According to a Memo circulating among the staff of the State Department and revised by Wired, the Trump administration plans to rename the American Agency for International Development (USAID) as an American humanitarian aid (IHA) and to carry it directly under the Secretary of State. The document, on which Politico reported for the first time, indicates that in the context of its reorganization, the agency “will take advantage of blockchain technology” as part of its supply process.
“All distributions would also be secure and traced via blockchain technology to radically increase safety, transparency and traceability,” said memo. “This approach would encourage innovation and efficiency among implementation partners and allow more flexible and reactive programming focused on tangible impact rather than simply finishing activities and inputs.”
The note does not show what this specifically means – if it would include cash transfers in a kind of cryptocurrency or stablecoin, for example, or simply means using a large blockchain book to follow the disbursement of the aid.
The memo occurs while members of the staff of the USAID try to understand their future. The agency was an early target of the so-called Ministry of Government efficiency (DOGE), which was effectively led by the Centillionaire Elon Musk. Shortly after the inauguration of President Trump, the State Department put all of the agency staff on administrative leave, reduced its workforce and interrupted part of the payments to partner organizations around the world, including those that do rescue work. Since then, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against the dismantling of the agency, but the memo seems to indicate that the administration plans to continue its mission to radically cut USAID and fully fold it to the State Department.
Blockchain’s plans have also taken the staff out of charge.
Few blockchain projects have managed to achieve large -scale use in the humanitarian sector. Linda Raft, a consultant who helps humanitarian organizations to adopt new technologies, says there is a reason for this – the incorporation of blockchain technology is often useless.
“It looks like a false technological solution for a problem that does not exist,” she says. “I don’t think we could never find an example where people used the blockchain where they could not use existing tools.”
Giulio Coppi, a main humanitarian officer with non -profit access, who has done research on the use of blockchain in humanitarian work, says that blockchain technologies, although sometimes effective, offer no obvious advantage compared to other tools that organizations could use, as an existing payment system or another data base tool. “There is no proven advantage that it is cheaper or better,” he says. “The way it was presented is this technological solutionist in solution that has been proven to be repeatedly so as not to have a substantial impact in reality.”
However, there have been successful cases of using blockchain technology in the humanitarian sector. In 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) led a small pilot to provide cash aid to the Ukrainians displaced by the Russian-Ukraine war in a stablecoin. Other pilots have been tested in Kenya by Kenya Red Cross Society. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which works with the Kenya team, has also helped to develop the humanitarian token solution (HTS).
