The Real Impact of the USAID Shutdown
The full text of the video is below:
Welcome to the third episode of “We are all going to die: But does it have to be so soon?” A video series by nurses condemning cruelty by governments in their health policies.
This week we’ll examine cuts by Donald Trump and Elon Musk to the United States Agency for International Development or USAID.
Public health scholars estimate that these cuts have led to the deaths of over 550,000 people so far (most of them children). The cuts have taken away health care services that have long been in progress for orphans, children, and people who are poor.
You may be thinking, well, Trump and Musk did not actually kill anyone, they just stopped helping.
Well, I’m a nurse. Do you know what happens to nurses when they abandon their patients and abruptly go off, and say, do a line of ketamine, withdrawing their care from people who they know will die without it, and then just watch while those people die?
THE NURSES GO TO JAIL FOR HOMICIDE.
But what Trump and Elon are doing is not just homicide. It is a totally needless move, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
I don’t know if you saw, but President Bush, President Obama, and Bono just hosted an event for USAID employees on their last day – commemorating them for their service saving lives– as the agency has now been mostly shut down.
Former President Bush said: “Is it in our interest that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is.” Bono said, “It’s not left-wing rhetoric to feed the hungry, heal the sick. If this isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.”
By the way, we haven’t forgotten about cuts to domestic health programs, like those for Medicaid, lots of Americans are going to die from those too, unless the Senate Democrats prevail in the government shutdown. But we will cover that in episode 3.
But one part of that discussion is relevant here because it shows the cold and ruthless attitude behind all these health cuts.
Just in June 2025, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, one of the Republicans who is allowing Trump to destroy the country and what he can of the rest of the world, responded to a complaint about the planned domestic cuts:
“Well we all are going to die. So. For Heaven’s sakes…”
USAID, when it is funded, delivers needed medicine to people with malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and other diseases. USAID also provides food for people who have none.
But since USAID programs were savaged by Elon and his muskrats, the doors to these health programs have been shuttered with the medicine inside and health workers sent home.
Just last month in September, it was reported that the US government was planning to destroy $10 million worth of USAID contraceptives intended for low-income nations – even though several aid organizations had offered to buy or otherwise receive the contraceptives, which had not yet expired.
There has been a large withdrawal of both health care and food assistance across the world. We have read reports of a sick woman in the hospital receiving IV medications. After staff got the news that the USAID program helping her was shut down, she had the IV taken out of her arm and was sent home, where she soon died.
Another report said that an orphaned boy receiving HIV medications had them abruptly taken away when USAID closed down. He went home and died.
As we mentioned earlier, some people have been making specific estimates of the harm the USAID cuts have caused. According to an “impact tracker” created by global health scholars at Boston University, already — as of mid-October 2025 — over 550,000 people have died because of these cuts—two-thirds of them children.
The researchers estimate that 1 person continues to die every 41 seconds. And their one-year projection is more than 750,000 excess deaths from stopping the USAID funding.
In late June, the respected UK medical journal The Lancet released a study estimating that the cuts to USAID would cause more than 14 million additional deaths worldwide by 2030. The study also estimated the USAID programs had helped save more than 90 million lives
over the past couple decades.
What diseases are we talking about? In order of deadliness, according to the Boston University tracker, these are preventable deaths from HIV, pneumonia, malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected parasitic diseases such as elephantiasis, schistosomiasis, and river blindness.
Now, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has to defend these cuts, even though they are really the work of Elon Musk and DOGE.
Rubio was recently confronted at a House committee hearing with first-hand reporting from the New York Times and Reuters about the deaths in Africa and Asia.
Congressman: “We next focus on USAID. Musk gutted it. He said no one died as a result. Do you agree that no one has died yet as a result of the chainsawing of USAID?”
Congressman: “No one has died because of U.S.A.I.D.”
Congressman: “The people who have DIED as a result of cutting and denying HIV/AIDS treatment to those in Africa. They are dead now at the hands of Elon Musk and his co-conspirators.”
Rubio: “That’s a lie. That’s false.”
Congressman: “Firing these individuals has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.”
Rubio: “That’s false. That’s fake. That’s just not true.”
Stephen A. Smith: “You listen to him, it’s something entirely different. Somebody’s lying. Now somebody’s lying. I don’t know who, but I’m telling you, somebody’s lying. “
So – who should we believe? Well, we could look at the specific, first-hand reporting about what is happening on the ground.
According to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, here is one thing USAID was doing before the DOGE apocalypse.
It was helping an 8-year-old girl named Achol Deng who had HIV and was receiving medicines and help from USAID. Trump and Musk fired the case workers. So when Achol lost her ID card to allow her to get medicines, no case worker was there to help her with that. So, she got sick and died–because of a lost document.
How much were we spending for USAID before DOGE?
Annual federal outlays on the entire US budget, including the military, the government, and social security, were more than $6.1 trillion.
And federal spending on USAID was just about $40 billion or 0.7% of the budget – only 1/150th of the budget to fund to help the poor abroad.
So it was not 25%, as many Americans apparently think – it was less than 1%.
That’s so little money that Elon could have funded that by himself for 10 whole years.
And in fact, the US contributes far less of its national income to foreign aid as a percentage than many other wealthy nations, as the recent Lancet study noted.
I just want to ask you something. I haven’t heard a lot about it lately, but just in terms of societal norms, social expectations, and living up to the adage “to those who have been given much, much is expected,” last I checked, a common tithing amount for major religions is 10%. It is the general expectation that people should give 10% of their income to help the less fortunate.
The United States is the richest country on Earth. Shouldn’t we be tithing 10% of our budget to help the poor in the world?
If so, we are nowhere near that. Even under Joe Biden it was only 0.7% of the federal budget, or about $40 billion, for USAID. And now that Trump has taken over, we are giving about zero for the starving and sick people in the world.
A 10% giving expectation would be about $600 billion. The nation’s 800 or so billionaires have 10 times that much–about six trillion dollars– which is the same as the annual federal budget.
Why does that 40 billion we had set aside for the poor have to go to people who are so rich they won’t even notice they have more money?
Even if the current Administration doesn’t care about helping people, preventing people from starving to death and dying of disease actually helps the US.
As many people have pointed out, when we help other people survive and thrive, we have to fight fewer wars. Plus, hey, we look like the good guys.
But since Trump and Musk shut down most USAID programs, we just look like horrible people who let Lex Luthor hijack the White House.
Perhaps we need more real stories to understand who is getting hurt and exactly how.
Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist I mentioned earlier, takes his investigative role seriously.
So he headed off to many countries in Africa to see what is happening to people in the wake of the pullout of USAID.
Kristof reports on a pregnant mother of two, Yamah Freeman, 21, who went into labor and began bleeding heavily. So her neighbors frantically called the county hospital to request an ambulance. But even though the ambulances USAID provided to reduce maternal mortality were still there, we stopped providing any fuel for them. The ambulance crew said they’d come through the 10-mile jungle drive if someone would buy them gas, but no one had the money.
So the strongest men in the village put Yamah in a hammock and carried her on foot down this 10-mile path, but she and her unborn baby died on the way. Now her 3- and 6 year-old kids cry for their dead mother.
Kristof also went to a village in western Liberia, and met Bendu Kiadu whose two tiny children caught malaria in March. A USAID-funded community health worker used to administer simple medicines for malaria, but since USAID closed, the community health worker had no malaria medicine to offer. So Bendu rushed her children to a clinic, but it had also run out of malaria medicine. The next day, her 1-year-old child Gbessey died. Now she’s expecting her newborn, Osman, to die as well because there is still no malaria medicine.
Here is another story.
USAID planned to upgrade the roof of a medicine warehouse in eastern Liberia, so contractors removed the roof. Then the US sent an immediate stop-work order. So now the Liberians have a medicine warehouse with no roof.
But now plans are to take that $40 billion that used to go to USAID and give it to the wealthy with more tax breaks. Based on the impact counter, that money going to the wealthy instead of USAID means almost 1,000 lives are lost per billionaire per year.
We know the expenses for gigayachts add up, but still—is that really what we want our country to be funding?
Let me leave you with a quote from the $1,000 gold-painted Bible that Trump hawks, available at the separation-of-church-and-state God Bless the USA Bible website. Paraphrasing Matthew 8:36: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Republicans in Congress–Let’s not find out the answer to that question. You could stop Trump. You are allowing him to take away your power and to be a dictator. Why go to all the trouble to get elected to Congress only to be somebody else’s lackey?
Embrace your power. Protect the country.
Protect the children.
It’s time to step up and block this hate and widespread killing.
Restore the USAID funding. Now.
See the video on YouTube by clicking here.
