The U.S. State Department signed its first bilateral health agreement with a country in the Western Hemisphere on Wednesday. The U.S. will provide up to $22.5 million to Panama over the next three years, with Panama cofinancing the agreement by increasing its own health spending by over $11 million during that timeframe.
Following the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development last year, the U.S. is embarking on a dramatic shift in the way it delivers health aid. That includes launching its new “America First” global health strategy, and sending teams from the State Department to countries to negotiate new agreements, which the U.S. has said would start being implemented in April.
This new approach prioritizes providing money directly to governments as opposed to funneling it through nongovernmental organizations — a structure that often happened with USAID and that the Trump administration has heavily criticized for having high overhead costs and creating parallel systems.