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 went directly to the government.
A senior State Department official said Wednesday the department is “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 that the Trump administration is taking steps to terminate fraud-prone programs there.
The official said the administration ordered the suspension after authorities at the Mogadishu Port demolished the WFP warehouse at the direction of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud “with no prior notification or coordination with international donor countries, including the United States.”Continue reading…