Defunding USAID Was a Big Mistake: Billionaires Keeping Life-Saving Aid from the Poor and Needy is Not a Good Look for the U.S.

      I don’t think this can be said enough, so I’ll say it again: It was a huge mistake to defund USAID. Despite some real and legitimate concerns about NGO biases, there was no need at all to stop alleviating suffering in the world. Sure, most of the NGOs are more in line with liberal policies than with conservative ones. So, what?

     The LA Times’ Robin Acarian places the blame squarely on three men, Trump, Musk, and Rubio, saying they should be ashamed. A trillionaire, a billionaire, and a sycophant perpetrated the defunding. She estimates that 4.5 million children have been cut off from the aid the U.S. was once proud to provide. The aid was paused on day one, January 20, 2025, with an executive order for a 90-day pause on all foreign aid, and then the agency was dismantled.

     Acarian writes:

“The effects of Trump's order were felt immediately. Shipments of antiretroviral HIV medications, malaria nets and oxygen tubes for newborn infants expired in warehouses or never arrived in sub-Saharan Africa. In Haiti and Sudan, the funding "pause" halted programs for clean water, maternal health and refugee food rations. And, inevitably, people began to die.”

“It's been a tragic end for an agency that was founded in 1961, the brainchild of President Kennedy, who saw the exercise of soft power as a way to counter Soviet influence abroad. Later, of course, it was Chinese economic influence that USAID programs sought to neutralize.”

     While there was likely some inefficiency in the organization that could have been addressed, Musk was especially against USAID, apparently after hearing on the Joe Rogan podcast where a former State Department official criticized it.

“Musk called it a "criminal organization," "a radical-left political psy op" and a "crazy waste of money."

“As Bill Gates so poignantly put it in a May 2025 Financial Times interview, "The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one."

     The evidence shows that those who led the defunding were woefully misinformed about what the agency did. While Rubio announced that the life-saving parts of USAID would remain, that ended up not being the case. By one account:

“…nearly 263,000 adults and 518,428 children died unnecessarily.”

     That is more human beings than died in the wars in Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza combined.

“A study in the Lancet concluded that by 2030, as many as 14 million people could die due to the defunding, including 4.5 million children under age 5.”     

     We need to reinstate these programs. Sure, we can have better oversight. This is something to look forward to if political headwinds change, but it won’t begin to happen until at least January 20, 2029, so there will be at least 900 more days of no help available. It still burns me that they allowed food and medicine to expire in warehouses, later to be destroyed, rather than spend the money to distribute what was already available. I agree with Acarian that this was the worst thing the Trump administration has done and should be shamed for it.

   

References:

 

Abcarian: Shame on Trump, Rubio and Musk, who've enabled needless deaths around the world. Robin Abcarian. LA Times. August 2, 2026. Abcarian: Shame on Trump, Rubio and Musk, who've enabled needless deaths around the world