The prestigious Lancet Medical Journal has released a research report, stressing that USAID cuts could cause a humanitarian crisis. The report said that the cuts could cause around fourteen million deaths worldwide.
The US Senate is in the process of debating a large-scale budget bill today in Washington. This bill, which comes to more than 1,000 pages, has provisions for increased cuts to international foreign aid provided by the United States. Trump has referred to this legislation as his “big, beautiful bill.”
The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, stated in March that 83% of all government programs at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were to be cancelled. These cutbacks were then celebrated by Elon Musk, who bragged about putting the Agency through “the woodchipper”.
USAID provides the majority of the world’s aid to the poorest countries and has been supporting many humanitarian initiatives and organisations for decades. The USAID organisation provides around $68 billion in funding annually and is integral to the global aid system.
Other nations had followed suit with the US, as several European countries have also cancelled aid funding. The removal of this vital funding is set to have catastrophic consequences.
The Lancet Journal used modelling to investigate the effects of the removal of this funding would have. It states that the funding cuts have the potential to lead to a staggering number of more than fourteen million deaths by 2030.
The cuts could have a massive impact on children across the world. The report states that around 4.5 million children under the age of five are at risk, with the potential to cause an annual infant mortality rate of 700,000 a year.
The co-author of the Lancet report, Davide Rasella, states that low and middle-income countries could face an effect, “comparable in scale to a global pandemic or armed conflict.”
Rasella also stated that these cuts have the risk of “abruptly halting and even reversing two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations.”
To put this into perspective, 10 million soldiers died in WWI, 11 million people perished during the Holocaust, and 7 million people have died from COVID-19 since 2020. So, this potential death toll would represent a global catastrophe on the scale of some of history’s greatest tragedies.
This move has been widely condemned by humanitarian organisations, with the United Nations saying it was “facing the deepest funding cuts ever to hit the international humanitarian sector.”
Dozens of world leaders are meeting this week in the Spanish city of Seville for the biggest aid conference in decades. The United States has announced that it will not be in attendance.
This decision over aid cuts to USAID could have catastrophic effects for the global community.
