America’s expansive, near-immediate response to aid victims of the twin earthquakes in Venezuela on Wednesday has defied ominous predictions that streamlining the country’s international response by eliminating USAID would leave it flat-footed in the face of disaster.
Venezuela, where severe earthquakes are uncommon but not unprecedented, suffered two earthquakes in quick succession late on Wednesday documented as being above a magnitude 7, devastating the state of La Guaira and the capital of Caracas. As of Friday morning, the Venezuelan socialist government has documented 589 people dead and over 2,000 injured, as well as untold numbers missing under the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Venezuela is especially poorly equipped to handle disaster response after over two decades of socialism – first under late dictator Hugo Chávez, then under his protege Nicolás Maduro – as the socialists hollowed out the country’s healthcare system, destroyed its prized oil industry, and funneled all of its cash into a repressive apparatus to imprison, torture, and kill ant-socialist dissidents.
Members of the County of Los Angeles Fire Department’s international urban search and rescue team (USA-2) prepare to leave for Venezuela on June 25, 2026. (Blake Fagan / AFP via Getty)
The government interim “president” Delcy Rodríguez was left with in January, following Maduro’s arrest, has already proven incapable of responding to the catastrophe alone. Initial images of search and rescue operations showed individuals using mobile phones as flashlights, pointing them into giant mounds of rubble. The socialist government asked those looking to find missing loved ones to use the VenApp, an espionage mobile phone app the government uses to monitor and repress suspected dissidents, to document who they are seeking.
The State Department moved rapidly to deploy support to Venezuela, moving dozens of trained rescue workers and dogs into the country to help find missing people. As the earthquakes destroyed much of the closest airport to the disaster site, Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía, the State Department is coordinating with the Department of War to use its specialized aircraft to deploy resources. U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the Pentagon’s arm in Latin America, confirmed late on Wednesday that U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Jarrard landed in Caracas to lead Pentagon support efforts for disaster relief.
“Assigned U.S. military forces will utilize fixed and rotor wing aircraft to provide specialized mobility services and assist U.S. Government personnel, search and rescue teams, and partners assessing damage and delivering critical life-saving assistance,” SOUTHCOM explained.
The State Department published a detailed explanation of how it is leading relief efforts on Thursday, coordinating with humanitarian aid groups on the ground as well as the U.S. military. It has created a formal Venezuela Earthquakes Response Task Force to coordinate among American federal government agencies and state capabilities that can offer support.
“The Department is deploying a regional Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), which includes two specialized urban search and rescue teams focused on locating and reaching survivors,” it explained, adding:
[T]he U.S. is mobilizing $150 million in assistance to Venezuela through our assistance partners, drawing on $50 million in new bilateral awards to partners on the ground in Venezuela, including World Vision, Samaritan’s Purse, Catholic Relief Services, International Medical Corps, the International Organization for Migration, and the World Food Programme, plus a $100 million contribution to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Venezuela pooled fund.
At least two specialized rescue teams – one from Fairfax, Virginia, and one from Los Angeles, California – have flown to Caracas.
Delcy Rodríguez offered her gratitude to Washington, recognizing the expansive and urgent effort.
“We thank U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration, who have been in constant contact with Venezuelan authorities, offering support and solidarity to the people of Venezuela in the face of this tragedy that has plunged us into mourning,” she said in a written message on Thursday. “Venezuela will never forget the helping hand extended to our people during these difficult times.”
Rodríguez also noted that she spoke personally to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and expressed gratitude to him for coordinating relief efforts. The “interim president” publicly thanking the United States for humanitarian support is particularly notable given that, while she served as vice president for dictator Maduro, she went out of the way to discourage starving Venezuelans from accessing American humanitarian aid, accusing the first Trump administration of injecting food aid with “carcinogens” to kill Venezuelans.
The swift and efficient deployment of aid in what Rodríguez described as a “complicated” circumstance undermines the widespread panic in mainstream media following President Trump’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency that for years worked outside of the control of the State Department, presumably to distribute foreign aid. One of President Trump’s first moves in his second term in the White House was to fold USAID into the State Department and task Secretary of State Marco Rubio with shutting it down. The move prompted a wave of panic across the celebrity sphere, as top names such as Charlize Theron, Bono, and Angelina Jolie accused the Trump administration of killing children.
In reality, investigations into the agency following the news that it would be incorporated into the State Department revealed serious efficiency flaws and poorly chosen priorities – a situation that could have impeded a successful effort to help Venezuela today. In February 2025, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) revealed following an investigation into USAID that it had spent millions of dollars subsidizing, in one instance, Ukrainian businesses, without proper oversight of how the money was being used. Similarly that month, the former head of the U.S. government’s Afghanistan oversight agency John Sopko lamented that USAID was “broken” and geared toward spending money flagrantly without analyzing its efficacy in solving international problems.
“The whole objective was spend the money,” Sopko said at the time in an interview with Fox Business. “The test wasn’t what the outcome was, the test was, did you spend your appropriated funds? And if you didn’t, you lost money.”
“At USAID, 12 cents of every dollar was reaching the recipient. That means that in order for us to get aid to somebody, we had to spend all this other money supporting this foreign aid industrial complex,” Rubio explained in May 2025.
“We’re going to find more efficient ways to deliver aid to people directly,” he promised. “It’s going to be directed by our regional bureaus. It’s going to sponsor programs that make a difference. And it’s going to be part of a holistic approach to our foreign policy.”
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