The Biden administration Wednesday took steps to make it easier for humanitarian aid to reach Afghanistan as the combination of the pandemic, a severe drought and a cash shortage have left the country’s fragile economy on the brink of collapse.

The Treasury Department said the measures would give U.S. and international aid groups more freedom to operate in the country, while allowing the United States to maintain economic pressure on the Taliban.

“The United States is the largest single provider of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan,” Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting the people of Afghanistan, which is why Treasury is taking these additional steps to facilitate assistance.”

But diplomats and activists said the changes might not be enough to rescue Afghanistan from what one U.N. official called “shocking levels of need and suffering.”

The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has put the Biden administration on the defensive three months after the Taliban assumed power and American and international forces left the country. U.S. and international sanctions that were designed to cut the Taliban off from the international financial system have left the entire country with a cash shortage, crippling banks and businesses and sending prices soaring.

The United States does not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Following the group’s takeover of the country this year, the Biden administration froze $9.5 billion of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves, stopped sending shipments of dollars to Afghanistan’s central bank and pressured the International Monetary Fund to delay plans to transmit emergency reserve funds to the country.

The Treasury Department said new “general licenses” would allow financial transactions involving the Taliban and members of the Haqqani network as long as the money was used for things such as projects to meet basic human needs, civil society development and environmental and natural resource protection.