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Merged USAID: is it really a bunch of crazy leftists? / Trump Was Absolutely Right to Shut Down USAID

At Science Based Medicine Mark Crislip wrote, "Take the USAID, which

From 2001 to 2021, USAID programs were estimated to save between 4.1 and 4.7 million lives per year, including between 1.2 and 1.7 million children under five.
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Now funding has been gutted and as a direct people have and will die..."
 
Futurism reported on a measles outbreak in Bangladesh, which has taken over 100 lives. "At the heart of the public health failure lies a shortage of vaccine stockpiles. That shortage traces back, at least in part, to the wave of DOGE-driven spending cuts to the US Agency for International Development (US AID) that forced Bangladesh’s then-interim government to shutter healthcare programs across the board, from tuberculosis screenings to public maternity clinics."
 
NBC News reported, "Until last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development was part of a time-tested system for dealing with Ebola. In its absence, a dozen former federal employees told NBC News, the U.S. response to the growing outbreak has been slow and disjointed." The report continued, "“What we’ve lost is speed, which is the most important thing in an outbreak like this,” said Nicholas Enrich, former acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID. Enrich and other experts said USAID programs could have helped laboratories in Congo detect the virus earlier, sped up the distribution of personal protective equipment to hospitals and deployed local community health workers to screen people for symptoms and track down those who may have been exposed."
 
In an article at the New York Times Nicholas Kristof discussed three failings of the current administration: "Global health is unpredictable, and it’s not certain that the U.S. Agency for International Development would have stopped Ebola this time. But in three ways, Trump’s assault on global health has left us in a worse position to combat Ebola (although, in fairness, the administration has done one thing right). The first failing was the destruction of U.S.A.I.D. Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw the response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic for the agency, noted that it used to have a major presence in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Ebola outbreak appears to have begun. But most of the aid to Congo was cut, and Ebola spread widely by the time anyone realized that it was present."

He continued, "“With Ebola, time is lives,” Dr. Tom Frieden, who was the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, told me. “Get to an outbreak in days, and you can stop it in weeks. Get there in weeks, and it goes on for months. Get there in months, and it can go on for years.”

He wrote, "The second failing on the part of the Trump administration was its hostility to the World Health Organization...The third failing is simply the administration’s disregard for public health and lack of preparation. The Biden administration had several hundred pages of planning documents for handling an infectious disease outbreak, and it left these for incoming Trump aides, according to Stat News — but the Trump administration reportedly ignored the materials...Yet U.S.A.I.D. was intended to protect our interests as well as project our values — and a significant element of that self-interest was fighting diseases like tuberculosis and Ebola."
 
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Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs interviewed Nicholas Enrich, the former top global health official of USAID who wrote a book describing how USAID was shut down, "For example, we saved over 92 million lives within just the last 20 years alone...And the reason was: because we were distributing foreign aid abroad, we were very carefully audited, and we were very carefully overseen by our congressional committees, so we had all kinds of standards in place. So, for example, our payment system. We couldn't just like distribute funds to a government and say, you know, I hope these go to good use.Any time that a payment, no matter how small, was distributed, we had our program managers ensuring with the technical experts that we had gotten exactly what we had asked for with that funding, and we we would not distribute a single dollar without making sure that we had got what we had asked for. These are exactly the kind of systems that were completely destroyed when DOGE came in."
 

doge officially done

Trump’s January 2025 executive order creating DOGE also established a July 4, 2026, sunset. “A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift” to America on its semiquincentennial birthday, the president said when he announced the commission.
But DOGE didn’t really deliver on that promise, said Elizabeth Linos, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy and management professor, as did others who spoke to POLITICO about DOGE’s dramatic efforts over the past 18 months. Instead, it resulted in a near-immediate loss of expertise and live-saving programs but cost savings nowhere near the $2 trillion once promised.
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South Africa's mortality numbers don't show any sign of an increase after USAID cuts.

Report on Weekly Deaths in South Africa | SAMRC

Monthly reporting of weekly deaths Estimated numbers of weekly deaths are reported monthly against the predicted numbers.
www.samrc.ac.za www.samrc.ac.za
Do any countries show a rise that can be correlated with these cuts?
 
At Science-based Medicine Jonathan Howard wrote a response to Dr. Saphier's nomination to be Surgeon General, "Enough time has passed to judge whether this was the case. Today the headlines read NIH Killed Grants on Orders from Elon Musk’s DOGE and USAID Shutdown Has Led to Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths. In his article How USAID Funding Cuts Are Killing Kids, Dr. Vincent Iannelli listed the following ways DOGE hurt children around the world:"

Dr. Howard's article next lists seventeen bullet points, all with at least one citation. I decided against quoting directly such a long passage per the rules of this forum. Here is a link to Dr. Howard's article.
 
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closing is pretty quotable

I hope during her confirmation testimony, Dr. Saphier will have the integrity to either explain why she believes this overwhelming suffering isn’t just good, but one of the greatest things to happen in U.S. history — up there with the moon landing and defeat of Nazi Germany.

Or, she can admit that she was wrong.

But something tells me she will choose option C: act as if it never happened, and claim it is rude for anyone to remind her of her own words. And therefore, her credibility will be as dismal as all the other incompetent disinformation doctors she’ll be joining in the MAHA circus.
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Chris_Halkides said:
Dr. Howard's article next lists seventeen bullet points, all with at least one citation. I decided against quoting directly such a long passage per the rules of this forum. Here is a link to Dr. Howard's article.
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I picked one of those to look at. Here's the bullet point:
That's a serious claim. Let's see what's behind it. The link is to a letter to the editors of a journal, it is not a peer reviewed paper. But no matter, let's see what it says. Here's one of that source's claims:

The funding cuts have already had an immediate impact, leading to increased child mortality as children suffering from malnutrition become more vulnerable to preventable diseases like diarrhea, pneumonia, and measles (FACTBOX—USAID Cuts: Why Trump's Funding Freeze Threatens Millions Worldwide 2025).​

That supports the original claim. Moreover, this isn't a claim about possible impacts, it's a claim about impacts that have already happened. Funding cuts already increased child mortality. That's bad. And the claim is even sourced. So let's check out that source.

First thing to note is the date on that source: February 6, 2025. Oh. So... nothing in that source is going to be able to tell us anything about the actual effects of the cuts, because at the time that source was written, there wasn't time for those cuts to have produced any real effects. Also absent from that link are the words diarrhea, pneumonia, and measles. Hell, there's only one instance of the word "child" in that link, and it doesn't have anything to do with disease or mortality. It doesn't support the claim that it's cited for. So why the hell does this letter to the editor cite a story that doesn't actually back up any of the claims that they cite it to support?

Now, I haven't gone through all these links, but what I did pick didn't turn out to support the claims made. Not encouraging.
 
OK, here's another one. First, the original bullet point claim:
  • children contracting and dying with malaria because health centers have run out of mosquito nets and anti-malaria medicines
This one struck me as a bit odd, because I would expect mosquito nets to last a while, although I can understand how medicines can run out quickly. But let's examine the source. First, keep in mind that this testimony is from June 2026, and Dr. Saphier is claiming that these are harms that have already manifested. But what does the source say?

Well, first off, the source is from Feb. 27, 2025. So as with the above source, there was not time for much of anything to have already happened. Moreover, it's basically a press release, which itself cites an estimate for (at the time) future possible increases in malaria. You can find details of that estimate here. Now, at least in this case the source is actually directly relevant to the claims being made, unlike before. But we still face the problem that these were projected estimates made when the USAID cuts were first implemented, they are NOT measurements of actual impact that Saphier is claiming, And projections aren't always accurate. So what actually happened? Did malaria infections actually increase? Did malaria deaths actually increase? Were the projections correct? Given that it's been more than a year, one would think that data on this should be available, so why isn't Saphier citing the actual data rather than the projections? And what do the actual data say about malaria infections and deaths?
 
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In a 15 December article ProPublica reported, "Days later, on a remote patch of land in South Sudan, a 38-year-old man named Tor Top gathered with his neighbors outside the local health clinic. Surrounded by floodwaters, their hamlet of thatch and mud homes had been battling a massive outbreak of cholera, a deadly disease spread by poor sanitation. Around the country, it had infected 36,000 people in three months, killing more than 600, many of them babies. Top’s family lived in the epicenter. The clinic, one of 12 in the area run by the Christian, Maryland-based humanitarian organization World Relief and funded by USAID, provided a key weapon in the fight: IV bags to stave off dehydration and death. The bags cost just 62 cents each, and in three months, the clinics had helped save more than 500 people."

They continued, "In public statements and congressional testimony, Rubio has repeatedly insisted that no one died because of cuts to U.S. foreign aid and that his staff had reinstated lifesaving operations. But ProPublica found that those claims were a charade: Lifesaving programs remained on the books, but the flow of money didn’t restart for months, if at all." This is from bullet point six.
 
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In a 28 May 2025 article ProPublica wrote, "American diplomats in at least two countries have recently delivered internal reports to Washington that reflect a grim new reality taking hold abroad: The Trump administration’s sudden withdrawal of foreign aid is bringing about the violence and chaos that many had warned would come...The assessments are not just predictions about the future but detailed accounts of what has already occurred, making them among the first such reports from inside the Trump administration to surface publicly — though experts suspect they will not be the last. The diplomats warned in their correspondence that stopping aid may undermine efforts to combat terrorism."
 
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