Health: Trump’s USAID cuts may cause 14 million more deaths by 2030
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: President Donald Trump’s controversial move to cut most of the US’ funding towards foreign humanitarian aid through the USAID could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.
A third of those at risk of premature deaths were children, researchers projected.
The USAID (US Agency for International Development), established in 1961, is an independent executive agency to administer foreign aid and economic development assistance outside the US. It supports economic growth, global health, and education, provides humanitarian aid in crises, and advances US foreign policy goals through partnerships.
In 2024, its budget was USD 21.7 billion, only 0.3 percent of the overall federal spend. The US, by far the world’s largest humanitarian aid provider, has operated in more than 60 countries, largely through contractors. According to government data, it spent USD 68 billion (£55 bn) on international aid in 2023.
President Trump, who returned to the White House on January 30, however, announced to heavily cut this ‘wasteful’ spend, and potentially scrap USAID altogether.
According to the media reports, this could cause havoc in many countries of the Third World.
Low- and middle-income countries were facing a shock “comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict,” said Davide Rasella, who co-authored the report.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that over 80 percent of all programmes at the USAID had been cancelled as the Trump administration saw it as ‘wasteful spending.’
The controversial cutbacks, condemned globally by humanitarian organisations, were overseen by Elon Musk who was then leading the Trump initiative to shrink the federal workforce and save money.
During his second term, Trump repeatedly said he wanted overseas spending to be closely aligned with his “America First” approach. That means he would allow funds to only those who follow his policies.
The USAID funding cuts “risk abruptly halting – and even reversing – two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations,” Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, said.
His team estimated that USAID funding had prevented more than 90 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.
They modelled the potential impact on death rates with an assumption that funding would be cut by 83 percent – the figure Rubio provided in March.
The cuts could lead to a “staggering” number of more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five.
The Lancet report was published when dozens of world leaders meet in the Spanish city of Seville this week for a United Nations-led aid conference, the biggest of its kind in a decade. The US is not expected to attend.
USAID was seen as integral to the global aid system. After Trump’s cuts were announced, other countries like the UK, France, and Germany, also cut their own aids.
Humanitarian organizations the world over have widely condemned these moves. In May, the United Nations said it was dealing with “the deepest funding cuts ever to hit the international humanitarian sector.”
Rubio said in March that around 1,000 remaining US programmes would be administered “more effectively” under the US State Department and in consultation with Congress.
Still, the situation on the ground has not been improving, according to UN workers.
Last month, a UN official said that hundreds of thousands of people were “slowly starving” in Kenyan refugee camps after US funding cuts reduced food rations to their lowest ever levels.
