Thinking Out LoudHundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people are going to die if the American aid agency USAID – shut down on ideological grounds within days of President Trump’s 2025 inauguration – remains closed.
According to an article in the New Yorker this week, AIDS medicine keeping 20 million Africans alive was cut instantly, with no notice. This must lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths – as Nicholas Kristof pointed out in the New York Times three days ago, they have already begun.
Worse, the closure of the hugely successful anti-malaria program may lead to millions of deaths. Meanwhile, employees of USAID outside the US, including pregnant women, have been cut off and stranded without even a ticket home.
The article, an interview with a former USAID chief, notes that USAID had three arms. The biggest responded to disaster abroad – earthquakes, famines and the like. The next biggest focused on diseases and health threats and improving health systems in low-income countries. The role of the third, surely the only controversial one, was to advance low–income nations’ economies, freedom, and democracy.
It also noted that, while many Americans think massive spending went on foreign aid, in fact it was less than half the budget of a single Boston hospital.
Of course the US, or any nation, is entitled to examine its foreign aid program and ask could it be more effective, can we minimise corruption or other problems? But, in instantly closing USAID, Musk and his team did not do that; rather they swung a sledgehammer to crush a nut, and gloated at the consequences.
There is something unpleasant in the world’s richest man, beneficiary of billions of dollars from the US taxpayer, rejoicing in slashing funds to the poorest. In fact, I suggest, it is infamous.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.