{"id":6265,"date":"2025-01-30T21:16:22","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T21:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/?p=6265"},"modified":"2025-01-30T21:16:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T21:16:22","slug":"trump-freezes-usaid-funds-amid-ongoing-harassment-cases-in-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/2025\/01\/30\/trump-freezes-usaid-funds-amid-ongoing-harassment-cases-in-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Freezes USAID Funds Amid Ongoing Harassment Cases in Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Link to article:https:\/\/slguardian.org\/exclusive-trump-freezes-usaid-funds-amid-ongoing-harassment-cases-in-sri-lanka\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, an internal email from the Trump Administration was leaked by The Washington Post<\/em> telling USAID employees to cease communications with outside agencies, including the U.S. State Department, while the White House decides which countries will have their foreign aid restarted. USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, works in over 100 countries worldwide, one of those being Sri Lanka, where there are claims of harassment according to multiple employees. An anonymous employee described multiple instances of harassment. They also said that complaints to the higher-ups were swept under the rug and created circumstances that forced the employee to resign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is crazy. How has this not been addressed yet? I guess there wouldn’t be an effective way to tell USAID to stop considering they clearly aren’t even listening to their own employees. Some people are just weird. About the whole “freezing USAID funds” deal, I believe this is part of a huge thing that Trump did that froze funds for a bunch of agencies. It was rescinded yesterday due to everyone hating it, at least that’s where 30 minutes of browsing X got me. This freeze for USAID was scheduled for 90 days, which seems like way too long considering our foreign aid is probably keeping some of these small countries afloat. Just looking at a quick list, some of the countries that receive aid from USAID are the Maldives, Papua New Guinea, and various Pacific islands. They might not need aid, per se, but it would certainly help. Granted, the U.S. probably doesn’t gain much for funding Papua New Guinea, but there has to be some reason, or they wouldn’t have been doing it in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This relates to class because it is an example of foreign policy (or a lack thereof). The United States was getting involved in all these countries, likely due to national interest, via USAID. This also relates to class because we can analyze this decision by Trump using different levels of analysis. On the global scale, it’s a unipolar system with the United States playing global police, which is a reason why they’re in all these small countries. Additionally, on the individual scale, Trump is known for either threatening to or actually going through with outlandish plans like these to either force someone’s hand or simply perform a political stunt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Link to article:https:\/\/slguardian.org\/exclusive-trump-freezes-usaid-funds-amid-ongoing-harassment-cases-in-sri-lanka\/ Recently, an internal email from the Trump Administration was leaked by The Washington Post telling USAID employees to cease communications with outside agencies, including the U.S. State Department, while the White House decides which countries will have their foreign aid restarted. USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, works in over 100 countries worldwide, one of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":309,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/309"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6267,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265\/revisions\/6267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}