WIRED Senior Writer Kate Knibbs explains how the Trump administration’s self-proclaimed “America First” policies are, in practice, anything but—particularly their effective destruction of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). See why shuttering the operations of USAID will negatively impact the everyday lives of Americans. Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey Director of Photography: Constantine Economides Editor: Matthew Colby Host: Kate Knibbs Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi Associate Producer: Brandon White Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Camera Operator: Chris Eustache Sound Mixer: Rebecca O’Neill Production Assistant: Caleb Clark Researcher: Paul Gulyas Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Rachel Kim Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Video Transcript
– 1 billion children immunized.
2.2 billion malaria cases prevented 26 million lives saved from AIDS.
For 60 years, USAID, America’s Foreign Assistance Agency has fed the hungry and prevented disease worldwide.
40% of total global humanitarian aid came from the US with two thirds of that coming from USAID.
Recently, president Trump and Elon Musk all but gutted the agency as part of their so-called America First policies.
But in our globalized economy, the data suggests that slashing upwards of 90% of USAID’s budget or $60 billion may have unexpected blowback here in the US, contributing to rising food prices, making us susceptible to epidemics at home and damaging the livelihoods of many Americans, especially farmers in the heartland.
Wired pinpointed some critical food and medical cuts to USAID and placed their impact on the health and wealth of everyday Americans on the grid.
This was the headquarters of the USAID offices in DC.
Google Maps list the office as permanently closed.
Only a few hundred out of the agency’s 13,000 employees will retain their jobs, but when they were in business, USAID wasn’t spending American taxpayer funds only on foreigners as many claim.
80% of the companies that had contracts with the agency were American.
USAID was investing money back into the pockets of as many as 50,000 American contractors employed by universities, nonprofits, and aid organizations.
This map will give you an idea of just how many American institutions were partnering with USAID before the cuts.
From Columbia University’s research center, helping countries plan for climate change to a partnership with the Coca-Cola company, improving access to water and sanitation services, USAID money funded American universities, businesses and charities to the tune of $28 billion annually, only 0.7% of the total federal budget that fed a multitude of programs aimed at promoting global health, democracy, and other foreign policy aims of the US because so much was affected.
We can’t cover it all in a single video, so we’ll be focusing on the two most critical aspects of USAID, Food and Health.
A huge USAID program, Food for Peace, bought surplus food from American farmers and delivered it to countries in need, benefiting over 4 billion hungry people worldwide since 1954.
So when malnourished children received much needed breakfasts in Afghanistan or families and famine prone Sudan lined up for a meal from an emergency kitchen.
41% of that food was sourced directly from American farmers who were paid about $2 billion annually, $2 billion bought everything from Iowa Soybean oil to Oklahoma Wheat, Kansas lentils produce from Virginia and Georgia Peanut products including a nutritional pace that’s a powerhouse for Friday hunger.
The products were then sent around the globe by USAID and its contractors, but by mid-February, just days after the cuts began, $489 million worth of food assistance and over 500,000 metric tons.
American grown food already paid for by USAID remained stranded in ports or in transit with a significant portion at risk of spoiling.
In Larned, Kansas, the Pawnee County Cooperative Association reportedly had 1.5 million bushels of sorghum, a key grain in cereals in storage, with no one to buy it.
Port Houston had 235,000 tons of wheat stranded in warehouses according to local sources, as well as 30,000 metric tons of cornmeal, pinto beans, lentils, rice, and vegetable oil.
Similar issues reportedly impacted ports in Boston, Miami, Norfolk, Savannah, New York, Chicago, and Lake Charles.
At Ports in Kenya, nearly 200 million in emergency food aid remained undelivered, contractors and local USAID staff responsible for getting the food which had already been bought and paid for.
From the Kenyan ports to the South Sudanese people did not receive payment due to the USAID pause.
In South Sudan, about 7.1 million people, more than half the population require food assistance with 1.6 million children at risk of acute malnutrition.
South Sudan lacks basic infrastructure like paved roads, making aid delivery expensive and inefficient.
For example, PGE is a remote area in South Sudan that humanitarian workers can only access by taking a two hour flight, followed by a four hour canoe journey, then a six hour trek through a swamp.
As a result, those suffering will not receive this food.
The food will go to waste or possibly be stolen from the docks.
According to the World Health Organization, which the Trump administration tries to discredit.
At any given moment, 733 million people are experiencing food insecurity somewhere in the world.
To combat hunger back in the US, scientists are studying things like the resilience of specific crops like wheat and peanuts.
17 food science research labs housed at various American universities, including Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska and Purdue University received millions of dollars from USAID’s Feed the Future Program.
But due to the cuts they’ve had to pause their research.
The Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois has laid off 30 employees and expects to close down if funding isn’t restored.
They worked with farmers in Madagascar and Nigeria, as well as Pakistan, India, and Indonesia to breed soybean varieties that are resistant to diseases like soybean rust.
Research like this benefits American farmers by helping them prepare for crop diseases we see everywhere in the world.
For example, knowing how to best grow crops in drier hot conditions will be more crucial in a world increasingly touched by climate change.
Without this research, farmers everywhere will be left ill-equipped in the face of a heating planet.
Let’s talk about rising food prices.
What many don’t realize is that USAID has helped keep prices of some products in check for Americans for years by supporting the production of specific agricultural commodities like chocolate, coffee, spices, and even rubber in developing countries.
How?
Well, let’s take coffee as an example.
The US coffee industry contributes 1.6% to the US GDP and supports nearly 1.7 million American jobs.
For years, USAID partnered with US coffee companies and small farmers abroad in places like Africa, central and South America and Indonesia to combat crop diseases and improve coffee supply chains by providing digital tools and training to coffee breeders with a goal of increasing capacity, ensuring that US coffee businesses had access to a stable and high quality supply.
With the USAID cuts, this is no longer guaranteed and prices may spike similar programs in the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ecuador, where cacao grows were in place to ensure America’s supply of chocolate flows.
Cacao is critical to the candy industry, which supports at least 70,000 American jobs in Maryland.
Spice Giant McCormick and Company has benefited from a USAID partnership with the Ohio based Cooperative Business Association or CBI to enhance spice production in Indonesia.
This program rehabilitated abandoned plantations, built new ones, and improved yields of vanilla bean, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, and of course, pumpkin spice.
CBIs local affiliate Agri Spice Indonesia supplied well priced spices to a variety of McCormick products.
Also in Indonesia, USAID has helped Royal Lestari Utama, a company owned by Michelin, get a loan for its sustainable rubber plantation, which feeds the US tire industry, particularly in South Carolina.
These are just a few examples of how by strengthening supply chains and improving productivity in developing countries, USAID funded programs maintain the availability and affordability of key raw materials for US industries whose products then turn out to be cheaper for American consumers.
Now let’s turn to the impact of USAID cuts on health Up to a million lives were saved in 2016 when a famine in the Horn of Africa was predicted and responded to by the famine early Warning Systems network refused net using data analysis of weather and armed conflicts to predict famines and distribute food aid.
This successful system was paid for by USAID and largely run by Chemonics, a private DC based international development firm cuts by Doge have led to the program going offline.
Chemonics has furloughed 88% of its US-based workforce Experts warned that without FuseNet humanitarian response efforts will be less effective.
Leading to more hunger and instability around the globe and food instability in developing nations has been closely linked to increased file and extremism.
In northeastern Nigeria, the jihadist terrorist group, Boko Haram offers meals to attract potential recruits.
There are also reports from 2017 of ISIS lowering unaccompanied child refugees out of Syria with food and cash.
Since we’re talking about ISIS, the USAID cuts affect payments and support to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic forces or SDF who manage camps holding ISIS members and their families.
Around 10,000 suspected ISIS fighters are imprisoned in 28 jails across northeastern Syria with the largest being the Al-Sina prison in Hisaka.
US and Syrian officials have warned that weakened security here could lead to an ISIS revival.
Clearly dismantling or even pausing USAID programs not only weakens humanitarian efforts, but also undermines American national security and foreign policy objectives.
Let’s turn our attention to the impact of USAID cuts on our health.
The Trump administration revoked over 10,000 global health grants from USAID and the State Department that played a significant role in global disease prevention.
These included outbreak surveillance, which means global collaboration to detect and respond to emerging infectious diseases.
The Global Bird Flu Pandemic is currently spreading throughout the US.
USAID funded avian flu surveillance in 49 countries around the world that involved collecting samples from farms with high levels of poultry mortality and testing them, notifying farmers of results, monitoring migratory birds and the cross-border poultry trade, and sharing all of that collected data.
The USAID cuts have ended that program, which is bad news because the response to bird flu experts warn requires global cooperation.
The previous outbreak in 2014 cost the American poultry industry approximately $1.6 billion.
The case of an Iowa man who died recently of LASA fever after visiting in West Africa is proof that infectious diseases from other continents are just an international flight away.
Uganda is facing its eighth Ebola outbreak with the first confirmed case being a nurse in Kampala who died on January 29th.
The outbreak involves the deadly Sudan Street.
However, contact tracing and traveler screenings in Uganda have been disrupted.
Why?
On February 26th, Elon Musk admitted that Doge accidentally canceled USAID’s Ebola prevention funding, but assured us once they discovered the error that it was quickly restored.
However, as I reported for wired the following day, emergency waivers meant to sustain some of USAID’s humanitarian programs, including those focused on Ebola have been ineffective.
In part because most USAID staff have been laid off leading to delayed responses to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak with America now refusing to meet the moment in regards to Uganda’s latest Ebola outbreak.
CBS has reported that Russia has launched a mobile lab there to assist with outbreak containment and alarmingly.
A new unidentified hemorrhagic fever has emerged in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It is claimed over 60 lives and made over a thousand people ill.
Historically, USAID played a key role in identifying pathogens by funding the testing of virus samples in laboratories.
Dismantling USAID made this particular illness harder to investigate.
One way to combat infectious diseases on the rise around the world, such as cholera and Afghanistan, polio in Yemen and dengue across Central America and the Caribbean is vaccines and they don’t just save lives.
Vaccines also save money.
According to a study by John Hopkins University, every dollar spent on immunization yields a $16 return by reducing the cost of illness treatment.
In an additional analysis that considers the wider economic impact of illness.
Every dollar spent on vaccinations could save $44 according to the CDC.
The USAID funding freeze has halted at least one notable vaccine development program, a $45 million award to the South African Medical Research Council, which aims to end HIV in Africa.
In late January, a group of researchers from eight African countries plan to initiate a phase one clinical trial for two experimental HIV vaccines, enrolling dozens of volunteers in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda.
– If this vaccine is found to be safe and efficacious, it could help prevent millions of lives of South Africans that are currently being lost.
– There are no FDA approved HIV vaccines in the US yet, so new vaccines that are developed overseas could be promising contenders for the first HIV vaccine in the US too.
That study is now on hold indefinitely since the funding no longer exists.
According to a report from the Guardian, an estimated 500,000 South Africans could die because of this blow to crucial research, plus the removal of other USAID funds, which assist in the diagnosis and dispensing of antiretroviral medications which keep infected patients alive.
Another way to stave off illness is prevention.
And in the Amazon basin, USAID was on the forefront of initiatives to control malaria in Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Guana, Peru, and Surinam.
Through the Amazon malaria initiative, USAID funded tailored interventions to region specific needs with funding cutoff in employees furloughed.
The trust in Goodwill USAID has worked hard to grow has been thwarted, and once trust is lost, it’s hard to build back.
In 2023, there were an estimated 597,000 malaria deaths worldwide, mainly in Africa, with children under five, constituting 76% of the deaths in this region.
These food and health program cuts are just a fraction of the story of what USAID dismantling ultimately means for our country and the world.
Experts say that abruptly cutting off this work will kill untold numbers of people around the world.
There are some people within the US who are unmoved by how disastrous this choice will be for people across the globe.
They say our dollars are better spent solely on domestic projects, but this viewpoint fails to consider how interconnected we are and how deeply damaging it will be for Americans if our country is considered a callous rogue state.
The US turning its back on humanitarian aid in such a sweeping and abrupt way is also an out and out win for China, a country that is still eagerly pursuing international development projects as a way to win power and influence abroad.
They’ve already invested over $1 trillion in infrastructure as part of their own USAID.
Ultimately, the cuts to USAID will have unexpected impacts on the livelihoods of Americans and make the US less safe.
The full impact is only beginning to unfold, so stay updated with our continuing coverage on wired.com.
Thanks for watching on the grid.
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