Emergency food, TB tests and HIV -Medicijnen: Vital Health Aid remains frozen despite the court ruling

Funds for essential health programs all over the world remain frozen and their work has not been able to resume, despite the command of a federal court who temporarily stopped the government of the government of the government’s main foreign assistance agency.

Interviews with people working on health initiatives in Africa and Asia discovered that parents in Kenya are supposed to have tuberculosis, they cannot have them tested. There is no clean drinking water in Kampen in Nigeria or Bangladesh for people who fled a civilian conflict. A therapeutic food program cannot treat acute malnourished children in South Sudan.

“We have people who travel 300 kilometers from the mountains to find their medicines in other hospitals, because there is no way they live,” said Makele Hailu, who runs an organization that helps people with HIV in the Tigray region of Ethiopia And trusted financing the United States Agency for International Development. “USAID was the provision of the medicines and transporting to rural places. Now these people are thrown away without good information. “

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday that the office of State Secretary Marco Rubio had issued more than 180 exemptions that could resume life -saving activities, and that more was approved every day. The Department did not respond to a request to provide a list of the 180 projects.

But even programs with exemptions are still frozen, according to people in more than 40 groups funded by USAID, because the payment system that USAID used to pay funds to the organizations has not operated for weeks. Programs cannot function without access to that money.

On Thursday evening, judge Amir H. Ali of the American court for the District of Columbia denied a motion to keep the Trump government in contempt of the court for freezing the help, and acknowledged that the government had acknowledged that “rapid compliance with The order “was required.

But he wrote that the restrictive command ‘defendants does not allow their general suspension of the congress of the congress,’ to have time ‘to come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the A lot of delay. “

Organizations usually receive their subsidies in small steps, by submitting applications for activities that they will indeed carry out. They rely on that rapid change to keep working. Many of the affected groups are non -profit organizations that have no other source of funds.

“Some NGOs have received exemptions, but exemptions without money are just pieces of paper – and you cannot perform programs with only paper,” said Tom Hart, the Chief Executive Officer of Interaction, who represents 165 organizations that offer foreign help. “These organizations are not paid for work from December, and they have no certainty that they will be paid for that work or any work in the future.”

During a meeting with aid organizations last week, Peter Marocco said the Trump who is now the director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that the payment system was offline but would be restored on 18 February. been.

Mr. Morocco drew one declaration submitted to the court at the federal court, which reported on compliance with the government of the restrictive order. In it, he argued that the administration acted on the basis of other regulationsNot the executive order to continue to freeze the financing.

The Trump administration insists that the exemption system makes an emergency work possible to remain unobstructed. But the process of issuing the exemptions has been complex, said the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, because the department had to verify that organizations they are looking for do not misunderstand their activities.

“The Department has established that many activities that have previously been described as life-saving humanitarian aid in reality the dei or gender ideology programs, transgender operations or other non-lifesaving aid and efforts have been explicitly introduced against the American first foreign policy agenda by the president , “said the statement.

USAID did not finance sex transitional operation; Programs with a gender focus include efforts to protect women against domestic violence and HIV infection in vulnerable teenage girls.

Organizations that have received exemptions report that one or two activities in larger projects have been approved to restart, while the surrounding and related activities are still frozen.

The Chief Executive of a large organization that provided health care that asked not to be identified because he was excluded by the USAID stop-work order with the news media, said his desk had received two of the 24 exemptions for which they applied. If the organization had all the exemptions, they would cover about five percent of its activities. So far it has not received any money. “I can’t buy medicines with an exemption,” he said.

The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation is the only organization that found the Times in an extensive overview of USAID recipients who resumed the work after receiving an exemption.

But the foundation has not been able to access new money. To restart his HIV test and treatment programs, the money it had received as a reimbursement for payouts before the stop-work order, said Trish Karlin, the executive vice-president of the organization. She said that the foundation received exemptions for 13 of its 17 projects.

“For prices where we are not financed by advances but are previously paid as a arrears after we invoice the US government, we are not paid and we owe almost $ 5 million,” she said.

Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting.