More than 14 million people could die over the next five years because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to an analysis published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet.
Researchers calculated the lifesaving benefits of USAID funding over a 21-year period, then used the data to determine how many lives would be lost without USAID funding in the future.
Donald Trump (left, in orange makeup) and Elon Musk will kill more people over the next five years than many of the most infamous tyrants of the 20th Century.
The analysis found that, from 2001 through 2021, USAID-funded programs prevented nearly 92 million deaths across 133 countries, including more than 25 million deaths from HIV/AIDS, around 11 million from diarrheal diseases, 8 million from malaria and nearly 5 million from tuberculosis.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in March that he was canceling 83% of USAID’s programs, which he said did not serve “the core national interests of the United States,” and added that the State Department would absorb the roughly 1,000 remaining programs.
The action brought many overseas humanitarian efforts to a grinding halt, leading to the closings of food kitchens and health clinics in underserved countries and in some cases delaying or stopping the distribution of lifesaving medications, bed nets to ward off malaria, nutritional packets for starving children and chlorine tablets to disinfect dirty water.
The analysis, done by a team of international researchers from Spain, Brazil, Mozambique and the United States, estimated the impact of the 83% funding cuts, assuming they remain through 2030. Of the more than 14 million deaths forecast, around 4.5 million would be among children under 5, the authors found.
“The numbers are striking, but we are not the only group that did this kind of analysis,” said Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, who coordinated the study. Other research groups, he said, “came up with similar magnitudes — millions and millions of deaths that will be caused by the defunding of USAID.”
A model from a Boston University researcher estimated that funding cuts for U.S. aid and support organizations are leading to 88 deaths per hour.
Before it was gutted, USAID was a key partner in overseas efforts to alleviate poverty and disease. It also supported the economic growth of low- and middle-income countries with the capacity to trade with the United States. The agency managed more than $35 billion last year, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Elon Musk is trying to rewrite the history of his four-month tenure in Washington. As the billionaire founder of Tesla and Space X returns to the private sector after four months as a “special government employee,” he has put aside the celebratory chainsaw and cast himself as a misunderstood outsider whose dreams of efficiency were stymied by a terminally broken bureaucracy.
Marco Rubio, seen here enjoying free tickets to a UFC event, will be personally responsible for a death toll greater than that of Pol Pot.
Nowhere is this attempted whitewashing more jarring than his effort to sweep away the consequences of the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, which has supported food assistance programs around the world and helped administer the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. Musk once bragged about feeding USAID into a “woodchipper.” But, on May 20, when Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked about the disruption of PEPFAR funding in an interview in Qatar, the tech executive dismissed the claim out of hand.
“First of all, the program, the AIDS medication program is continuing,” he said. “So your fundamental premise is wrong. Do you have another example, since the one you cited is false?”
As Husain pressed on, explaining that the State Department—which is absorbing what’s left of USAID—had granted a waiver only to certain PEPFAR programs, Musk repeated his denial.
“It’s false, it’s false,” he said. Before Husain moved on, Musk made a promise: “Okay well which ones aren’t being funded? I’ll fix it right now.”
But it was not false. And Musk did not fix it.
Despite his assurances on stage—and his subsequent assertion in response to the rocker Bono that “zero people have died” as a result of funding cuts—the destruction he spearheaded is continuing to have devastating effects in places that relied on USAID for lifesaving aid. But don’t take my word for it; take the Trump administration’s. State Department cables obtained by Mother Jones warn that cuts to foreign assistance programs are driving hunger and human trafficking in Malawi, and threatening to undo years of progress battling the AIDS epidemic in Lesotho, by terminating a program that worked to prevent HIV transmission from mothers to their children.
White evangelical Christians are enthusiastic supporters in killing millions of poor, non-white people in other countries.
These are just two examples, based on internal records. But the consequences of slashed or interrupted services have been severe and wide-ranging. The US has cut programs for malaria. At a hearing on Capitol Hill last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio celebrated cutting “$10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique”—a PEPFAR-supported program that reduced HIV transmission in 2.5 million men by 60 percent. The assertion that people will you die if you take away their food or medication is not a hypothetical; New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof previously reported on an HIV-positive 10-year-old orphan from South Sudan named Peter Donde who died from a pneumonia infection after the administration shuttered the community health program that ensured his access to medication. Rubio, like Musk, has called the reports that children have died as a result of program interruptions a “lie.”
Before he went on the defensive, though, Musk seemed to relish the process of gutting foreign assistance. Destroying USAID was one of Musk’s first tasks at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In his first weeks in Washington, the world’s richest man spread a conspiracy theory that USAID had helped start the Covid-19 pandemic, falsely suggested that it secretly bankrolled news organizations like Politico, and dismissed the agency’s employees as “radical-left Marxists who hate America.” The sense that the people wielding the chainsaw did not understand what they were cutting down was reinforced by Musk himself, who stated at a public cabinet meeting that “we accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention but had quickly restored the program. (The program in fact had not been restored.)
Musk was not simply going rogue. His attacks were in sync with an executive order from President Donald Trump ordering a review of all foreign assistance projects, and a freeze on foreign-aid spending pending further approval. Although the State Department announced that certain life-saving programs, such as food assistance and PEPFAR, would receive waivers to continue operating, those waivers were slow to arrive and undercut by payment issues. And some programs that seemed to meet the narrow criteria were terminated anyway after a cursory review process.
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