President Donald Trump spent much of his second term slashing funds to foreign aid programs like USAID, which exist primarily to provide food, medicine and other humanitarian relief to developing countries. Now Trump is breaking new ground in letting people starve, at least according to a new report.
“For the first time since the 1980s, the U.S. government, faced with this kind of disaster, has done nothing and apparently plans to continue doing nothing,” reported The Atlantic’s Hana Kiros on Sunday.
Describing how famine has spread in Somalia in large part due to America pausing humanitarian relief there, Kiros wrote that “the Trump administration has said that it paused funding because in January, the Somali government, while in the process of redeveloping a port area, had destroyed a warehouse that contained 83 tons of fortified foods partly paid for by the United States. (The World Food Program’s second in command, Carl Skau, told me that the organization ultimately recovered all of the food.) ”
Kiros added, “‘The Trump Administration maintains a firm zero tolerance policy for waste, theft, or diversion of U.S. resources,’ a State Department spokesperson told me in an email. But the decision may have been in the works weeks before that demolition. In November of last year, the State Department was considering distributing foreign assistance to Somalia, according to an internal document that I reviewed. A plan was drawn up, then, abruptly, on December 1, a senior State Department leader informed people who had worked on it that they should instead prepare for no funds to be sent at all, according to the document.'”
While no official explanation was provided, at least at first, it later came out that Trump administration officials believed Somali immigrants were more likely to commit welfare fraud.
“Whether Trump will ever decide to resume aid to Somalia is uncertain,” Kiros wrote. “(The State Department declined to say.) In 1985, Peter McPherson, the head of USAID under Reagan and the architect of FEWS Net, brought photos of skeletal Ethiopian children to the Oval Office, which led Reagan to famously declare ‘a hungry child knows no politics’ and help the country through a famine, despite its Marxist dictator. McPherson told me that he believes Trump will be moved to reconsider helping Somalia when similar pictures appear on the nightly news. ‘Of course, by then, many people will have died,’ he said.”
Speaking with AlterNet in July, one medical expert testified from her on-the-ground experience that the president’s cuts to foreign aid have led to deaths on the ground.
“Elon Musk, singularly, as head of DOGE at the beginning of this administration, through his cuts has led to the deaths of millions,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told AlterNet at the time. “He was the executor of really dismantling USAID — essentially, the work to help the world’s poorest children has been decimated by the world’s richest man.”
Gandhi continued, “I have a project in South Africa, and I can stand absolutely firsthand witness since he also executed the cuts to South Africa — meaning on February 7th, the Trump administration put out an executive order that said we will give no assistance to South Africa because of their ‘egregious actions,’ like supporting the ICC [International Criminal Court] case against Israel, or they think South Africa is committing a white genocide – all of that means that there’s no funding going toward South Africa, even his home country. And I have seen firsthand the effects on deaths, on advanced HIV, people dying of tuberculosis, not able to get HIV medications or preventative medications. Elon Musk is singularly responsible for the deaths of millions.”