The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has officially stopped working. This was announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Trump administration's decision to stop the agency's work has raised serious concerns that it could lead to the death of millions of people around the world.
According to a study by the medical journal "Lancet", the termination of USAID aid threatens the lives of 14 million people by 2030 who would benefit from the agency's programs. Among them are five million children under the age of five. The authors conclude that Trump's decision is equivalent to a global pandemic or a major military conflict in terms of the number of lives that will be lost.
90 million lives saved
Since 1961, USAID has provided humanitarian and development assistance to countries around the world. In recent years, the agency's budget has been several tens of billions of dollars a year, and according to the study's authors, these funds have saved 90 million lives in the past two decades alone. The most effective programs have been programs to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Distributing food to those in need through emergency humanitarian assistance in threatened areas has also saved many lives.
"Is (USAID) a good use of resources? We found that the average American taxpayer contributed about 18 cents a day to USAID," says James Macinko, one of the study's co-authors, quoted by NPR. "For this small amount, we managed to save up to 90 million lives around the world."
Rubio: "Greater accountability, strategy and efficiency"
Early in his term, Donald Trump said that he would stop the work of the agency, which was run by "a group of lunatics". The DOGE service, then headed by Elon Musk, described the work of USAID as ineffective and too expensive.
It is expected that in the future the United States will provide less foreign humanitarian aid, and the work of distributing it will be done by State Department employees. "Under Trump, we will finally have a foreign funding mission in America that prioritizes our national interests," wrote Marco Rubio.
"Foreign assistance programs that are consistent with administration policies and that advance American interests will be administered by the State Department, where they will be executed with greater accountability, strategy, and efficiency," the US secretary of state also said.