Throwing out the baby with the bath water. And still the Trump apologists prattle on….
Cutting aid, JFK noted, “would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive.” He added: “Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled.”
Perhaps that’s why Russia has
praised Trump’s move.
In contrast with Kennedy, the Trump administration braids together cruelty, ignorance and shortsightedness, and that combination seems particularly evident in its assault on American humanitarian assistance.
One person has already died of bird flu in the United States, and there is growing concern of a pandemic — yet Trump’s suspension of foreign aid has interrupted bird flu surveillance in 49 countries,
according to the Global Health Council, a U.S.-based nonprofit.
Remember the American panic over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014? (Trump was
particularly hysterical back then.) In the end, an Ebola pandemic was averted — in part because of U.S.A.I.D.’s work in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
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I’ve seen U.S.A.I.D. operate all over the world, and it’s a mixed picture. It is fair to complain that U.S.A.I.D. is endlessly bureaucratic and that too much of the aid goes to so-called Beltway bandit American contractors rather than to needy people abroad.
Yet there’s no basis for the White House mythology that U.S.A.I.D. is an enclave of woke waste, reflected in
Trump’s claim that it spent about “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” (he doubled his previous claim of $50 million).
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Trump’s policies are as reckless as his rhetoric. I’d welcome some restructuring of U.S.A.I.D. But this isn’t restructuring but demolition — a blow to our values and interests alike.
Musk lambasted U.S.A.I.D. as “
a criminal organization.” In fact, many of its employees have risked their lives in the best tradition of public service. The
U.S.A.I.D. Memorial Wall honors 99 people killed while working for the agency in places such as Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
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I’ve seen genuine improvements in U.S.A.I.D. over the years. Its public-private partnership to
tackle lead poisoning, announced last year, was a model of American leadership. And so from my travels, this is what U.S.A.I.D. has come to mean to me:
I’ve seen women and girls with
obstetric fistula, a horrific childbirth injury, get a $600 surgery that gives them back their lives — and this is something that U.S.A.I.D. supports.
I’ve seen men humiliated by elephantiasis and grotesquely enlarged scrotums, occasionally requiring a wheelbarrow to support their organs as they walk. And U.S.A.I.D. has fought this disease and made it less common.
I’ve seen children dying of malaria (and
I’ve had malaria), and I’ve seen U.S.A.I.D. help achieve major strides against the disease over the last two decades.
I’ve seen southern Africa ravaged by AIDS. And then President George W. Bush’s
landmark program against AIDS, called PEPFAR and implemented in part through U.S.A.I.D., transformed the landscape. I saw coffin makers in Lesotho and Malawi grumble that their business was collapsing because far fewer people were dying. PEPFAR has
saved 26 million lives so far. (In the coming months, I’ll see if I can calculate how many lives are lost to Trump’s cuts in aid.)
I’ve seen the suffering of communities where people in middle age routinely go blind from trachoma, river blindness or cataracts — and the transformation when U.S.A.I.D. helps prevent such blindness.
Trump scoffed that U.S.A.I.D. was “run by radical lunatics.” Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?
If this is woke, what about the evangelical Christians in
International Justice Mission, which, with U.S.A.I.D. support, has done outstanding work battling sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the Philippines? Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?
To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.
