Hundreds of Thousands of Children Have Died From Trump Shutting Down USAID Article | Archive
This is evil.
Craig Wood- Jun 19, 2026when the Trump administration dismantled the United States Agency for International Development at the start of 2025, officials called it an effort to cut waste and redirect resources. Researchers, epidemiologists, and physicians who spent careers building those programs called it something else.
They called it a death sentence. The numbers are proving them right.
The Numbers
According to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, the dismantling of USAID has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people. Two thirds of them were children.A separate analysis published in The Lancet found that USAID assistance had saved 92 million lives over two decades through programs targeting HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, polio, maternal mortality, and malnutrition. Those programs are now gone.
Researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that the funding cuts could contribute to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 additional deaths annually. A one-year impact tracker maintained by public health researchers, now frozen at the one-year mark from when cuts began, documents the toll by disease and age group: 518,000 projected child deaths, 165,000 additional child deaths from pneumonia alone, 155,000 from malnutrition, 126,000 from diarrhea, 53,000 from malaria.
These are not projections from critics looking to score political points. They are models built by epidemiologists using USAID’s own data, cross-referenced against spending records from the federal government’s own financial reporting systems.
What Was Cut and What Happened Next
The cuts were immediate and sweeping. Terminated USAID awards had been supporting an estimated 2.3 million people on lifesaving antiretroviral treatment for HIV. US cuts to the World Food Programme’s operations in Yemen alone ended food assistance to 2.4 million people and stopped nutritional care for 100,000 children.The website tracking malaria program data has been down since January. There has been no recent monitoring data published for PEPFAR, the HIV/AIDS program that had kept millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa alive for two decades.
On the ground, the consequences are documented and specific. Malnutrition deaths rose in northern Nigeria, Somalia, and Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar border. Malaria deaths spiked in northern Cameroon following the collapse of antimalarial supply chains. HIV treatment programs across Africa face reversal. Payment delays and award cancellations caused widespread medicine stockouts and service suspensions across dozens of countries simultaneously.
Surgeon and public health researcher Dr. Atul Gawande, who served as USAID’s assistant administrator for global health under Biden, wrote in the New Yorker that the death toll will continue to grow largely unseen, because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatment or vaccine-preventable illness, and because the deaths are scattered across dozens of countries and communities with limited visibility in American media.
“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.
A Mother Had to Choose
The human reality of these numbers has a face. Rovina Naboi is a single mother of nine children living in a Kenyan refugee camp. When her daughter Jane’s health deteriorated from malnutrition, Naboi brought her to a clinic and stayed with her for ten days. Then she learned that her other children, left alone at home, had not eaten for days.She took Jane home, still seriously ill, because she had no other choice. Jane died the next day.
The clinic’s chief medical officer, Dr. Sila Monthe, described what Naboi faced: a choice between staying with her dying daughter or feeding her other children. “That is a decision that no mother should ever have to make,” he said.
The support systems that could have prevented that choice, the nutrition programs, the clinic funding, the supply chains for therapeutic food, were built over decades with American taxpayer dollars. They were cancelled in the first weeks of the Trump administration.
What Replaced Them
Between January 21st and the end of the fiscal year, the federal government issued precisely one new relief award from the International Disaster Assistance account worth more than two million dollars. One. In nine months. There have been no other awards made to respond to new or expanded humanitarian emergencies anywhere in the world.
Meanwhile, internal State Department estimates reported in the press suggest that USAID shutdown costs alone could reach six billion dollars. The administration did not cut foreign aid to save money. It spent billions eliminating the infrastructure that had been saving lives, and replaced it with nothing.
Other countries have tried to partially fill the gap. Nigeria passed a supplemental health budget of $200 million. South Africa pledged additional funding to maintain HIV treatment. These responses are meaningful. They are also a fraction of what was lost. The OECD estimates that overall overseas development assistance fell 9 to 17 percent in 2025, with health funding potentially dropping by up to 60 percent from its 2022 peak.
What This Was
USAID was not a bureaucratic abstraction. It was the largest funder of global health aid on earth. It kept HIV-positive mothers in Kenya from passing the virus to their newborns. It distributed antimalarials to children in Cameroon. It fed children in Yemen who had no other source of food. It had saved, by documented estimate, 92 million lives over twenty years.Elon Musk’s DOGE shut it down in a matter of weeks, dismissing it as waste. The administration called it foreign handouts. Congressional Republicans cheered.
Six hundred thousand people are dead. Most of them were children. The toll is rising every month, in places most Americans will never hear about, from diseases that cost pennies to prevent.
That is not waste reduction. It is a policy choice, made deliberately, with the full knowledge of what would follow.
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