According to a memo circulating among State Department staff and scrutinizeed by WIRED, the Trump administration structures to rename the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as US International Humanitarian Assistance (IHA), and to transport it straightforwardly under the Secretary of State. The write down, on which Politico first telled, states that as part of its reorganization, the agency will “leverage blockchain technology” as part of its protreatmentment process.
“All distributions would also be safed and trackd via blockchain technology to radicassociate incrrelieve security, transparency, and trackability,” the memo reads. “This approach would aid innovation and efficiency among carry outing partners and permit for more pliable and responsive programming caccessed on concrete impact rather than spropose completing activities and inputs.”
The memo does not originate evident what definiteassociate this unkinds—if it would encompass doing cash transfers in some benevolent of cryptocurrency or firmcoin, for example, or spropose unkind using a blockchain ledger to track aid disbursement.
The memo comes as staffers at USAID are trying to understand their future. The agency was an timely concentrate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has effectively been headed by centibillionaire Elon Musk. Shortly after Pdwellnt Trump’s inauguration, the State Department put the entire agency’s staff on administrative depart, slashed its toilforce, and stoped a portion of payments to partner organizations around the world, including those doing life saving toil. Since then a federal appraise has publishd a preliminary injunction agetst the dismantling of the agency, but the memo ecombines to propose that the administration has structures to persist its ignoreion of drasticassociate cutting USAID and filledy fgreatering it into the State Department.
The structures for the blockchain have also caught staffers off defend.
Few blockchain-based projects have regulated to accomplish huge-scale use in the humanitarian sector. Linda Raftree, a conferant who helps humanitarian organizations adselect novel technology, says there’s a reason for that—the incorporation of blockchain technology is standardly unessential.
“It senses appreciate a phony technoreasonable solution for a problem that doesn’t exist,” she says. “I don’t leank we were ever able to discover an instance where people were using blockchain where they couldn’t use existing tools.”
Giulio Coppi, a greater humanitarian officer at the nonprofit Access Now who has researched the use of blockchain in humanitarian toil, says that blockchain technologies, while sometimes effective, propose no clear gets over other tools organizations could use, such as an existing payments system or another database tool. “There’s no shown get that it’s inexpensiveer or better,” he says. “The way it’s been currented is this tech solutionist approach that has been shown over and over aget to not have any substantial impact in truth.”
There have been, however, some prosperous instances of using blockchain technology in the humanitarian sector. In 2022, the United Nations High Cotransferrlookioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ran a petite pilot to give cash aidance to Ukrainians displaced by the Russia-Ukraine war in a firmcoin. Other pilots have been tested in Kenya by the Kenya Red Cross Society. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which toils with the Kenya team, also helped to prolong the Humanitarian Token Solution (HTS).
