The decimation of USAid is already having a terrible effect in some of the poorest places on the planet. It damages America: it will harm us all.
An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or above could not have caused more carnage. Recent floods in Asia and droughts in Africa have been catastrophic, yet they have inflicted less damage and affected fewer people than the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars of US aid from the world’s most volatile hotspots and its most vulnerable people. Coming alongside President Trump’s plan for a US takeover of Gaza, the US administration’s resolve to shut down its international aid agency sends a clear message that the era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end.
But while the Gaza plan is as yet only on the drawing board, USAid cuts – which will see funding slashed and just 290 of the more than 10,000 employees worldwide retained, according to the New York Times – have already begun to bite this week. We have seen the halting of landmine-clearing work in Asia, support for war veterans and independent media in Ukraine, and assistance for Rohingya refugees on the border of Bangladesh. This week, drug deliveries to fight the current mpox and Ebola outbreaks in Africa have been stopped, life-saving food lies rotting at African ports, and even initiatives targeting trafficking of drugs like fentanyl have been cut back. One of the world’s most respected charities, Brac, says that the 90-day blanket ban on helping vulnerable people is depriving 3.5 million people of vital services.
One critical programme has been granted a limited waiver. Pepfar, created by Republican president George W Bush, offers antiretroviral prescriptions to 20 million people around the world to combat HIV and Aids. Its activities escaped the ban only after warnings that a 90-day stoppage could lead to 136,000 babies acquiring HIV. But it has still been blocked from organising cervical cancer screening, treating malaria, tuberculosis and polio, assisting maternal and child health, and efforts to curtail outbreaks of Ebola, Marburg and mpox.
Not only does the stop-work edict mean that, in a matter of days, the US has destroyed the work of decades building up goodwill around the world, but Trump’s claim that America has been over-generous is exposed as yet another exaggeration. Norway tops the list as biggest donor of official development assistance (ODA) as a percentage of gross national income (GNI) at 1.09%; Britain is at just over 0.5%, albeit down from the UN target of 0.7%; but the US is near the bottom of the advanced economies at 0.24% – alongside Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is simply the size of the US economy – 26% of world output – that means that the 0.24% adds up to more aid than any other country. The US provided $66bn in 2023, making USAid a leader in global humanitarian aid, education and health, not least in addressing HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.
On Sunday night, Trump told reporters that USAid had been “run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”. “I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap,” his press spokesperson added, with one of the president’s chief advisers Elon Musk calling the agency a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair,” he said. “We’re shutting it down.”
US generosity is often seen as mere charity, but it is in the country’s self-interest to be generous because the creation of a more stable world benefits us all. We all gain if USAid can mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, prevent malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, halt the upsurge of IS in Syria and support a fair, humanitarian reconstruction of Gaza and Ukraine. Only the narrowest and most blinkered view of what constitutes “America first” can justify the disaster America has unloaded on the world.
Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
Rawr
Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/07/donald-trump-elon-musk-usaid-poverty-america