Foreign Aid

Far From Home

Over the past few months, President Trump has taken a sort of a slash-and-burn approach to much of the U.S. government, and among the many taxpayer-funded programs he’s axed has been American foreign assistance distributed through the Agency for International Development or USAID. That’s billions of dollars that helped with things like Ebola prevention in West Africa, malaria testing in Myanmar, famine relief to war-torn Sudan, and food deliveries to refugees from Western Sahara.

Leading the cost-cutting charge is Elon Musk, who Trump appointed to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In response to criticism, Musk tweeted recently that “no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” but as time has passed, more and more evidence has emerged that that assurance simply isn’t true.

The British newspaper The Telegraph reported in early February that a number of people in Thai refugee camps passed away after USAID-funded hospitals were forced to close and medical workers abruptly left the area, cutting off patient’s oxygen supplies. More recently, New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof visited South Sudan, where he heard stories of children who’d died after losing access to their American-funded HIV medications, which had only cost about 12 cents a day. The World Health Organization says that the Trump administration’s decision to cut foreign aid means eight countries could completely exhaust their supplies of life-saving HIV medications in the coming months. And internal memos from USAID itself estimate that dismantling the agency could cause up to 166-thousand worldwide deaths each year from malaria, not to mention a million children who will suffer from severe malnutrition and 200-thousand who will be paralyzed with polio.

On this episode of Far From Home, I visit a food distribution warehouse for refugees in southwest Algeria, and I speak to humanitarian workers in Sudan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the country of Georgia to hear firsthand accounts of how these budget cuts are directly impacting people around the world.

On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian reports fascinating stories from faraway places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org