Today, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, has shut down a small portion of its programs and employees will be part of the State Department this week. Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and rock star Bono spoke to thousands of USAID employees, praising their achievements and criticizing the decision to dismantle the agency. A new study published in the Lancet medical journal estimates that the cuts in U.S. funding could lead to millions of additional deaths over the next five years. By 2030, that’s 18 million additional deaths, an average of more than 2.4 million deaths per year, including 4.5 million children under the age of 5, or more than 700,000 deaths. Smith was the agency’s former administrator during the annual power vitaminization. He also served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Obama. That’s the end of his tenure under the Trump administration. We’ll finally have a foreign funding mission in America. How do you make the case to people that USAID’s previous mission to the United States was in the national interest? So when we built lab capacity in developing countries in Africa, it meant that it was easier to detect a pathogen before it became a full-blown epidemic, and we saw USAID work in West Africa and suppress the Ebola epidemic when one person came to the United States and brought a lot of Ebola. The department can do most of this, it’s better under the State Department. It’s going to be less politicized. It’s going to be more efficient. First, it’s important to actually state the facts in the context of Rubio’s claim. They’ve cut 80% of the life-saving programs that are going on overseas. It depends on the program. We can see specifically. But whether it’s HIV/AIDS or even if they prepare for a mosquito invasion, that means millions, if not millions, of children who are at risk of dying from mosquito bites. This is not something that any American should tolerate, but what Secretary Rubio is continuing to do is warn that if these cuts continue at this rate, 12 million lives will be lost, two-thirds of whom are children under five, but in fact the programming that is being taken away is being run by people who are running life-saving programs and which are not, in fact, being cut in half, which is an incredible achievement. I talked to Bill Gates and he predicted that it could be cut in half again in the future. I mean, you know, millions of children who could be the next Einsteins, just decent people who live and contribute to their communities. I mean, there has been progress in many areas. Now it seems like the progress on health is measurable with the 25 million lives saved through President Bush’s PEPFAR program on malaria and tuberculosis. That’s progress. Every American can be proud of you, George W. Bush started it, it’s a remarkable thing that it’s saved 20 million lives. It’s a remarkable thing, what’s going to happen to it? But they haven’t fired everyone who runs programming across Africa. There are nurses, health workers, and people who have come out to educate communities who are no longer getting paid and are no longer able to do this work. So again, the first important thing is to set the record straight that the programming that the Secretary of State says is going on at scale is not being scaled back and it is now unknown in the communities. If it can be resurrected again at the State Department, then the United States or the workplace or every U.S. supporter of the United States will celebrate the reintroduction of this programming that is so valuable not only for the survivors and for all the work and good that those people continue to do in their communities and their countries, but also for America’s reputation. This part of the discussion has not gotten enough community to take away that soft power art.
Samantha Power says small part has been shut down
