USAID Dead, 14 Million Humans To Follow

Don't Fear the Reaper, everybody dies, they'll get over it.

“A Mozambican tuberculosis patient who has successfully cured her illness celebrates with the ADPP (Aid for the Development of People for People) activist who supported her through the entire period of her treatment.” Winner, Work With USAID photo contest, 2024. Photo: Arnaldo Salomão Banze, ADPP. Creative Commons License 2.0

On Tuesday, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) officially ceased to be, after Elon Musk and his crowd of Nazi incel creeps decided to put the foreign aid agency “through a wood chipper,” haha, emphasizing that all the cruelty this administration perpetrates is a big joke to the Nazi incels doing the dirty work. Not terribly long after Musk declared the agency “a viper’s nest of radical left Marxists” and set out to dismantle it — unconstitutionally, as if that matters — we learned that USAID had been investigating Musk’s Starlink internet service, too, although that investigation has by now, we assume, long been buried, possibly in a sand trap at one of Donald Trump’s golf courses.

In a blog post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who among his many jobs is USAID’s final administrator and is also in charge of the sheep dip, celebrated the death of the agency that began under John F. Kennedy, before Ted Cruz’s dad killed Kennedy. Rubio lied ceaselessly, claiming in a torrent of MAGA trigger words that “Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War.” You know, other than a record of saving lives, preventing disease, and measurably improving life expectancy in the developing world.

Rubio griped that nations that received US aid through USAID were insufficiently grateful, because quite a few have voted in the UN in opposition of American foreign policy, which is always right and only wrong when Democrats are in power. He lied that USAID only ever improved life for “the executives of the countless NGOs, who often enjoyed five-star lifestyles funded by American taxpayers,” and all the QAnon people nodded sagely and cursed the Clinton Foundation and George Soros.

In there among all the grievance and cant was an announcement of what had been known all along. As of July 1, USAID is gone, 83 percent of USAID’s programs were long cancelled, and the fraction of remaining foreign aid will now be handled through the State Department — but only if such programs “align with administration policies — and which advance American interests,” as defined by the Trump administration.

Timed to coincide with the shuttering of USAID, a major study published in The Lancet Monday predicts that in the next five years, the cessation of US foreign assistance is likely to result in the deaths of 14 million people globally, a third of them children.

That has to be a record even for those “pro-life” Republicans in the Trump administration.

The study, by an international team of researchers, estimated that in just the first two decades of this century, from 2001 to 2021, USAID programs in low- and middle-income countries prevented 91 million deaths through nutrition and health programs. Of the lives saved by USAID interventions, 30 million were children.

The researchers projected two possible scenarios: one in which USAID’s foreign assistance continued as it had before the current crowd of sociopaths came to power, and another in which only the pittance of remaining US aid keeps going to the developing world. In the latter scenario, 14 million lives will be lost, including 4.5 million children under the age of five.

The study found that USAID assistance led to a 15 percent reduction of mortality from all causes between 2001 and 2021. The biggest impact of USAID funding came from its role in fighting HIV/AIDS using funds from George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) program: a 65 percent reduction in deaths, according to the study. US assistance also brought a 51 percent reduction in mortality from malaria, and 50 percent lower mortality from “neglected tropical diseases.”

In a video conference for former and departing USAID staff Monday, Bush himself noted that PEPFAR has been credited with saving 25 million lives since it began in 2004. He told the USAID workers, “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”

Barack Obama also took part in the video call, saying that gutting USAID was “a colossal mistake,” adding that,

“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,” said Obama, crediting the organisation with saving lives and playing a role in economic growth that turned recipients into US trade partners.

He predicted that “sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realize how much you are needed”, adding: “your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come.”

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post summed up the farewell messages to the USAID staffers, and the praise of their decades of life-saving work, with the headline “Bush teams up with notorious Trump foes to trash ‘colossal mistake’ shuttering USAID.” But really, it was the organizers’ fault, because another of the video messages was from U2 singer Bono. He and Obama together was like four Antichrists. Oddly, while fellow enemy of all that’s good and holy Hillary Clinton took part in the video call, she was merely an afterthought for the Murdoch rag.

Anyway, the Lancet study was also very America-hating, warning that the elimination of USAID, compounded by its “ripple effect” on other international assistance, threatens to

abruptly halt and reverse one of the most important periods of progress in human development. For many [countries], the resulting shock would be similar in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.

The big difference between a big war or health crisis and what Trump has done, of course, is that the sudden shutdown of USAID was “a conscious and avoidable policy choice — one whose burden would fall disproportionately on children and younger populations, and whose consequences could reverberate for decades.” The study, we should note, only names Trump once, in its overview of the history of USAID, and then it’s “the Trump administration,” which is very diplomatic of the authors.

The researchers are of course all respected public health experts from around the world, for whom sober, careful discourse is obligatory. Yr Wonkette is a bunch of scruffy bloggers, so we can state the obvious: Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller, and all their underlings are murderers whose victims will continue to pile up long after American politics moves on.

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[Guardian / WaPo (gift link) / Lancet / NPR / State Department]

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