The Casual Destruction of USAID Is, so Far, the Trump Administration Action That Has Had the Greatest Negative Effect on Human Well-Being: MOST IMPORTANT THING
What is the most important thing you should focus on today? I think it is this: the casual incompetence of doing immense damage for no rational reason whatsoever. “It is something we can do that will make liberals really sad!” seems to have been the sum total of the analysis and the motivation behind the elimination of USAID…
And it seems to be getting more traction right now, as we have:
Jerusalem Demsas: <https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/2070508864521551893>: ‘Elon Musk bragged about feeding USAID into the “wood chipper” but now he pretends that whatever happens as a result isn’t his fault. If DOGE had saved the federal government billions of dollars, you can be sure he would be taking credit for that. But somehow he’s not responsible for the consequences of eliminating these programs? Today at @TheArgumentMag we published a thorough explanation for why we should hold @elonmusk responsible for the deaths of at best 700,000 people…
Atul Gawande: <twitter.com/Atul_Gawa…>: ‘Independent analyses estimate that your actions to dismantle USAID and drastically reduce lifesaving foreign aid have already killed 700,000 people. Here are some of those people: Elon Musk: “All DOGE required was contact information of the recipients to confirm that funding was not fraudulent. No validated medical funding was stopped. Anything that appeared to be legitimate lifesaving funding continued and is now administered by the State Department.”
Jane Sunday, 15 months old, died of malnutrition in Kakuma, Kenya after the USAID closure and aid cuts slashed refugee food rations and severe malnutrition treatment.
Nyarietna, Rebecca Nyariaka, and one-year-old Nyagoa died from cholera in South Sudan when the aid cuts closed down nearby clinics.
Mohamat, 9 months old, died from malaria in Cameroon. Treatment was delayed due to lack of health workers who lost their jobs from aid cuts. When he finally made it to a clinic, they had run out of a lifesaving drug that had been funded by the US.
Yagana Bulama’s 8-month-old son died from malnutrition two weeks after a USAID-funded malnutrition program was stopped in northeastern Nigeria.
Fatima and her newborn baby died in Yemen when the local USAID-supported hospital could no longer offer the emergency C-section she needed.
Derek Thompson: <twitter.com/DKThomp/s…>: ‘There are some center-to-right wing accounts I follow that are more offended by the possibility that some public health sources are over-estimating the death count from Musk carelessly destroying US global health programs than by the core fact that Musk really did carelessly destroy US global health (and bragged about it relentlessly) in a way that clearly killed people. These people know who they are, and they’re wrong…
Together with great sensitivity to the issue on the part of Elon Musk:
Elon Musk:
If there were mass deaths due to USAID, when are they? I would like to call the bereaved parents! Nobody died is the truth, but a lot of fraud, funding bioweapons and foreign government interference was stopped. Many lives were saved as a result of stopping the bad parts of USAID funding. The parts of funding that have some chance of doing good remain in place and were transferred to the State Department….
There is not even a single dead child! If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!…
USAID funding was central to the creation of COVID-19….
True: Wall Street Apes: ‘The money being sent from USAID wasn’t for humanitarian efforts. USAID money was being LAUNDERED TO GEORGE SOROS to pay for protests. Mike Benz exposes USAID has been sending money to George Soros NGOs, he then uses that money to FUND AND TRAIN PROTESTERS….
I do know something about the coalition of interests, resentments, and fantasies that made the destruction of USAID politically attractive, intellectually justifiable in certain circles, and personally gratifying to the people who pushed it: oligarchy plus grievance politics yields policy that is both morally catastrophic and instrumentally stupid.
Foreign aid is tiny in budgetary terms. Foreign aid is enormous in symbolic terms. USAID disbursed on the order of $40 billion dollars a year in assistance before Trump’s second-term freeze and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) crusade, in a federal budget north of $6 trillion a year. Yet, as the Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations dryly noted, USAID had been a central pillar of U.S. soft power since 1961, underwriting everything from the global smallpox eradication campaign to HIV treatment under PEPFAR to vaccine rollout during COVID–19. See for example: <https://www.cfr.org/articles/what-usaid-and-why-it-risk>. A program that costs little, delivers a lot, and buys the United States both lives saved abroad and goodwill that any minimally rational hegemon ought to prize.
Why would you feed that into the wood chipper?
In brief:
Ideological hostility to foreign aid provided the vocabulary.
Culture-war resentment supplied the emotional energy.
Oligarchic self‑assertion and conspiratorial fantasies gave the protagonists their self‑image as heroic truth‑tellers cleaning out a corrupt temple.
Performative cruelty ensured that the suffering of distant others was not a bug but a feature.
And public indifference—gross overestimates of how much money is spent on foreign aid, a general belief that government is wasteful, and no sense of the very high soft-power and human well-being bang-for-the-buck—meant there was no swift political price.
