An analysis published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet projects that cuts to the agency will lead to more deaths from diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
By Aria Bendix
More than 14 million people could die over the next five years because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to an analysis published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet.
Researchers calculated the lifesaving benefits of USAID funding over a 21-year period, then used the data to determine how many lives would be lost without USAID funding in the future.
The analysis found that, from 2001 through 2021, USAID-funded programs prevented nearly 92 million deaths across 133 countries, including more than 25 million deaths from HIV/AIDS, around 11 million from diarrheal diseases, 8 million from malaria and nearly 5 million from tuberculosis.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in March that he was canceling 83% of USAID’s programs, which he said did not serve “the core national interests of the United States,” and added that the State Department would absorb the roughly 1,000 remaining programs.
The action brought many overseas humanitarian efforts to a grinding halt, leading to the closings of food kitchens and health clinics in underserved countries and in some cases delaying or stopping the distribution of lifesaving medications, bed nets to ward off malaria, nutritional packets for starving children and chlorine tablets to disinfect dirty water.
The analysis, done by a team of international researchers from Spain, Brazil, Mozambique and the United States, estimated the impact of the 83% funding cuts, assuming they remain through 2030. Of the more than 14 million deaths forecast, around 4.5 million would be among children under 5, the authors found.
“The numbers are striking, but we are not the only group that did this kind of analysis,” said Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, who coordinated the study. Other research groups, he said, “came up with similar magnitudes — millions and millions of deaths that will be caused by the defunding of USAID.”
