{"id":6453,"date":"2026-08-06T10:38:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T10:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=6453"},"modified":"2026-08-06T10:38:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T10:38:21","slug":"abcarian-shame-on-trump-rubio-and-musk-whove-enabled-needless-deaths-around-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=6453","title":{"rendered":"Abcarian: Shame on Trump, Rubio and Musk, who\u2019ve enabled needless deaths around the world"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and richest-man-in-the-world Elon Musk have not personally killed anyone, but their actions are unquestionably causing the unnecessary deaths of millions of innocent people \u2014 including 4.5 million children \u2014 who have been cut off from the lifesaving aid the U.S. was once proud to provide.<\/p>\n

Read more Horoscopes August 6, 2026: Vera Farmiga, choose what and who are meaningful to you<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the president\u2019s first executive orders on Jan. 20, 2025, was a 90-day pause on all foreign assistance. It wasn\u2019t really a pause; it was the beginning of the end for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been saving and improving lives around the world for more than half a century.<\/p>\n

The effects of Trump\u2019s order were felt immediately. Shipments of antiretroviral HIV medications, malaria nets and oxygen tubes for newborn infants expired in warehouses or never arrived in sub-Saharan Africa. In Haiti and Sudan, the funding \u201cpause\u201d halted programs for clean water, maternal health and refugee food rations. And, inevitably, people began to die.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a tragic end for an agency that was founded in 1961, the brainchild of President Kennedy, who saw the exercise of soft power as a way to counter Soviet influence abroad. Later, of course, it was Chinese economic influence that USAID programs sought to neutralize.<\/p>\n

By far, USAID\u2019s greatest triumph was its global health program, which included President George W. Bush\u2019s massively successful 2003 HIV-AIDS initiative, PEPFAR. In the last 23 years, more than 26 million lives have been saved, and millions more new HIV infections have been prevented.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo many people around the world,\u201d President Obama said in a June 2025 message of gratitude to the thousands who lost their jobs, \u201cUSAID is<\/em> the United States.\u201d Fittingly, its logo was a drawing of two hands clasping with the slogan \u201cFrom the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the beginning of Trump\u2019s second term, USAID operated in 100 countries and employed 10,000 people. Working with host countries, it funded infrastructure projects, made loans and provided money, food and technical expertise to boost growth and education in developing nations.<\/p>\n

When Trump decided to kill it as an independent agency and fold its remains into the State Department, USAID was working all over Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia to combat not just health crises like HIV-AIDS, but also malaria and tuberculosis, and outbreaks of the deadly viruses Ebola and Marburg.<\/p>\n

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Musk, who foolishly promised Trump he could shave $2 trillion from the federal budget with his White House advisory team, which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, developed a bizarre hatred for USAID after hearing a wacky critic of the agency on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast. In social media posts, Musk called it a \u201ccriminal organization,\u201d \u201ca radical-left political psy op\u201d and a \u201ccrazy waste of money.\u201d (USAID\u2019s $40-billion annual appropriation totaled only about 0.7% of the federal budget. Less than $2 billion went to administrative costs.)<\/p>\n

Like an army of child soldiers, Musk\u2019s DOGE team of callow computer nerds \u2014 remember \u201cBig Balls\u201d? \u2014 were soon unleashed. \u201cWe spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,\u201d Musk tweeted on Feb. 3, 2025. \u201cCould gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.\u201d<\/p>\n

His lack of moral clarity is stunning.<\/p>\n

As Bill Gates so poignantly put it in a May 2025 Financial Times interview, \u201cThe picture of the world\u2019s richest man killing the world\u2019s poorest children is not a pretty one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

If you want a window onto the fecklessness of DOGE and the Trump political appointees put in place to wreck the agency, I recommend \u201cInto the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower\u2019s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID,\u201d by Nicholas Enrich, formerly USAID\u2019s acting administrator for global health.<\/p>\n

In headshaking detail, Enrich chronicles the administration\u2019s six-week assault on USAID.<\/p>\n

Read more Asking Eric: My boyfriend told me his neighbor\u2019s secret, and I wish he hadn\u2019t<\/a><\/p>\n

You may recall the outrage when DOGE found a program that seemed like a gift from the gods to Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,\u201d Trump announced on Jan. 29, 2025. \u201cAnd do you know what\u2019s happened to them? They\u2019ve used them as a method of making bombs.\u201d This was a fantasy. The program, focused on reproductive health and HIV prevention, served a region of Mozambique called Gaza, a continent away from the Hamas stronghold.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the parade of political appointees Trump put in charge either knew little about the agency, or had axes to grind. After Enrich delivered a presentation on the agency\u2019s work to his new Trump-appointed bosses, one of them said, \u201cI had no idea you did all this. As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just \u2014 you know \u2014 abortions.\u201d (It\u2019s common knowledge, or should be, that American tax dollars are prohibited from funding abortion care.)<\/p>\n

One political appointee told Enrich that Ebola, which had recently broken out in Uganda, was \u201ca scam.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the chaotic interlude before Enrich was fired (after being told on the same day he was an essential employee and<\/em> was being laid off), he and his colleagues desperately tried to save some of the agency\u2019s most critical programs. They believed \u2014 wrongly as it turned out \u2014 that Rubio was being truthful when he announced that programs responsible for saving lives would be exempt from Trump\u2019s pause on foreign aid.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo children are dying on my watch,\u201d Rubio confidently (but incorrectly) asserted to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.<\/p>\n

According to an impact counter developed by Boston University\u2019s Brooke Nichols, an associate professor in the School of Public Health and an infectious disease mathematical modeler, in the first year after USAID was abruptly ended, nearly 263,000 adults and 518,428 children died unnecessarily. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, accused Nichols of \u201cdangerous hysteria\u201d and of spreading misinformation.<\/p>\n

But journalists at ProPublica, NPR, the Washington Post and the New York Times, among others, have traveled the world to document the preventable deaths and illness caused by the abrupt defunding of USAID.<\/p>\n

A study in the Lancet concluded that by 2030, as many as 14 million people could die due to the defunding, including 4.5 million children under age 5.<\/p>\n

Not that you will ever admit it, Secretary Rubio, but children are still dying on your watch.<\/p>\n

Heckuva job, as someone once said.<\/p>\n

Robin Abcarian is a Los Angeles Times columnist.\u00a0\u00a92026 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Harriette Cole: What if the new boss wants me to work harder?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Not that you will ever admit it, Secretary Rubio, but children are still dying on your watch.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"\nAbcarian: Shame on Trump, Rubio and Musk, who\u2019ve enabled needless deaths around the world - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=6453\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Abcarian: Shame on Trump, Rubio and Musk, who\u2019ve enabled needless deaths around the world - 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