The Trump administration has mobilized money, personnel and military equipment in response to the earthquakes in Venezuela, in what aid experts say is a major U.S. disaster relief effort.
An American response on that scale, which includes $100 million in new funds for partner aid organizations, would typically be unsurprising. But it comes from an administration that has slashed foreign aid budgets and maintained that the United States should bear a lighter humanitarian burden worldwide.
At the same time, President Trump has an incentive to assist Venezuela, where he is trying to foster an American-driven oil production boom after his military seized Nicolás Maduro, the country’s strongman leader, in January. Soon afterward, Mr. Trump said he expected that the United States would be running the country and extracting its oil for years.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has rejected complaints about last year’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and deep cuts to other foreign aid programs by insisting that other wealthy nations, like China, must contribute more than they do.
But after a pair of powerful quakes last Wednesday in Venezuela, he boasted about America’s response. “It’ll be big; it’ll be fast; and it’ll be effective,” he told reporters last week.
The most urgent priority after an earthquake is the deployment of search-and-rescue teams able to find survivors, who have just hours to live if trapped in rubble. The State Department has sent three such teams totaling 300 people. The teams are from Los Angeles, the Miami area and Fairfax, Va.
The size and speed of the U.S. deployment to Venezuela were on par with previous efforts, said Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a director of disaster response at U.S.A.I.D. during the Obama administration.
“It seems like the system has worked the way it was meant to work,” he said. “They just borrowed from the systems that U.S.A.I.D. had developed over the decades.”
He added that State Department officials appeared to have made a course correction after the Trump administration was widely criticized for failing to send search-and-rescue teams to Myanmar after an earthquake there in March 2025. U.S. officials were demolishing U.S.A.I.D. at that time, and they even fired three aid workers who had arrived in Myanmar to do assessments.
However, Mr. Konyndyk said that the State Department’s announcement on Monday of $300 million in total U.S. aid for Venezuela involved sleight-of-hand calculations.
Of the total, he said, $100 million comes from a pooled fund at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and is not new money dispensed by the State Department after the earthquakes. The department had announced before the quakes that it was giving funds to that U.N. office.
Asked for comment, the State Department confirmed in an email that $100 million had indeed been mobilized by the U.N. agency. Of the other $200 million, half of that was money or material support given by the Defense Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the State Department for its own logistics.
That left $100 million in new funds announced since the quakes for partner aid organizations, the department said.
The department said that tens of millions of its aid would be disbursed or used by groups including the Red Cross, UNICEF, Samaritan’s Purse and Catholic Relief Services.
The immediate U.S. response has been comparable to some other major American disaster relief efforts in recent decades.
Days after a January 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti and ultimately killed more than 100,000 people, for instance, President Barack Obama pledged an initial $100 million in aid. (That was just a first step, however: Within five months, the U.S. contribution would total more than $1 billion and was still growing, according to the Obama White House.)
It remains to be seen how many U.S. dollars pledged actually reach Venezuela. Mr. Trump often fails to follow through on showy financial pledges, although that is less true for funds announced by the State Department, as is the case here.
The U.S. military is at work in the country. An American team helped repair two damaged runways at Simón Bolívar International Airport, near Caracas, where 100 airmen have arrived to help manage a coming flood of relief supplies from around the world, according to the Defense Department.
About 130 U.S. Marines have also begun arriving to help reopen the port of La Guaira, where the amphibious landing ship Fort Lauderdale is docked, so that supplies can be received there. American planes and helicopters and even satellites are conducting aerial damage assessments of the country, according to the State Department.
Michael LeFever, a retired Navy vice admiral who oversaw the U.S. military disaster relief operation after a major 2005 quake in Pakistan, said his impression was that the absence of U.S.A.I.D.’s longtime infrastructure was “hampering our impact.” And a lack of working ties with Venezuelan officials — the United States and Venezuela had frosty relations for decades before Mr. Maduro’s capture — will further complicate efforts, he said.
While it is natural for the United States to have concern for nations in its own hemisphere, the Trump administration’s response probably also reflects an increased focus on using foreign aid for strategic purposes.
Foreign aid is “a tool of our foreign policy, and it should be used for the purpose of furthering the national interest,” Mr. Rubio told reporters in December.
Mr. Rubio insisted that this did not mean the United States no longer cared about human suffering. But, he added, aid money “should be spent in places and on things that further our foreign policy.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to send humanitarian aid, as well as search-and-rescue teams, to Venezuela “should be applauded on a moral level,” Daniel DePetris, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy research group, wrote on social media.
“But the motives are also personal and geopolitical,” he added. “Trump points to Venezuela constantly as a success story for the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ and the country is very much a legacy item for him. To watch it suffer without lifting a finger would reconfirm suspicions that Trump only cares about reaping profits from Venezuela’s oil sector, not the people who actually live there.”
Venezuela is also a legacy issue for Mr. Rubio, who was a main architect of the pressure campaign that the Trump administration carried out against the country starting last year.
That has included military operations in the region, including strikes on civilian boats that many legal experts say amount to extrajudicial killings.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
