Childhood Coffins Due to Cuts in Foreign Aid

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Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, 9/20/25: Trump’s Most Lethal Policy

Reporting from Uganda, Mr. Kristof reports on the devastating and worsening impact related to the cuts of foreign aid –without apparent cost savings. He details three particular avoidable deaths and outlines the larger problem. Here’s an excerpt:

The Trump administration has claimed that no one has died because of its cuts to humanitarian aid…Yet what I find here in desperate villages in southwestern Uganda is that not only are aid cuts killing children every day, but that the death toll is accelerating.

Stockpiles of food and medicine are running out here. Village health workers who used to provide inexpensive preventive care have been laid off. Public health initiatives like deworming and vitamin A distribution have collapsed. Immunizations are being missed. Contraception is harder to get. Ordinary people are growing weaker, hungrier and more fragile. So as months pass, the crisis is not easing but growing increasingly lethal — and because children are particularly vulnerable, they are often the first to starve and the first to die… credible estimates by experts suggest that the child death toll may be in the hundreds of thousands this year alone — and likely an even higher number next year.

A June 3 State Department memo, headed “sensitive but unclassified,” saying that the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development will cost taxpayers $6.4 billion over two years… the money is necessary to manage “litigation, claims, residual payments and closeout activities.”..

A recent study published in The Lancet estimated that the cuts will cost the lives of about 690,000 children under the age of 5 in 2025, and 829,000 next year. The study estimated that some 3.1 million children under age 5 would die during Trump’s second term because of his cuts in humanitarian assistance...

PEPFAR, founded by President George W. Bush with the strong backing of America’s evangelical Christians. It turned the tide of AIDS and has saved 26 million lives — but the Trump administration has withheld some of its funding…About 65 percent of PEPFAR awards have been canceled…

Yet it’s also true that there are hints that the Trump administration is beginning to find some footing on aid. It has begun to place new orders for R.U.T.F. and has plans to move these stockpiles. It is preparing to hand over its food aid stockpiles to U.N. agencies to distribute to those in need. And it announced this month that PEPFAR will distribute lenacapavir, an important new drug that prevents AIDS transmission, in at least eight countries next year. These are real and positive steps; they just don’t make up for the larger pattern of chaos and cutbacks…

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