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When the two earthquakes struck Venezuela last week, killing more than 1,400 people and leaving tens of thousands missing, there was a silent pause in Washington with everyone wondering: with no USAID, how will the U.S. respond to this disaster?
Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, USAID surged resources, with urban search-and-rescue teams wheels-up within hours. Naval vessels steamed to Haiti’s capital. President Obama placed USAID as the lead agency. The machinery of American humanitarian response was moving. The Trump Administration has now responded: multiple USAR teams from Fairfax County, Los Angeles, and Miami-Dade are on the ground, the State Department has pledged $300 million in assistance, with more promised, and the Department “of War” is providing C-17 airlift and Marine Osprey support. This is deja vu all over again.
Now the question is whether we have learned anything since Haiti.
I've seen this machinery up close. I coordinated the U.S. response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake from Washington — the then largest American humanitarian mobilization in a single country. We had genuine resources, genuine commitment, and genuine failures. Fifteen years later, as Venezuela's crisis unfolds, the lessons we learned are likely to be repeated again.
The most effective humanitarian tool is also the least glamorous: cash. It lets organizations buy exactly what is needed immediately, spurs local markets rather than undercutting them, and reaches beneficiaries faster. The new Trump Administration partnership with Walmart and Global Empowerment Mission to collect in-kind donations — clothing, toys, household goods - will be a time-consuming logistical mess.
We saw NGOs with more experience than GEM make the same mistake in Haiti. Those items filled valuable warehouse space while people went without shelter; sorting and distribution consumed staff time and resources. In Venezuela, that same supply chain runs directly into CLAP — the Bolivarian food distribution network that conditions assistance on political loyalty. Cash allows organizations and individuals to purchase locally what they need, building up the local markets.
The U.S. military performed heroic and essential functions in the early days of the Haiti response. But it performed them at defense-budget rates, and they continued humanitarian tasks long past the point where cheaper civilian alternatives were available. The USS Comfort hospital ship sat in Port-au-Prince harbor for months at approximately $1 million per day — with no patients on board. The full cost of the military response was obscured across multiple budget authorities, making honest accounting impossible. In addition, with 23,000 personnel on the ground, it made coordination impossible across all the other actors on the ground.
USAID formally recommended transitioning military operations out after 8 weeks. Political leadership pushed back, and the military footprint persisted until summer, costing more money and crowding out the civilian and longer-term programming that should have taken its place.
Within days, USAID surged experienced officers to Haiti with decades of technical expertise in civilian response to humanitarian crisis, honed after the Asian tsunami, the Pakistan earthquakes, and other relief efforts. Without USAID’s experienced coordination and personnel, the default to military logistics in Venezuela will be even stronger. And with Venezuela's acute sovereignty sensitivities — a country where 25 years of Bolivarian politics have institutionalized resistance to U.S. military presence as a founding national narrative — a visible American military footprint isn't just expensive, it is politically combustible. The Delcy Rodriquez government is already unpopular, and such a presence could further delegitimize the very transitional government it is meant to bolster.
The Trump Administration has starved the UN of resources, and ironically is now relying almost entirely on the UN for relief efforts in Venezuela. Of the U.S.’s $300 million commitment, $200 million flows directly through OCHA’s Venezuela pooled fund — an institution the Administration has simultaneously been defunding.
In Haiti, within weeks of the earthquake, political pressure prioritized permanent housing construction over temporary shelter. The reasoning was politically driven — the donor community wanted houses built. There was a concern that anything less than permanent wasn’t good enough. The consequence was catastrophic - hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians remained in tent cities for years, because the "permanent" programs moved slowly through land disputes and contractor delays while the temporary shelter that could have housed them in months went underfunded.
The simple missing answer we neglected was to surge supplies – plywood, lumber, cinderblock corrugated metals, plastic sheeting – to affected areas and provide support to local entities who could rebuild structures to last two to three years. Supplies should be purchased on the local market to further spur the local markets.
The failure to prioritize the removal of rubble was a strategic miscalculation. The Haiti earthquake generated an estimated 10 million cubic meters of debris. Rather than treating its removal as a strategic prerequisite — clear the roads, open the sites, enable everything else — it was treated as a logistics afterthought. No single agency owned it. Only one disposal site was identified, requiring trucking rubble through the broken downtown on narrow urban roads. Dump trucks spent 8-10 hours on each load of rubble. The bottleneck cascaded across the entire response for years.
Venezuela's cities, particularly Caracas and the coastal communities near the epicenter, face similar dynamics. The pressure to show reconstruction will arrive before the rubble is cleared. The pressure to build permanent housing will arrive before anyone has mapped who owns the land — a question made vastly more complicated by 25 years of Chavista-era property redistributions. Permanent housing takes years to complete even when the land is easily available; people will need shelter good enough to live in while a permanent solution is created.
Corruption is a cancer that will bring down governments and create long-term instability (just look at Haiti), and establishing mechanisms at the outset is a core design requirement for any response. Corruption in Venezuela is categorically harder. The Bolivarian state has spent 25 years building sophisticated infrastructure for capturing and redirecting resource flows. The CLAP food distribution system — the government's commodity network — is a documented political control tool, conditioning food on political loyalty.
The same sanctions-evasion architecture that moves Venezuelan oil revenue through front companies and cryptocurrency channels is fully available to divert humanitarian cash.A response that doesn't build independent financial oversight, beneficiary verification, and distribution channels explicitly designed to bypass state capture mechanisms before the first dollar is obligated will hemorrhage resources.
The window to get the architecture right is now. That is the lesson Haiti burned into everyone who was there: the cameras arrive before the coordination does, and decisions made in the first two weeks shape outcomes for the next ten years.
Venezuela is not Haiti. It is more complex and more fraught diplomatically — and this time, the agency built to apply these lessons no longer exists to apply them. Haiti was not a failure; lives were saved, a devastated capital came back to life, and a generation of practitioners learned hard truths about sequencing, cost, and corruption. The risk now is that we forget it and make the same mistakes again, because the institution that absorbed those lessons is gone, and no one has rebuilt the muscle memory to apply them.
The people of Venezuela deserve the benefit of what we learned in Haiti, not a response built from scratch. So does American credibility.
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