To the billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game but to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives. — AP
On Feb 7, US District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington temporarily allowed around 2,700 furloughed USAID employees to go back to work, pausing aspects of the plan to dismantle the agency. It also bars the administration from relocating USAID humanitarian workers stationed outside the US. Is it too little too late, though?
THE world’s richest man is boasting about destroying the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which saves the lives of the world’s poorest children, saying he shoved it “into the wood chipper.”
By my calculations, Elon Musk probably has a net worth greater than that of the poorest billion people on earth. Just since Donald Trump’s election, Musk’s personal net worth has grown by far more than the entire annual budget of USAID, which in any case accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget.
It’s callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as President John F Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it’s also myopic.
Cutting aid, Kennedy noted, “would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive.” He added: “Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled.”
Perhaps that’s why Russia has praised Trump’s move. In contrast with Kennedy, the Trump administration braids together cruelty, ignorance and shortsightedness, and that combination seems particularly evident in its assault on US humanitarian assistance.
One person has already died of bird flu in the United States, and there is growing concern of a pandemic – yet Trump’s suspension of foreign aid has interrupted bird flu surveillance in 49 countries, according to the Global Health Council, a US-based nonprofit.
Remember the American panic over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014? (Trump was particularly hysterical back then.) In the end, an Ebola pandemic was averted – in part because of USAID’s work in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
As it happens, another Ebola outbreak has just been reported in Uganda, with 234 contacts identified so far. USAID would normally help suppress it – but now Trump and Musk have put it out of commission.
Another hemorrhagic fever, called Marburg virus, broke out in Tanzania last month. Aid workers are rushing to contain the virus, but again Trump has made the US AWOL, leaving the world a little more vulnerable.
A disclosure: In 2012, USAID made some games for India and Africa based on a book my wife and I wrote, Half the Sky. USAID did not pay us anything for this, and the games did a good job promoting deworming, girls’ education and safe pregnancy.
I’ve seen USAID operate all over the world, and it’s a mixed picture. It is fair to complain that USAID is endlessly bureaucratic and that too much of the aid goes to so-called Beltway bandit US contractors rather than to needy people abroad.
Yet there’s no basis for the White House mythology that USAID is an enclave of woke waste, reflected in Trump’s claim that it spent about “US$100mil on condoms to Hamas”. Hmm. Male condoms cost the US government 3.3 cents each, so that would be three billion condoms.
By my calculation, for Hamas to use up that many condoms in a year, each fighter would have to have sex 325 times a day, every day.
That might wipe out Hamas as a fighting force more effectively than Israeli bombardment. In any case, the actual amount of US assistance spent on condoms for the Gaza Strip in recent years appears to have been not US$100mil but US$0.
Trump’s policies are as reckless as his rhetoric. I’d welcome some restructuring of USAID. But this isn’t restructuring but demolition – a blow to our values and interests alike.
Musk lambasted USAID as “a criminal organisation.” In fact, many of its employees have risked their lives in the best tradition of public service. The USAID Memorial Wall honours 99 people killed while working for the agency in places such as Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
I’ve seen genuine improvements in USAID over the years. Its public-private partnership to tackle lead poisoning, announced last year, was a model of US leadership.
And so from my travels, this is what USAID has come to mean to me: I’ve seen women and girls with obstetric fistula, a horrific childbirth injury, get a US$600 surgery that gives them back their lives – and this is something that USAID supports.
I’ve seen men humiliated by elephantiasis and grotesquely enlarged scrotums, occasionally requiring a wheelbarrow to support their organs as they walk. And USAID has fought this disease and made it less common.
I’ve seen children dying of malaria and USAID has helped achieve major strides against the disease over the past two decades.
I’ve seen southern Africa ravaged by AIDS. And then President George W. Bush’s landmark program against AIDS, called PEPFAR and implemented in part through USAID, transformed the landscape.
I saw coffin makers in Lesotho and Malawi grumble that their business was collapsing because far fewer people were dying. PEPFAR has saved 26 million lives so far.
I’ve seen the suffering of communities where people in middle age routinely go blind from trachoma, river blindness or cataracts – and the transformation when USAID helps prevent such blindness.
Trump scoffed that USAID was “run by radical lunatics.” Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?
If this is woke, what about the evangelical Christians in International Justice Mission, which, with USAID support, has done outstanding work battling sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the Philippines? Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?
Trump’s moves are of uncertain legality, not least because USAID was established by Congress, but the outcomes are indisputable. Around the world children are already missing healthcare and food because of the assault on the agency that Kennedy founded to uphold our values and protect our interests.
To the billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening. — 2025 The New York Times Company
