such a bummer /s
was purposely left to rot in warehouses instead of being distributed
six months ago the NY Times documented half a million deaths attributable to the destruction of USAID
by now it's easily a million, slow-motion murdered
may you never suffer to death like those million that could have been spared
NYT has no such reporting because it was reporting from ProPublica. In a series of (Pulitzer-prize finalist) articles they estimated about 700,000:
* https://www.propublica.org/series/the-end-of-aid
* https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/brett-murphy-and-anna-mar...
An analysis in The Lancet estimates that by 2030 as many as 14 million people could die, including 4.5 million children under age 5:
* https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
A recent article in Science found that after aid was shutdown there was an increase in violence in various regions where it was previously present:
I guess someone should look into that
Also USAID existing prevented NGOs to have too much local political power and the corruption that goes with it.
My opinion is that overall, USAID was a net positive, although in some specific cases it wasn't.
This reminds me of the standard USA tech startup model, where you do something useful to get the users, while secretly exploiting them.
> A rise in instability abroad also creates a national-security risk for the U.S., Wright adds. Yemen—once a major USAID recipient, with $768 million worth of aid flowing into the country in 2024—is also home to the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group that controls much of the country’s north and has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. As USAID funding disappears, support for the rebels is only likely to grow, he says. “Iran can continue to finance rebellions like the Houthis,” says Wright. “These second- and third-order effects might be even more consequential to the U.S. than the direct effects.”
* https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-rise-glob...
* Analysis: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeh7122
This is appalling to think career appointees are trying to override the democratically elected president. USAID, etc., have zero constitutional independence or authority, and cannot be granted any by the legislature, except only as an agent of the executive.
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
this seems to have a lot of pretty concrete data. Which do you disagree with in particular?
lawn•42m ago