Why We Couldn't Sell America on U.S.A.I.D.

New York Times

11 hours ago

On July 1, the Trump administration will effectively dissolve the United States Agency for International Development and shunt the agency's few remaining contracts to the State Department. Over the next two months, remaining employees will be terminated — including the entirety of the government's global humanitarian aid work force. Quietly, America will abandon the fight against global famine.
Most Americans won't notice.
For many, it may take months or years to connect reports of mass death abroad back to these decisions made at home. That's because after six decades, U.S.A.I.D. became so efficient at quietly stopping millions of deaths worldwide that most Americans didn't even know many of the humanitarian disasters were occurring. Because they never heard about the lives regularly saved by their tax dollars, Americans don't realize the generosity that has been stolen from them.
I worked for U.S.A.I.D. in East Africa over the past eight and a half years, selling the story of American foreign aid to people in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Kenya. Our inability to tell this same story to Americans is our great failure. It is what put the agency into the Department of Government Efficiency's wood chipper first. It's what allows Secretary of State Marco Rubio to get away with insisting that lifesaving humanitarian aid would continue while the administration drastically slashed its funding. And it's what I fear will let this presidency cast the deaths from the next preventable catastrophe as unstoppable or inevitable.
In East Africa I saw our development projects during times of peace and our humanitarian aid during crises and conflicts. Yes, our agency was often tangled in a slow, maddening bureaucracy. But I believe most Americans would be horrified to learn what they're forfeiting.
One example is enough.
In April 2022, I flew eight Ethiopian journalists to Gode, a dusty city in southeastern Ethiopia, where the temperature that week neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We were there to see communities ravished by the 2020-23 Horn of Africa drought, the longest ever recorded in the three countries it spanned — Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. We took the journalists to a temporary tented camp for 2,500 families that was built in part with American funding. We saw a hospital saving children from malnutrition death with American-bought nutritional medicines. Soaked in sweat, we visited a cavernous warehouse stocked with just a fraction of the more than 150,000 tons of food that included American-grown grain, dried peas and cooking oil that our nation was rushing into the region each year.
During the drought, more than 40 million people were helped by humanitarian aid, of which over 70 percent was paid for by the United States. Dr. Oliver Watson, a lecturer at Imperial College London who has modeled drought deaths, estimates that without American aid, between 2.1 million and 3.9 million more excess deaths would have occurred. That's an especially grave figure, given that half of those who died from the region's last famine were newborns or young children.
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