ProPublica estimated the number of children who will die–of starvation or lack of medical care–because DOGE closed down USAID. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, in addition to their families, are the direct result of the shuttering foreign aid. These lives don’t matter to Trump and Musk; they are not white. Musk is a well-known pro-catalyst; he thinks women must have more babies. He himself now has 14 children, by different mothers. But he seems to care only about white babies.
Here is a portion of their report:
For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.
In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.
Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.
President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials.
During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.
The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday.
Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica.
The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.
The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview.
Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs.
Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately.
How do you sleep at night, when you know that your actions were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children? And their parents?
The New York Times story that was linked in the story gave more details:
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw foreign aid and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development is likely to cause enormous human suffering, according to estimates by the agency itself. Among them:
- up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;
- 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;
- one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;
- more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.
Those stark projections were laid out in a series of memos by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., which were obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Enrich was placed on administrative leave on Sunday.
This was the opening of Enrich’s bold memo, as reprinted in the New York Times:
Takeaway: The temporary pause on foreign aid and delays in approving lifesaving humanitarian assistance (LHA) for global health will lead to increased death and disability, accelerate global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks-directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public health. If the pause leads to permanent contract terminations, the $7.7B in resources appropriated by Congress are no longer be used to support these lifesaving global health programs, which could potentially result in wasted resources. The impacts on mortality and morbidity are summarized in the tables below. While the Foreign Assistance Review is set to take place in the coming weeks, it is important to recognize that a mechanism-by-mechanism approach may overlook the broader impact of these programs across global health program areas. This includes missed opportunities to enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness within LHA program areas.
Marco Rubio, how do you feel about the deaths of so many people? Does it trouble you? Can you look in the mirror in the morning without seeing a murderer reflected back to you?
We know that Trump and Musk don’t care. What about you, Mr. Rubio?
Diane Ravitch's blog 