The sweeping U.S. cuts to foreign aid are potentially killing thousands of people a day due to factors like starvation and disease, a new report finds — after “shadow president” Elon Musk has claimed that “no one” has died to the supposed “brief pause” on aid funding that the administration is seemingly seeking to make permanent.
A report published on Saturday by The New York Times, citing estimates from the Center for Global Development, finds that the funding cuts will cause roughly 3 million people around the world to die within the next year.
This includes over 1.6 million people who may die from the lack of HIV and AIDS prevention provided by the U.S.; nearly 550,000 who will die without food aid; and 1 million who would die without vaccines and prevention for tuberculosis and malaria. Most of these people live in countries where they have nowhere else to turn for aid, largely concentrated in countries in eastern and southern Africa which have been exploited by Western powers for hundreds of years.
This means that, on an average day, roughly 9,000 people could die due to the lack of aid, the Center for Global Development found in its analysis.
Some foreign donors could step in to fill the gap left by the U.S. funding, but the U.S. gives the most in foreign aid annually worldwide in total dollars, making it unlikely that all of the deficit could be covered, the group said. With the defunding of these programs, they found, it “appears inevitable” that “deaths will continue to climb because of the disorder and confusion within USAID and the number of service providers who have already been forced to close down.”
When President Donald Trump took office, his administration announced that it would be carrying out a 90-day suspension of funding for foreign aid in order to supposedly “assess” their efficacy and “consistency with United States foreign policy.”
As part of these cuts, Elon Musk led a charge to eradicate the U.S. Agency for International Development — an agency that, though often criticized for its role in upholding U.S. imperialism abroad, plays a major role in disease prevention and humanitarian programs around the world.
Musk, who has been caught in numerous lies about his role in the Trump administration so far, said in a post on X earlier this month: “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”
But this isn’t true. First, it is misleading to call it a “brief pause,” as Trump has ordered the cancelation of 90 percent of U.S. foreign aid contracts, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying that the administration has already cancelled 83 percent of them. Even if the cuts were temporary, it would take time to reestablish programs that were gutted overnight.
Second, even discounting the estimates of future deaths, countless people have already died due to the dismantling of foreign aid, as the Times has documented.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said that, in fact, it took him less than an hour after traveling to south Sudan to find someone who had died as a result of the funding suspensions.
This includes an orphan named Peter Donde, who had HIV transmitted from his mother during childbirth. His parents died of AIDS, but he was kept alive by medicine provided by U.S. aid, under a program known as President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. The 10-year-old child, no longer able to access his medicine, died shortly after the funding was suspended, as the Times found. An outreach provider who worked with the boy said he would be alive today if USAID had stayed.
The World Health Organization said on Monday that the aid suspension could soon lead to lifesaving HIV treatment to be totally depleted in eight countries — Haiti, Kenya, Lesotho, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria and Ukraine.
“The disruptions to HIV programs could undo 20 years of progress” within a matter of months, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
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