The Trump administration has suspended all U.S. assistance programs that benefit Somalia’s federal government, the State Department said Wednesday, citing allegations that Somali officials destroyed a World Food Programme warehouse and seized 76 metric tons of food aid meant for impoverished civilians.
In a statement, the department said the action reflects what it described as the administration’s “zero-tolerance policy for waste, theft, and diversion of life-saving assistance.”
The State Department said it had “paused all ongoing U.S. assistance programs which benefit the Somali Federal Government,” and said any resumption would depend on the Somali federal government taking accountability for what the department called “unacceptable actions” and taking “appropriate remedial steps.”
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the department was “undertaking a thoughtful and individualized review to determine which ongoing assistance programs directly or indirectly benefit the Somali Federal Government and to take appropriate actions to pause, redirect or terminate such programs.” The official said Somalia had long been “a black hole of poorly overseen U.S. assistance” and said the administration was taking steps to terminate fraud-prone programs there.
The official said the administration ordered the suspension after authorities at Mogadishu Port demolished the World Food Programme warehouse at the direction of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, “with no prior notification or coordination with international donor countries, including the United States.”
It was not immediately clear how much assistance would be affected by the suspension, the report said, noting that the Trump administration has slashed foreign aid expenditures, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, and had not released new country-by-country data.
The article said the U.S. had provided $770 million in assistance for projects in Somalia during the last year of Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, but only a fraction of that money had gone directly to the Somali government.
The suspension also comes amid broader administration criticism of Somali refugees and migrants in the United States, including allegations of fraud involving child care centers in Minnesota, the report said. The administration has also imposed restrictions on Somalis seeking to come to the U.S. and has made it more difficult for those already in the United States to stay.
Somalia, located in the Horn of Africa, is one of the world’s poorest nations and has faced chronic insecurity for decades, exacerbated in recent years by multiple natural disasters including severe droughts.
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