USAID
From 1961 to 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) managed international projects that dealt with food aid, disaster relief, and health and education programs in over 100 countries.
For over six decades, support from the American people vastly increased access to education and healthcare for millions; helped achieve significant reductions in child and maternal mortality; was instrumental in eradicating smallpox and reducing malaria deaths; helped secure democracy for vulnerable nations; and was responsible for sparking economic development in various regions throughout the world. We provided critical assistance during natural disasters, famines, and other emergencies; prevented millions of new infections of HIV/AIDS; and provided access to clean drinking water for millions.
On his first day back in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14169, freezing all new foreign development assistance obligations and disbursements. Four days later, a stop-work order was issued for all existing foreign assistance awards; on February 2nd the USAID website was taken down; and five days later, signs identifying the headquarters of USAID were removed.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) quickly started to systematically dismantle the rest of USAID, shutting down most all its programming and laying off almost all its staff. This included people working in war zones, who found themselves abruptly cut off from their work emails and the app they relied on to help them in case of an emergency.
Immediately after Elon, in his words, “fed USAID into the wood chipper,” at least 11,500 Americans and 54,575 foreigners lost their jobs; around $1 billion in payments for work that had already been completed was frozen; $500 million in food was just sitting in ports, ships and warehouses, rotting; health workers who provided preventive care were forced to leave devastated villages; and immunizations, Vitamin A distributions, and deworming were abruptly stopped.
Wait? Deworming? What the heck is that? … many Americans are probably asking, since we don’t have a clue of the horrors people in other countries face.
Children in many countries are besieged by worms. Apologies if you’re eating breakfast, but a female worm can lay 200,000 eggs a day – which vastly worsens children’s malnutrition since the very little nutrients they receive go to the parasites, not to them. The great news is that aid agencies can deworm a child for less than $1 a year. The bad news is the $1 has now been cut.
Just in case you’re not sufficiently outraged yet, a seven-page memo obtained by Bloomberg – dated June 3, 2025, prepared for Secretary of State Marco Rubio and signed by nine U.S. State Department aides – revealed that, instead of $6 billion going to dying children, the Trump/ Vance administration is going to use that money – six billion dollars – to dismantle USAID, including hundreds of millions that will be used to fight the legal challenges that are surely coming thanks to the Trump/ Vance administration closing the agency.
In a gallant – but we hope unsuccessful – effort to clear his conscience, in testimony before Congress on May 21, 2025, Secretary of State Rubio said that the gutting of USAID by the Trump/Vance administration had not caused any unnecessary deaths: “No children are dying on my watch… no one has died because of USAID.”
That is a preposterous thing for him to say. Without question, directly because of heartless decisions made by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk, babies have needlessly died of malnutrition, cholera, malaria and AIDS, and more women and young girls have fallen victim to violence, both physical and sexual. That’s just a fact.
Humanitarian aid in 2025 reached 25 million fewer people than the year before; over 2,000 health clinics have closed in crisis zones around the world; global food aid funding has dropped 40 percent; and millions of people have lost access to critical HIV treatment and testing.
Between 2000 and 2020, the number of children who die before their 5th birthday dropped by half. This is perhaps the greatest achievement ever in global health and shows a remarkable level of investment, dedication and collaboration between governments, donors, health professionals, communities and families.
However, for the first time in decades, child deaths rose in 2025. To pin down actual numbers on this is difficult, but we’re going to give you three models so you can decide for yourself.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimates that around 243,000 more children under 5 years died in 2025 than in 2024 (the numbers are based on deaths as of October 17, 2025). However, other studies show that number to be way low. A study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet estimates that USAID funding cuts specifically accounted for the deaths of around 690,000 children under the age of 5 in 2025 and that more than 3 million children under age 5 will die during the Trump/Vance administration because of their cuts to humanitarian aid.
An Impact Counter designed by Dr. Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease mathematical modeller and health economist, puts the number of child deaths at 488,550 in 2025, or 88 deaths every hour. Her team’s work has reached over 150,000 people in over 175 countries, and her methodology has been peer-reviewed by multiple academic cohorts across disciplines to certify accuracy and transparency.
To add insult to injury, many of these deaths could have been prevented with existing resources. BUT, thanks to the haphazard and incompetent way the Trump/Vance administration dissolved USAID, over 60,000 metric tons of food – along with other commodities and nutritional supplements already paid for by the U.S. taxpayer – sat in warehouses in America and around the world rotting and expiring instead of being transported to crisis zones and famine-stricken countries. It’s estimated these supplies could have helped over 60 million people.
More than $12 million worth of contraceptives and HIV-prevention medications purchased by the U.S. taxpayer – originally headed for 18 different countries – just sat in distribution centers in Belgium and the United Arab Emirates, going to waste. A Washington Post investigation from the first half of 2025 found that supplies valued at over $190 million were scheduled to arrive at distribution warehouses by the end of June; however, shipments worth almost $76 million never made it. An additional $63 million worth of supplies – including life-saving medications for diseases like malaria that must be treated quickly – were delivered to the warehouses but delayed, on average, 41 days… in far too many cases, 41 days too late.
Hundreds of thousands of doses of a lifesaving supplement called Plumpy’Nut sat in a warehouse in Rhode Island, its shipment to Sudan canceled after Washington issued the stop-work order. Meanwhile, at the Almanar food distribution center in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan, mothers sat in line – waiting – with their starving children.
By September, The New York Times was reporting that the 260,000 innocent civilians trapped in El Fasher, a city taking the full brunt of Sudan’s vicious civil war, were eating animal feed, trying to make the decision whether to risk being killed if they stayed OR raped before they were killed if they left. You know, much like the daily decisions we make over here, like if we’re going to get our coffee at Starbucks or Dunkin’.
Doctors Without Borders reports that, in Somalia, the number of children they see with severe malnutrition has risen by 73 percent since 2024. At Baidoa Bay Regional Hospital alone, deaths among severely malnourished children increased by 44 percent in the first half of 2025, compared to the same period the year before – with 47 percent of deaths occurring within two days of a child’s arrival.
Elsewhere in Africa – where 46 million people are forcibly displaced, including nine million refugees – the U.N. World Food Program was forced to end food distribution to one million refugees in Uganda’s Kiryandongo refugee settlement, a place that cares for people forced to flee unthinkable violence in South Sudan. This led to pandemonium, with hundreds of people physically fighting one another over the little food that remained. In Chad and Malawi, millions of refugees lost aid practically overnight as the U.N. Refugee Agency closed American aid programs.
Today, those in Sudan face what is now the largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded. Almost 34 million people – two-thirds of the population – desperately need help.
… and it’s just going to get worse. The people in Burkina Faso – whose government’s war against Islamist insurgents has intensified, leading to more deaths and mass displacement, widespread hunger and unthinkable human rights violations – now have no support.
In a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh – the world’s largest – a million people, including 500,000 children, forced to flee Myanmar have nothing to eat. Even if they live, they are now more susceptible to outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis and H.I.V. because clinics and programs have closed their doors.
Because USAID was one of the largest providers of health care to Indonesia, H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria cases have exploded. Women who are being mistreated and/or trafficked in Cambodia and Guatemala are now unguarded and Colombia is on its way to becoming destabilized again. The six million Haitians who need humanitarian aid are facing, at best, malnutrition and, at worst, starvation.
The hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Syria who live in camps increasingly have no food, fuel or water, and the millions of Ukrainian children at risk of death, forced deportation, psychological trauma, indoctrination, and militarization under Russian occupation are now largely unprotected.
Dangerous pathogens have been left unsecured at labs across Africa. Airport and checkpoint inspections for mpox, Ebola, and other infectious diseases have been reduced or stopped altogether – meaning millions of unscreened animals and people are freely crossing borders. This puts Americans directly at risk because diseases – like Ebola in Uganda, the Marburg virus in Tanzania, the mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Lassa in Nigeria – can obviously travel quickly.
USAID was not a perfect agency. And, yes, all our federal agencies have waste issues that we need to address. We cover this extensively in the Operation Overhaul section. But these are separate issues. The bottom line is that much of the world needs our help. Desperately.
Before the Trump administration decimated USAID, the Center for Global Development estimated that aid distributed by the agency saved up to 5.6 million lives a year by providing interventions for HIV/AIDS, vaccine-preventable illnesses, and emergency/humanitarian relief alone (this number doesn’t include interventions for water and sanitation, family planning, and nutrition, which are significant in and of themselves).
…. and it’s not like these remarkable successes cost us that much. Before President Trump's heartless Executive Order, the United States spent less than 1 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid. In 2023, we spent almost $65 billion on foreign aid, and in terms of dollars, that was more than any other country in the world. But before we break our arms patting ourselves on the back, as a percentage of our economy, the United States spent less than Japan, Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Not to mention that billions of those dollars came right back into the American economy. USAID funded many American researchers, and American farms supplied around 41 percent of the food aid that the agency sent around the world every year.
In 1962, President Kennedy said to the staff of USAID,
He also said that foreign aid was essential to America’s role as a global leader. "There will not be farewell parades to you as you leave or parades when you come back.” In other words, the reward was the work itself and the larger cause of freedom it served. Pulling back on foreign aid, President Kennedy said, “would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive. Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled.
He was 1000% right. Anyone having to do with this disastrous decision should be deeply ashamed of themselves. We must correct this horrible mistake as soon as humanly possible.
The people who are opposed to aid should realize that this is a very powerful source of strength for us. As we do not want to send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be under attack, we send you.