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The next year, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit, reported a crisis in Somalia. The U.S. government, the largest donor to the country, had recently cut off aid to parts of Somalia to avoid its donations falling into the hands of Al Shabaab, a jihadi group that controlled large swaths of Somali territory. N.G.O. workers in conflict zones are accustomed to negotiating with armed groups, and sometimes paying tolls at their checkpoints to gain access to civilians. But the consequences of these interactions weighed more heavily, and, as the famine worsened, many groups avoided working in Somalia for fear of prosecution. “Part of the problem for the aid agencies was it was really murky to understand what would and would not constitute material support,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who was then the policy director at Mercy Corps and, later, an official at U.S.A.I.D. under Obama, told me. “One of the many weird things during all of this was the Administration saying, ‘Don’t worry, go in, we’ve never prosecuted someone for something like this.’ We were thinking, O.K., but who comes after Obama?”
Months later, the Administration released the aid. “By then it was far, far, far too late,” Konyndyk said. An estimated two hundred and sixty thousand people were dead, more than half of them young children. Mark Bartolini, the director of U.S.A.I.D.’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, told me that, during one of his first overseas visits in that role, he sensed a change in attitudes toward America. “I met with a very senior official of a world-renowned humanitarian organization,” he told me. “His first comment to me was, ‘How does it feel to work for a government that’s criminalizing humanitarian aid?’ ”