March 16, 2024 Essay: Cutting Spending and Sacrificing Lives

The Trump administration’s decision to effectively terminate the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is already having profound consequences throughout the world and could contribute to the destabilization of entire regions.

USAID was initially established through an executive order signed by then-President John F. Kennedy in 1961 in response to the Foreign Assistance Act of the same year. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act in 1998 established USAID as its own agency separate from the State Department. This raises questions as to the legality of the administration’s actions in folding USAID into the State Department while substantially curtailing its work.

In 2024, USAID spent $40 billion of the $68 billion that the United States allocated for foreign aid programs with USAID providing critical assistance in the areas of health care, food, clean water, and crisis response. Although the United States was the world’s largest foreign aid donor, our foreign aid programs represented only 1% of the federal budget. Elon Musk, charged with eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse from the federal government, has a particularly strong animus toward USAID, calling it a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

Caritas Internationalis, the Catholic umbrella organization for 162 relief and development agencies working in more than 200 countries and territories around the world, was strong in its response to the dismantling of USAID programs. Alistair Dutton, Secretary General of Caritas, stated: “Stopping USAID abruptly will kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanizing poverty. This is an inhumane affront to people’s God-given human dignity, that will cause immense suffering…” In an NPR interview, Bill Gates also argued that the shuttering of USAID would put millions of lives on the line. Rob Nabor, North America Director of the Gates Foundation has stated: “There is no foundation – or group of foundations – that can provide the funding, work force capacity, expertise or leadership that the United States has historically provided to combat and control deadly diseases and address hunger and poverty around the world.”

What types of programs are now being eliminated?

• In war-ravaged Sudan, half the population of 50 million needs food aid while famine is spreading. The USAID suspension has halted national food programs serving millions and shuttered hundreds of community kitchens that operate in areas too dangerous for major aid organizations to enter.
• Suspension of USAID programs have halted efforts to contain a deadly hemorrhagic Marburg outbreak in Tanzania, the spread of an mpox variant killing children in West Africa, as well as the monitoring of a deadly bird flu that has been identified in 49 countries.
• In extremely volatile regions, USAID provided programs aimed at fostering greater stability. USAID sponsored a project that helped communities manage water stations in Niger to avert conflicts in a region already under threat from Islamic extremists. In Basra, Iraq, USAID helped repair water treatment plants after contaminated water caused violent social unrest. USAID created the Famine Early Warning Systems Network to enable aid workers to identify potential threats to food security and to take action to prevent them. In Kenya, USAID created a program to train young people to repair motorcycles offering them an alternative to recruitment by terrorist organizations. USAID helped farmer cooperatives in Kenya get fast-growing seeds that could grow with little water. USAID has sponsored research in United States universities to develop more nutritious, higher-yielding seeds that could better withstand heat and unpredictable rains – a critical need in light of climate change. All of these programs will now be lost.

It is true that there were problems with USAID, but those problems could have been addressed without effectively eliminating the agency. Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, recently stated: “People will die but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”

— Fr. Mark Hallinan, S.J., Associate Pastor