The Cruelty Is the Policy

The destruction of USAID, the loss of America’s soft power, and genocide

“Let’s kill poor people.”

Regarding the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D), Atul Gawande writes in The New Yorker:

On a budget of just twenty-four dollars per American—out of the fifteen thousand dollars in taxes paid per person last year—they had saved lives at an almost unimaginable scale. An independent, peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D. assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.

Despite that, when Donald came into office, he almost immediately defunded the organization. There are many reasons that defunding an agency like U.S.A.I.D. was a horrific idea. Doing so hobbled America’s ability to deploy soft power which is a vital tool it has used in the past to create alliances, spread democracy, and expand its global influence.

Leaving a soft power void for our adversaries like China to fill is destructive in both the short and long term, but there is a much bigger and permanent cost: since the Trump regime defunded U.S.A.I.D., at least 600,000 people who should still be alive are dead. 400,000 of those who’ve died are children.

Gawande puts the travesty of this in perspective:

The Administration, for its part, has denied causing widespread harm, even as it has made the scale of the damage harder to measure—halting data monitoring and dismissing the inspectors general who might have documented it. This is common in cases of public man-made death.

The short documentary, Rovina’s Choice, tells the broader story.

Donald, of course, doesn’t care about starving children in America, so there’s no reason to think he’d care about starving children anywhere else in the world, especially if they aren’t white.

That’s all terrible for this country’s long-term prospects. But if 600,000 people who should still be alive are now dead because of the defunding of U.S.A.I.D., how many more people are going to die in the next three years?

Salon reports that a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health projects that by 2030 as many as 14 million people could die because of U.S. and allied aid cuts. This will undo two decades of global progress against famine, HIV, malaria, and other preventable diseases.

Salon adds:

these actions are deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.

That is a key component of the definition of genocide. More people need to know about this. And of those who do know, more people need to care. The defunding of U.S.A.I.D. is a travesty that illustrates the moral depravity of everybody in the Trump regime from Donald on down. The regime’s deliberately inhumane acts should haunt him—and them—as long as they live.

Elon Musk was complicit in all of this, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to be. Initially, Rubio issued waivers for U.S.A.I.D. to continue some work, such as the distribution of HIV drugs, part of a long-standing U.S. initiative to combat AIDS. But because of the confusion created by the mixed signals sent by State regarding waivers and stop-work orders, many essential life-saving programs halted entirely, which led to more unnecessary deaths.

The combination of the defunding of U.S.A.I.D. and the chaos Rubio’s contradictory orders caused has undone two decades of progress towards helping combat poverty, hunger, and diseases like HIV. If we ever get to the point where U.S.A.I.D. becomes a viable agency again, which would require getting rid of the Republican Party as it is currently constituted, it may well take another two decades to get us back where we were before. We can never forget that people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Marco Rubio decided that saving a tiny percentage of the massive federal budget was more important than saving hundreds of thousands and, potentially, millions of lives.

At the same time, the Republicans’ assaults on healthcare are harming Americans as well. USA Today reports that as many as 22 million Americans could face significant increases in their insurance premiums next year. That could lead to the possibility that this will put health insurance out of the reach of millions of Americans and their families. The driver behind this is Republicans’ refusal to include the extension of the COVID-era ACA tax credit in their budget bill.

The ACA subsidies led to increased enrollment, particularly in red states. They also kept monthly premiums within reach of middle- and working-class families. Without the extension, premiums could more than double, and some enrollees may be faced with premium increases of over 700%. A West Health Gallup survey found almost half of American adults are worried about rising healthcare costs, the highest figure since the organization started tracking this issue in 2021.

The Republican budget also includes massive cuts to Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office says nearly 5 million people will lose coverage as a result of this bill.

Berkeley Loveless Jr., Health and Medical Reporter for NBC News, said:

[T]he survey found almost half of adults, 47%, say they’re worried about healthcare costs going into next year. Concerns about prescription drug costs are also climbing as well. So, that’s rising from 30% in 2021 to 37% this year in the share of adults who say healthcare costs cause a lot of stress in their daily lives has nearly doubled since 2022. [T]hat’s rising from 8% to 15%.

Given the fact that these increases are directly the result of Republicans in Congress, no elected Republican should ever be allowed to say that they care about the American family, the American worker, or children.

To make matters worse, according to The Guardian:

[T]he World Health Organization is preparing to cut nearly a quarter of its global workforce by next year. That’s over 2000 jobs. And this is happening because the WHO lost its largest donor, the United States which had supplied about 18% of the WHO’s total funding.

In January, Donald made a big show of withdrawing U.S. support from the agency. The sudden exit caused the WHO to slash programs, cut its management team in half, and completely restructure. Additionally, the WHO now faces a 1.06 billion budget shortfall for next year, which is nearly a quarter of its projected needs.

This is what America now stands for. America is the enemy of health. America is the enemy of combating disease and feeding children, all thanks to the fact that tens of millions of people thought that it was a good idea to put a man in the Oval Office who has no basic human decency and cares nothing about humanity.