cuts by saying the only people supporting the aid within the administration are “career employees,” a notion Feierstein disputed.

“I can’t imagine there is a single person, political or career, who works on Central America who would be supportive,” said Feierstein, now a senior advisor with Albright Stonebridge Group. He added the “demonizing by this administration of career officials is reprehensible.”

For Runde, the administration will now have to worry about the effectiveness of aid programs once they eventually resume. Many of them took 18 months to design and six months to staff.

“You can’t just hit pause,” he said. “Starting it up again may take a while.”

Because of that, he explained, the administration is turning off the faucets at the worst possible time.

“They’ve finally got more people and they’re ready to do stuff,” Runde said. “It’s kind of a waste to have all these people out there.”

Ultimately, Feierstein is hopeful the administration will opt for a minimally disruptive approach."I don’t see them just walking away—assistance to ministries, farmers, teachers—I don’t see them just walking away from that,” he said.