Rare, good news for a Haiti in crisis: Court revives U.S. agency aid

Miami Herald

10-04-2025

In these times of strikingly bad news in Haiti, a whisper of good news for the country emerged from a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C.
Last week, the Inter-American Foundation, IAF, a small U.S. government agency that provides grants for social and economic development to grassroots organizations in Haiti and throughout the Americas, was granted a reprieve from the devastating dismantling of the agency begun several weeks ago under the auspices of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
In an order in the case of Aviel v. Gor issued last Friday 4/4 in Washington by U.S. District Judge Loren L. Alikhan, the IAF was granted a preliminary injunction restoring the agency's president, Sara Aviel, who had been abruptly and illegally removed by DOGE, to her leadership position.
The court order also declared void and without any legal effect the actions taken by DOGE.
These actions taken in February included the replacement of the IAF's Senate-confirmed board of directors by a single legally specious appointment and the firing of the IAF's 40-member entire staff — and unilaterally terminating all the agency's grant agreements and contracts. This court-ordered reprieve will enable the agency to resume its work — at least for now — of assisting disadvantaged people throughout Haiti.
Since it was created by Congress in 1969 to support the hypothesis that community-led development is more effective than top-down undertakings designed and controlled by distant authorities, the IAF has supported over 6,000 local organizations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
The IAF's grant programs in Haiti that DOGE had slashed, as outlined in a report released on Friday by Church World Service, had been serving 81,493 Haitians in locally led development initiatives.
This includes 14,500 small farmers who lost access to seeds, tools and training provided through an IAF grant; another 15,000 Haitians who lost access to medical care; and 8,100 solidarity group members whose access to credit was significantly reduced.
Now, there is a glimmer of hope that support for these and other programs in the beleaguered Caribbean nation can be restored to a nation in crisis.
This whisper of good news for Haiti reverberates throughout countries in the Western Hemisphere where, in fiscal year 2024 alone, economic development efforts conceived and managed by local, community-based organizations and supported by the IAF, benefited more than 4.6 million people through 425 grant agreements.
These FY 24 grant agreements with a total IAF investment of $24 million generated $43 million in counterpart support committed by the IAF's grantee partners. Those partners are disadvantaged men, women and children in Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador, Jamaica and other hemispheric countries.
Detailed information on these partnerships was available on the IAF's website but was taken down by DOGE.
In the so-called 'development industry' of multi-million dollar budgets and enormous projects that often fail to deliver, the IAF stands out for its small and clearly articulated grants, low overhead costs and support of sustainable efforts undertaken by the people of the hemisphere. Its 2024 budget was $60 million.
Two days after Justice Alikhan announced her decision granting the IAF's reprieve from being shuttered, and its funding slashed, the Department of Justice announced it would appeal. Depending on the court's ruling the whisper of good news may be short-lived, although they too can appeal.
Equally short-lived could be restoring that important glimmer of support, relief and hope that the work of the IAF has offered to not only tens of thousands of Haitians suffering under the weight of poverty and violence, but to millions of peaceful and hard-working citizens of Latin America and the Caribbean.
These deserving people surely merit not just a resumption of the work of the U.S. government organization that supports them but for that support to be augmented considerably. It is for this reason that Justice Alikhan's decision must stand.
Robert Maguire worked as the IAF's representative for Haiti and the Caribbean from 1979–1999 and is a retired professor of international development studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.