Trumps foreign aid cuts have literally killed hundreds of thousands of children already and will kill millions if not reversed soon. After the end of DOGE, USAID, the administrative agency primarily concerned with delivering foreign aid, has receded from the headlines. But what has happened to USAID since those days when it seemed like it might be dismantled entirely? The short answer is that most of the aid programs have chugged on but with seriously diminished capacity and funding, leaving lots of innocent people dead.The picture a lot of people have is that USAID has been destroyed entirely, so that the United States is no longer really in the foreign aid business. That’s not right. USAID has been officially shut down, but many of its remaining operations are carried out by the Department of State. The result has been more transfer than wholesale destruction. https://abcnews.com/Health/usaid-programs-now-run-state-department-agency-ends/story?id=123373289 However, many operations have ceased. USAID spending in 2025 was 23% lower than in 2024. There was a 43% decline in obligations https://www.cgdev.org/blog/usaid-spending-country-and-sector-level-what-happened-fiscal-2025 commitments to future spending. Foreign aid tends to save about 3 million lives yearly, https://www.cgdev.org/blog/how-many-lives-does-us-foreign-aid-save so a 43% reduction will likely cost more than a million lives annually. Other earlier estimates https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5199076&fbclid=IwY2xjawK33KhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE4TExZd3ZHNFpSUXRsbXkwAR76ORhFayZzhN0m_kImLiBmaZ1BDAmshvRZvOqCucONgp5jVE5MRtFR9ZMM8A_aem_Zec5BpVMaTbVz-fsnnahgA put the death toll from USAID cuts north of 14 million by 2040. There was another cut of 16% between 2025 and 2026. https://maryknollogc.org/2026/03/03/2026_foreign_aid/
>>536164819The best estimate is that the number of lives lost from the 2025 spending cuts is between 500,000 and 700,000. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts The reduction in obligations likely cost between 670,000 and 1,600,000 lives. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts These cuts affected many different areas: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/usaid-spending-country-and-sector-level-what-happened-fiscal-2025
>>536164819how is that a bad thing?
>>536164900Cholera deaths nearly doubled, https://www.cgdev.org/blog/cholera-deaths-nearly-doubled-africa-2025-cuts-aid-may-have-contributed with cuts being a plausible contributor. While PEPFAR treatment grew 30% between 2023 and 2024, it remained constant https://www.cgdev.org/blog/pepfars-stable-numbers-are-hiding-demographic-shift between 2024 and 2025. PEPFAR HIV testing collapsed. Remember: PEPFAR is the single most effective foreign aid program that’s probably saved north of 20 million lives. https://ourworldindata.org/us-foreign-aid-saved-millions So a very conservative estimate puts the number dead from the foreign aid cuts much higher than the number dead from the war in Iraq. One report on the damages described: https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/206934/what-the-collapse-of-usaid-has-cost-the-world >cuts to PEPFAR, credited with saving 25 million lives since 2003, had resulted in more than 159,000 adult deaths and 16,000 child deaths. The termination of other USAID health programs contributed to an estimated 53,577 additional child deaths from malaria and 62,699 from tuberculosis.>But the sectoral damage has extended far beyond health. Agricultural sector cuts are predicted to affect roughly 735 million people who could now face hunger.>The cancellation of education programs has affected 44 million learners. UNICEF predicts that 6 million additional children will be out of school by the end of 2026 due to a US$3.2 billion education aid shortfall.
>>5361649787 Dear friends, let us love one another, 2) for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of GodE and knows God. E) 8 Whoever does notlove does not know God, because God is love. (G)1 John 4:7-8
>>536165004Now, many of those defending USAID cuts hoped other countries would fill in. The opposite happened. As Lydia Gichuki notes https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/206934/what-the-collapse-of-usaid-has-cost-the-world “2025 was the first time in nearly 30 years that the U.S., the UK, France, and Germany cut their aid contributions at the same time.” This produced a roughly 17% decline in total global aid. So taking into account the follow-on from other countries, America’s actions may have an even larger death toll, perhaps in the millions annually. https://www.bond.org.uk/news/2026/01/one-year-on-from-trumps-usaid-freeze-the-sector-faces-a-changed-global-aid-landscape/
>>536165194And the cuts aren’t the only way that foreign aid functionality has been diminished. Trump attempted to rapidly reconfigure foreign aid without forewarning or careful planning. Most employees were quickly fired. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y6701gl60o The result was an unpredictable and chaotic mess, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/421105/usaid-pepfar-cuts-death-toll with purchased food rotting in warehouses. https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2025/us-aid-cuts-leave-food-for-millions-mouldering-in-storage?In many cases, treatment was shut off abruptly. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)02379-7/abstract?rss=yes People had no time to transfer to a new provider or to adjust. Treatment simply vanished overnight, and lots of people died. As Nicholas Kristof put it: https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nyt-columnist-hammers-elon-musks-claim-that-no-one-has-died-from-spending-cuts-with-accounts-of-deaths-including-children/ >Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that’s true. It’s not. Within an hour of starting interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington
>>536165318While the health and humanitarian cuts caused the most death, cuts also rolled back progress on human rights. The apparatus investigating human rights abuses https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/05/14/us-foreign-aid-cuts-harm-human-rights-globally?utm_source was systematically dismantled, emboldening autocrats globally. Human Rights Watch concluded, “US aid cuts have diminished protection for people at risk of rights violations, constrained local efforts to gather evidence to one day hold abusive actors accountable, and weakened civil society organizations more broadly.” https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2026/05/us_aidcuts0526_0.pdf
>>536165362This is very likely the worst thing a president has done in my lifetime. If Trump had simply done nothing, https://benthams.substack.com/p/foreign-aid-cuts-are-more-like-killing?utm_source=publication-search rather than slashing foreign aid, many fewer people would be dead. Despite foreign aid saving millions of lives annually while taking up less than 1% of the federal budget, Washington bureaucrats made a deliberate political decision to gut it, very likely with full foreknowledge that the result would be more dead children.
>>536164819Good
>>536165403And these haven’t even benefitted America. Setting the global economy on fire, letting diseases ravage whole continents, and decimating American soft power isn’t in our interest. America is not an island. What happens to the rest of the world affects Americans. Additionally, see here for my objection to the claim that a nation should only serve its own interest. https://benthams.substack.com/p/trumps-foreign-aid-cuts-have-already?utm_source=publication-search It is a very bad thing when a single child dies.Multiply that by several million, and you have the horror of the USAID cuts.This was profoundly evil, and we should all hope that the cuts are reversed soon. While Trump’s popularity has recently sunk low due to the ill-fated war with Iran, I wish voters would attend more fully to the planes full of child death doled out by the monster in the White House.
>>536165440No
>>536164819If it was so important than why did rabidly anti-American communists use usaid as a slush fund to engage is subversive anti-American activities?
>>536165062>the bibbleLol. Lmao even.
>>536165591You are anti-American, communist scum. Nobody believes your lying bullshit anymore. Fuck off and die.
>>536165730The overwhelming majority of usaid spending was to help the poorest people on earth. It’s a big organization with lots of people
>>536165403>while taking up less than 1% of the federal budgetThat's still huge. Estimated 0.3%. Possibly more. You can only have 332 expenses that amount to it. And then the money's gone. It sounds cold, but all it had been doing was supporting people who couldn't even support themselves, into having families of 8 kids. That's unsustainable.
>>536164819lol all the LGBT bullshit and other climate change protests literally died here just because you stopped funding USAID and the UN
>>536164819It is deceptive to suggest that all US "foreign aid" is necessarily food for starving children overseas. In fact, less than 25% is humanitarian aid, and that's even counting "education" and "pandemic preparedness" in that category.
>>536166128cutting the corporate tax rate is much bigger
>>536166323Funding to Israel has not been cut, funding for Humanitarian Assistance and Global Health Programs which are about 50% have been severely cut
>>536165591am yisrael chazir am yisrael met you will be stuffed into the tophet
>>536166330Higher corporate rate = Higher cost for everythingUSAID was a bottomless pit. In the NYT story posted, there's examples of women with multiple children they can't feed. There's help, and then there's chaos. You're making more people for the sake of being 'humanitarian'. People without futures. Making more misery. For what? To feel virtuous? To me, that seems more cruel than not providing. I'd change my mind if the help was conditioned. But that can't be done, because each country chooses for themselves.
