The US Agency for International Development, or USAID, has officially shut down after President Donald Trump systematically dismantled the agency for its supposedly wasteful expenditures.
Over 80% of the entire agency’s programs were cancelled as of March, and Tuesday saw the rest officially absorbed by the state department.
The shutdown of USAID, which dispensed assistance on behalf of the US government, the planet’s largest provider of such, has been recently condemned by former Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush.
The aid reductions may lead to over 14 million additional deaths between now and 2030, a warning published by researchers in the Lancet health journal stated. The Lancet report authors referred to the figures as “staggering” and estimated that one-third of the people at risk of dying prematurely were children.
A government department official stated the research relied on “incorrect assumptions” and reiterated that the US would keep delivering aid “more efficiently”, AFP news agency said. USAID was established in 1961 and had some 10,000 employees, two-thirds of whom served overseas, before the controversial reductions, the Congressional Research Service said.
The contentious reductions started early in Trump’s second term, when billionaire and former White House adviser Elon Musk was charged with reducing the federal workforce.
The initiative drew near-universal criticism from humanitarian groups across the globe. Among the programs that were restrained were programs to provide prosthetic limbs to wounded soldiers in Ukraine, to demine mines in many nations, and to stop the spread of Ebola in Africa.
On Wednesday morning, the agency website still showed a notice indicating that all USAID direct-hire staff around the world had been put on administrative leave as of 23 February. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had earlier stated that the remaining 1,000 programs after the cuts would be managed by his department.
“This period of government-mandated inefficiency is officially over,” he added on Tuesday. Under the Trump Administration, we will finally have a foreign funding mission in America that serves our national interests,” he posted on Substack.
Trump has consistently stated he desires foreign expenditures to be highly synchronised with his “America First” policy. Bush and Obama made their statements of condemnation in a video conference that they held with U2 singer Bono to thousands of members of the USAID community.
Bush, a fellow Republican from Trump’s party, centred on the effect of reductions to an AIDS and HIV program that his administration initiated and was later acknowledged as responsible for saving 25 million lives.
“You’ve demonstrated the wonderful strength of America through your efforts – and that’s your good heart,” Bush said in a taped message, as reported by US media. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have perished now survive? I believe it is, and so do you.”
While Obama, a member of the opposition Democratic Party, guaranteed the work already done by USAID staff. Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,” Obama was reported as saying.
Humanitarian advocate Bono has talked for many years about the millions of people who he said could perish due to the cuts. They called you crooks when you were the best of us,” he explained to the audience of the video conference.
USAID was viewed as part of the international aid system. Once Trump’s reductions were made public, other nations copied them with their reductions – the UK, France and Germany, to name a few.
The United Nations last month confirmed that it was facing “the deepest funding cuts ever to hit the international humanitarian sector”.
