Just over three months ago, President Donald Trump introduced the nation to Executive Order 14169: “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.” On the surface, it looked and read like any other government document. It was, after all, full of boring procedural jargon, moderately confusing syntax and references to hyper-specific governmental programs that can seem distant to the public. However, beyond this facade of banality, Executive Order 14169 is so fundamentally different from anything that had ever been enacted in American history — a document that may just be remembered as one of the most consequential and bleak pieces of legislation.
Why? Just over a dozen lines into the executive order came the following mandate: “[there will be a] 90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.” What these few lines meant was that the Trump administration had paused the funding and crippled the operating abilities of The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency founded in the 1960s with the express goal “to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms.” However, what these lines meant in terms of practical reality was that the Trump administration had abandoned millions of the world’s most marginalized individuals.
To elaborate on this, experts from the Center for Global Development, in collaboration with the New York Times, recently outlined all the ways in which the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID could potentially result in a baffling amount of unnecessary deaths — 3.3 million to be exact. For one, USAID provides millions with life-saving medical assistance, whether this be in the form of HIV/AIDS medication and treatment, or clinics that seek to proactively stop the development and spread of diseases like polio, malaria and tuberculosis. USAID is also the primary force on the frontlines of the fight against famine, providing food and clear water to those in areas where such things would be a scarcity otherwise (e.g., in South Sudan, 70% of the food assistance that the nation relies upon to keep its population fed comes from USAID initiatives). While this list of the life-saving programs that USAID provides could continue to go on forever, the underlying point has been made: Trump’s cuts to USAID would destabilize and destroy those supply channels that the globe’s most vulnerable rely on to live.
To be sure, the Trump administration has attempted to justify its actions. For one, they have leveled that USAID’s budget, which totaled $71.9 billion in 2023, is a prime example of America “blindly [doling] out money [that has] no return for the American people.” Moving beyond the fact that this sentiment actively disregards the value that foreigners’ lives hold, it is worth noting that Americans reap various reciprocal benefits when U.S. foreign aid works to make the globe healthier. Namely, America’s investments in the public, socio-political and economic health of other nations keep its own citizens safe and prosperous, especially since contagious diseases do not respect national borders (see COVID-19). Additionally, countries that are not suffering from humanitarian crises pose less of a threat when it comes to terrorism, have more purchasing power when it comes to buying American goods and are simply better, more contributive members of the global community.
The Trump administration has perpetuated the claim that its drastic gutting of USAID is necessary in order to halt the agency from “[funding] crazy radical programs and far Left activists.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has perhaps been the most vocal in championing this narrative, actually spending one of her meetings with reporters reading out the USAID programs that she deemed to be “insane.” However, putting the dubious factuality of these claims aside, given the Trump administration’s current lackluster record in when it comes to cutting government programs or determining which parts of initiatives are necessary and which parts are not, their ability to effectively and efficiently slash USAID’s budget is worth questioning … Can they really be trusted to understand what damage they are actually doing as they look to change the landscape of our government by slaying the woke boogeyman?
Considering all of this together, it then seems that America has arrived at an extremely bleak juncture in its history; one in which its presidential administration is playing with the lives of some of this world’s most vulnerable individuals.