Trump is undermining his own law that prevents mass atrocities

The Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, which overwhelmingly passed across party lines in the House and Senate, institutionalizes atrocity prevention in the U.S. government.

This includes legally mandating an interagency atrocity prevention coordination body, requiring training for foreign service officers on the prevention of atrocities, requiring an atrocity prevention strategy and, critically, annual reporting to Congress on the government’s efforts. 

But this law is being ignored, to America’s detriment. 

Democratic and Republican administrations have agreed for almost two decades that preventing mass atrocities around the world is a central foreign policy interest of the United States. 

In 2011, President Obama declared mass atrocities prevention a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States. 

In 2019, the Trump administration stated that it “has made a steadfast commitment to prevent, mitigate and respond to mass atrocities, and has set up a whole-of-government interagency structure to support this commitment.” 

In 2021, President Biden said, “I recommit to the simple truth that preventing future genocides remains both our moral duty and a matter of national and global importance.” 

Preventing genocides, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing is so central to America’s own values, interests and security that in 2018, Trump signed the Elie Wiesel Act with strong bipartisan support.

This law was groundbreaking, making the U.S. the first country in the world to enshrine the objective of presenting mass atrocities globally into national law. Yet today, this law and the work it advanced are under dire threat.

What will Congress do about it?

Mass atrocities are an anathema to American interests. Large scale, deliberate attacks on civilians shock the conscience. They undermine U.S moral, diplomatic, development and security interests. 

Preventing mass atrocities not only advances American interests, but it also strengthens our international cooperation and global leadership while advancing a peaceful and more just world. 

Most importantly, America should help prevent mass atrocities because it can. It has the tools and capabilities to help protect civilians and prevent the worst forms of human rights violations. 

It cannot do this alone, as there are many reasons why atrocities take place, but it can have an impact. And in today’s world, this work is more important than ever. 

While the nation’s atrocity prevention systems aren’t perfect and there are certainly failures to point to, there has also been important progress and successes that risk being erased, making it even less likely that the U.S. will succeed at its commitment to protect civilians and prevent atrocities.

The Trump administration should have submitted its Elie Wiesel Act annual report to Congress by July 15 — this didn’t happen. 

The report is a critical tool for communicating to Congress and the American people what the U.S. is doing to advance this work.

It is a mile marker for what has been done and what the needs are. It creates an opportunity for experts outside of government to weigh in. And it allows Congress to conduct oversight over the implementation of its law. 

But not only was the report not submitted by the normal deadline, nearly all of the U.S. government’s atrocity experts have been subjected to reductions in force, forced to accept reassignment or retirement or placed on administrative leave. 

Key offices in USAID, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Intelligence Community and more have been eliminated or hollowed out. 

Without these experts and the offices that employed them, the U.S. lacks the expertise and systems to, at a minimum, fulfill its legal mandate under the law, let alone to effectively prevent, respond to and help countries recover from mass atrocities.

In response to this glaring violation of U.S. law, a group of former civil servants who served as the experts on atrocity prevention in the U.S. interagency wrote a shadow Elie Wiesel Act report, which was presented to congressional staff in a briefing last month. 

These are the people who served in the Atrocity Prevention Task Force and who, under normal circumstances, would have written the annual Elie Wiesel Act Report. Civil society also would have made key contributions, both during the writing and roll-out of the report. None of that is possible now. 

But the work and imperative to prevent atrocities is still critical. 

When it enacted the Elie Wiesel Act, Congress knew that “never again” doesn’t happen simply because good people serve in government.

True atrocity prevention requires institutionalization and incentivization in our governance system in order to compete with other, very legitimate foreign policy objectives. 

So why isn’t Congress acting when this administration has completely destroyed the ability to address these core national security issues? We hope lawmakers will read this shadow report and critically engage with the questions that it raises.

Why has the U.S. government’s ability to prevent mass atrocities been attacked? How does this breakdown affect U.S. interests? What does this mean for countries around the world? 

What can be done to protect what’s left and rebuild? And what is Congress willing to do about it, in defense of the law it passed and in line with its oversight duties?

To do any less is to abdicate the promise of “never again.” The world deserves better. And so do the American people.

Kim Hart was the global Human Rights team lead at USAID and part of USAID’s Atrocity Prevention Core Team. D. Wes Rist was an Atrocity Prevention policy advisor in the Department of State’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Both were government employees until April and served in both the Trump and Biden administrations.