There's a bit of a media brawl taking place this week over the issue of USAID funding which was cut off by DOGE. At base it's an argument over whether the cutting off of that funding has had any clearly discernible effects in places around the globe. There is a Boston University professor named Brooke Nichols who has set up a death toll tracker which she claims gives an estimate of the number of adults and children who have died as a result of the funding cuts.
You can see the dashboard here . The current estimate of excess deaths caused by the cuts in funding stands at just over 300,000. Note that these are estimates based on the size of the funding, i.e. these are not counts of actual deaths just estimates based on best guesses. Here's a bit of the methodology page.
Based on the budget for the 2024 financial year, USAID's nutrition program was allocated $168 million dollars [3]. It is estimated that the cost of treating a child for severe malnutrition, while varied by context, is between $100-$200 [4]. Assuming: a similar budget of $160 million dollars in 2025, that this budget is utilized for treatment of severe acute malnutrition in children and that on average treatment per child costs $150 (midpoint of range), approximately 1.12 million children with severe malnutrition would remain untreated as a result of USAID funding freeze and discontinuation in 2025.
So you start with 1.12 million children not getting treatment and assume that 10-20% of them will die without treatment (which a footnote says is based on WHO figures from 2004). So that's where these numbers are coming from.
In any case, Elon Musk, as the head of DOGE, has pushed back and said that no one is dying as a result of cuts to USAID. This is from a back and forth with Obama speech writer Jon Favreau in early March.
Dollar Store Jon Favreau is an imbecilic propagandist who lies to score cheap political points.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2025
That said, we will investigate whether this is real or not and fix it if it is.
No one has died as result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2025
Nor are these funding resumption actions due to pressure from K-Mart (I’m not promoting him to Target yet) Favs or some legacy news journalist. I give zero fucks what the legacy…
Nor are these funding resumption actions due to pressure from K-Mart (I’m not promoting him to Target yet) Favs or some legacy news journalist. I give zero fucks what the legacy press says and have made that abundantly clear.
There are two parts to resuming funding: 1. Releasing the pause on the contracts. That was done ~2 weeks ago regarding Ebola/diseases and foodstuffs, which were part of a large block of paused contracts. What I said at the cabinet meeting was accurate.
2. The money itself getting processed through various State, Treasury and Fed accounts and then ultimately getting to the recipient’s bank account. This takes a few weeks.
Meanwhile, other organizations have been making similar estimates. NY Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof has been writing about it since March, specifically pushing back on Musk's denials.
We worked with experts at the Center for Global Development who tried to calculate how many lives are at risk if American humanitarian assistance is frozen or slashed. While these estimates are inexact and depend on how much aid continues, they suggest that a cataclysm may be beginning around the developing world:
Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl, was also infected with H.I.V. at birth and likewise remained alive because of American assistance. Then in January, Achol lost her ID card, and there was no longer a case worker to help get her a new card and medicines; she too became sick and died, said Labani.
Yes, this may eventually save money for United States taxpayers. How much?
As you can imagine this has become a major talking point for Democrats who wanted to attack Elon Musk, DOGE and President Trump for making the cuts. About 10 days ago, Rep. Brad Sherman pressed Sec. of State Marco Rubio on this point and Rubio also denied that anyone had died as a result of the cuts.
That claim by Rubio got four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact-checker. It also got more pushback today from Nicholas Kristoff at the Times.
This is ludicrous: The only debate is whether to measure the dead in the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. So Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, challenged Rubio, citing reporting overseas by me and by Reuters of individuals who died as a result of the shutdown of American humanitarian aid...
So let me help Rubio with the truth. Meet Evan Anzoo, a 5-year-old boy who was born with H.I.V. in South Sudan:
...Evan’s life was in our hands, and for five years America kept him alive with antiretroviral medicines costing less than 12 cents a day, through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR...
Then along came President Trump and his freeze on most humanitarian aid in January. How could a 5-year-old orphan possibly obtain medicine on his own? Evan weakened and soon died of an opportunistic infection.
Let me try to change your mind: Meet Evan Anzoo. He was a five-year-old boy infected with HIV at birth, and USAID kept him strong with 12-cent-a-day medicines. The, @elonmusk, you fed USAID "into the wood chipper," as you put it, and without medication he died. No regrets? pic.twitter.com/RfpWuaOkLV
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) April 21, 2025
Enter Joe Rogan who just had Bono on his show. Bono actually has a connection to this because he was one of the big proponents of George W. Bush's PEPFAR program going back more than 20 years. In any case, Bono brought up USAID funding cuts and claimed that as many as 300,000 people have died as a result of USAID cuts. He did say those numbers weren't proven (and would piss people off) but also seemed to assume these were based on monitoring not estimates.
CONTROVERSIAL: Bono rips DOGE on Joe Rogan:
— Joe Rogan Recaps (@JoeRoganRecaps) May 31, 2025
BONO: “300,000 people have died from this hard cut of USAID.”
ROGAN: “It for sure was a money laundering operation with trillions
of dollars missing…
But the things America actually does to help the world shouldn’t have been cut.” pic.twitter.com/W4RQT4nHx2
Rogan's response is actually somewhat favorable to the idea of US spending on aid and to the idea that maybe DOGE moved a little too quickly to make cuts. In any case, you can open up X and see all sorts of people attacking, Bono, attacking Rogan, attacking DOGE, etc.
My own take is that while the figures produced by these outside academics and groups are speculative, there is evidence that pulling the funding will have an impact at some level. The death toll estimates may be too high (even Nicholas Kristof admits as much) but the claims that no one has died don't stand up to scrutiny. Some number of people will die as a result of the cuts and at least some already have. You can argue whether that's DOGE's fault or that of the aid groups pulling up stakes as a result, but cutting the aid will have life-altering consequences in some cases.
Ultimately, Bono is right about at least one thing. This is an argument about what Americans want to see from their government. Should we extend ourselves and our tax money for things like saving children in Africa, or are we going to pull back and decide it's not our problem? I'm with Joe Rogan on this, in the sense that I think some of these programs really have done some good and we probably ought to make an effort to continue them even if I also think DOGE was a good and necessary house cleaning of some fraud and junk spending. We shouldn't throw the bay out with the bathwater.
If you want to see the full interview with Rogan and Bono, here it is.
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