Last week, the Trump fascist regime called on Congress to erase $8.3 billion in funds that were already allocated for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID is an arm of the U.S. government that funds and runs programs around the world that provide food assistance, disease prevention, and other types of “humanitarian aid.” This take back of funds comes after Trump had reduced or eliminated large parts of USAID in the first months of the regime—accusing it of being run by “radical left lunatics”—and put whatever remained under the control the State Department. 

What are the effects of this drastic slashing of USAID? In a series of internal memos, a top official in the agency projected the enormous human costs from these moves. As summarized in an article in the New York Times,¹ which obtained a copy of the memos, among the likely effects of the cuts are:

• “up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;
• 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;
• one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;
• more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.”

To be clear, the aid given out through USAID over the past decades—in the name of American “generosity”—has been part of the network of aid/control used by the U.S. to pose as a great democratic “benefactor” in order to protect and project America’s position as the dominant power in the world capitalist-imperialist system. For example, in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world where over half the population is desperately dependent on aid, USAID funded food for people on the edge of starvation, healthcare for children suffering from cholera, and other programs. But a huge factor in this country’s humanitarian disaster was years of brutal U.S.-backed war by Saudi Arabia in Yemen—and the U.S. itself, including under Trump, has carried out aggressive military attacks in Yemen with utter disregard for human life, in the name of going after the Iran-backed Houthi group and others considered to be in the way of U.S. interests. 

And the reality is that the “humanitarian aid” given through USAID and other aid agencies around the world in no way meets the massive and urgent needs of billions of people worldwide—in food, housing, healthcare, etc. In a single year, nearly five million children die worldwide before reaching the age of five—half of those deaths are linked to children and mothers not having enough food! For the rest, infectious diseases like pneumonia and malaria are among the leading causes. This intolerable situation is rooted in the nature and workings of the system dominating the world—capitalism-imperialism—that lead to the plundering and devastation of the oppressed areas of the world, the predatory destruction of the environment, and huge gaps in living conditions between the rich and poor countries. Truly dealing with this problem would require not more aid, but an actual revolution to abolish this system and bring in a radically new system and a whole new way to live for humanity.

However, the fact is that the sudden cutoff of USAID is having, and will have, far-reaching, deadly consequences for millions of people, especially in the poorest and most oppressed areas of the world. During a Congressional hearing in May, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that “No one has died because of USAID [cuts]." This was a flat-out lie. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof profiled just some of the victims in South Sudan, whose deaths can be directly attributed to the cutoff of a USAID program called PEPFAR, which provided medicines and other care for people with HIV/AIDS in dozens of countries—among them were Peter Donde, a 10-year-old boy, and Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl, both of whom were infected with HIV at birth. These children, and other HIV patients, died because they could no longer get medicines that cost less than 12 cents a day. 

This is just the beginning of the oncoming catastrophe, especially in Africa, which has 25 million of the world’s 40 million HIV patients. Kristof notes, “In South Africa, where more than seven million people are H.I.V.-positive, the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation estimates that ending PEPFAR would lead to more than 600,000 deaths over a decade in that country alone.”

The State Department claims to have issued a “waiver” from the cuts for some USAID programs, including PEPFAR. But according to various reports, a lot of the aid remains suspended or is not getting through. And increased deaths and suffering from HIV, as intolerable as they are, are just one part of the story. 

"100 percent preventable deaths"

Brooke Nichols, a professor of infectious diseases at Boston University, used scientific methods to develop a tracker to estimate the effect in human lives from the USAID cuts. She at first assumed that the largest impact would be from HIV/AIDS. But, she said, “[I] was really shocked by the child deaths from diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition. Tens of thousands of children have died because we’ve pulled out our funding from diarrhoea, pneumonia and food programs.” 

According to Nichols’ Impact Counter, available online and continuously updated, estimates are that as of June 7 over 320,000 people have died as a result of the USAID funding cuts—over 219,000 of them children. “These are 100 percent preventable deaths,” Nichols says. “They all happened because of the abrupt halt in [USAID] funding.”

A former chief nutritionist for USAID said that 50 percent of therapeutic foods for treating malnutrition in children around the world used to be funded by USAID. Now, the ending of or major cutbacks in those food programs could lead to “1 million children not receiving treatment for severe malnutrition, resulting in 163,500 additional deaths per year.”

Since the end of World War 2, more than 500 million children have died needlessly because of starvation and preventable disease, fundamentally because the world, and in particular the poorer countries, has been dominated by the system of capitalism-imperialism, with the USA the number one imperialist predator. Now, even beyond the needless deaths caused by the “normal” workings of this system, hundreds of thousands more are losing their lives because of the heartless, demented actions of the fascist regime in charge of the U.S. government. This adds further urgency to these demands:

Trump Must Go—NOW!
In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!

This Whole System Is Illegitimate—We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System!