Devex Newswire: Trump transition team begins late handovers with USAID

Trump's transition team finally rings USAID's doorbell, starting the handover fashionably late. Led by foreign policy aficionado Cartwright Weiland, they'll try to catch up and smoothly switch the U.S. foreign aid baton.

Also in today’s edition: We look at Brazil’s bid to stop deforestation, and highlight one of U.S. President Joe Biden’s final moves in office.

+ Listen to the latest episode of our weekly podcast where we discussed the key trends that have shaped the global development landscape in 2024 and their implications for the year ahead.

First contact

Representatives of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have finally contacted USAID to begin preparations for the incoming administration’s takeover of U.S. foreign assistance agencies, according to a notice sent to USAID staff on Wednesday and seen by Devex.

An agency review team — also known as a landing team — collects information about government agencies and their work to help ease the transition of power from one administration to the next. The relatively late arrival of Trump’s representatives to USAID means that this transition is running behind schedule compared to most of its predecessors.

Trump’s USAID landing team is led by Cartwright Weiland, according to the internal memo. Weiland is a senior counsel to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a former member of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State. He also served as rapporteur on the Commission on Unalienable Rights, a controversial independent advisory committee at the State Department that scrutinized the basis of international human rights.

Run, forest, run

During a somber COP29 U.N. climate summit in Baku last month, a shimmer of hope emerged: Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon dropped by a sizable 30.6% last year — the biggest decline in nearly a decade.

At the summit, climate scientist Carlos Nobre shared an optimistic forecast, predicting a reduction in Amazon deforestation by up to 65% by the end of 2024 compared to 2022. This impressive turnaround is largely credited to Brazil's strengthened environmental policies under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the environment minister Marina Silva.

With these gains, Brazil is now advocating for more international support to sustain its efforts, my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz writes. The spotlight is on the proposed Tropical Forest Finance Facility, aiming to channel funds to nations that successfully preserve their forests.

This proactive approach is a revival of successful strategies from the early 2000s, marked by strict regulations and real-time satellite monitoring. These measures drastically cut deforestation rates, backed by robust enforcement and international collaboration. As Brazil seeks to lead by example, it's pushing for global financial mechanisms to reward forest conservation, setting the stage for a greener future at international forums such as COP30 — which Brazil will host.

Read: How did Brazil slash deforestation — and can others recreate the win? 

Related: How Meta is uniting with research org WRI to map the world’s forests (Pro)

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Global Voices: Food systems

In Devex Global Voices 2024, we have gathered predictions for the year ahead in the fields of artificial intelligence, localization, climate, and more, as well as some of our most-read opinion pieces this year.

Today we’re featuring some of our most-read op-eds on food systems:

• Investing in nutrition is investing in a more resilient world by Brieuc Pont and Lawrence Haddad.

• How blended finance can catalyze private capital for agriculture by Federica de Gaetano and Bruce Campbell.

• The climate crisis is a nutrition crisis — but solutions exist by Shawn Baker and Philomena Orji.

Read on for more of the most insightful global development professionals’ op-eds of 2024.

It’s over

The year is closing with some good news in public health: Rwanda declared the end of its Marburg outbreak today. This came after a 42-day countdown, with no new cases since Oct. 30, Devex Senior Reporter Sara Jerving tells me.

The case fatality rate of this outbreak was 22.7%, much lower than previous Marburg outbreaks — which have reached as high as 88%. In a press conference yesterday, Africa CDC’s Dr. Ngashi Ngongo said the Rwandan government’s prompt and transparent communication on the outbreak, strong surveillance systems, contact tracing, case isolation, and short laboratory turnaround times were some of the reasons for this success.

However, another outbreak on the continent is still raising questions. There’s a mysterious outbreak of what has been called “Disease X” — the placeholder name for an unknown pathogen that can cause a pandemic — in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kwango province, with 592 cases and 37 confirmed deaths at health facilities and 44 deaths reported in the community. The country’s health ministry said this week it was severe malaria, but Ngongo said there are still some questions. There’s been a new development: In recent days, a man in that community died from hemorrhagic fever. His samples have been sent for testing in Kinshasa.

Malaria is endemic to the region, so it’s not surprising that people have tested positive for it, Ngongo said. Given this, there are currently two running hypotheses: The outbreak could be due to severe malaria that has been exacerbated by malnutrition — or it could be some other viral disease, also exacerbated by malaria and malnutrition. He said the labs will test the samples from the man who died to see if the cause of his death might be Lassa fever, Marburg, or Ebola.

“We are hoping that, you know, in the next one week, we should be able to get at least the initial result on those samples,” he said.

Last stands

As one of Biden’s final moves in office, the U.S. submitted its nationally determined contribution, or NDC, yesterday. Every country that’s party to the Paris Agreement is required to submit an NDC, or climate action plan that lays out how it will work toward the goals of the agreement. NDCs must be submitted every five years and all of them are due by early 2025, Jesse tells me.

Biden has committed to a 61%-66% cut in greenhouse gases in 2035 from 2005 levels, versus the 50%-52% reduction the administration agreed to in 2021. In a briefing from the White House, the government said that this goal “keeps the United States on a straight line or steeper path to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050.”

Not everyone is feeling so jolly about this new promise, arguing that the NDC highlights a transition to clean energy rather than a focus on reducing fossil fuel usage.

“We welcome President Biden's acknowledgment that fossil fuels must be phased out,” says Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International. “But other elements of this NDC utterly fail to deliver. The NDC ignores scientists' clear warning that halting new fossil fuel projects is essential to keep warming below 1.5°C. Instead, it doubles down on the failed strategy of counting on clean energy to displace fossil fuels without simultaneous efforts to stop fossil fuels.”

Despite climate successes under Biden, the country also planned the largest oil and gas expansion of any country in the world over the next decade under his administration. U.S. gas export capacity has also tripled since 2018.

In other news

The U.S. confirmed Wednesday its first severe human case of bird flu in a critically ill Louisiana resident who may have been exposed to infected poultry. Meanwhile, California declared an emergency over a bird flu outbreak infecting its dairy herds. [Reuters]

MacKenzie Scott has announced that Yield Giving, her philanthropic vehicle, has awarded $2 billion in grants to 199 organizations in 2024, bringing the total she’s given away since 2019 to $19.2 billion. [AP News]

Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini faces a court verdict on Friday over allegedly detaining some 100 migrants at sea on a humanitarian rescue boat in 2019. If convicted, he could receive up to six years in prison. [Reuters]

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