A study published in British medicine journal The Lancet on Monday claimed that cutting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) could lead to up to 14 million deaths in developing countries, 4.5 million of which would be children below 5 years of age.
“Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030,” the study reads.
The peer-reviewed study is the first of its kind, and the only existing piece of scientific literature examining the impacts of USAID. It studied panel data from 133 countries, including low-income and middle-income countries, with USAID support ranging from none to very high.
The study then used a series of models to estimate the number of deaths prevented by USAID between 2001 and 2021, as well as a series of simulations to project how many preventable deaths could occur, assuming all USAID funding is cut by the end of 2025.
Using these models, the study found USAID helped to prevent 91 million deaths across all age groups, including 30 million deaths among children, between 2001 and 2021. The study also accounted for social determinants of health, estimating how many deaths were prevented by the USAID poverty alleviation, education, and water and sanitation interventions.
Extrapolating this out for the next several years, the models used in the study project that the current steep funding cuts, coinciding with cuts for other international aid programs from other wealthy countries, will lead to 14 million deaths by 2030.
The study noted some limitations. One of these was that it did not find a definitive causal relationship between USAID support and prevented deaths, only extremely strong evidence supporting the relationship. Another was that there are several uncertainties the study cannot account for, such as whether specific services of USAID will be moved to other agencies and whether natural disasters or new wars could increase the death toll.
USAID’s last day was Monday, June 30. By that point, 83% of the agency’s programs had already been terminated.
Interviewed by CNN, a senior State Department official downplayed the findings.
“A lot of these sort of studies are based on incorrect assumptions about what Secretary Rubio intends to and has done before,” the official said.
“USAID viewed its constituency as the United Nations, multinational NGOs, and the broader global community—not the U.S. taxpayers who funded its budget or the President they elected to represent their interests on the world stage. USAID marketed its programs as a charity, rather than instruments of American foreign policy intended to advance our national interests,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a Substack post on Monday.
Interviews by the Washington Post in Sudan spoke of mothers watching children and seniors starve as U.S.-funded soup kitchens closed. The New York Times also reported that thousands of Ugandans will go without life-saving antiretroviral medicine as USAID pulls out.
USAID accounted for 0.3% of federal spending in Fiscal Year 2024, according to nonprofit USAFacts.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Kristina Watrobski
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.offthepress.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
