Thread 23264872

Trump has gutted foreign aid. This decision is likely to kill millions of people, many of them children.

At the start of his administration, Trump signed an executive order shutting off nearly all foreign aid. https://benthams.substack.com/p/debating-richard-hanania-about-trump Then, Elon Musk and DOGE spent the next several months feeding USAID into the woodchipper https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886307316804263979?lang=en (embed) (embed) (embed) dismantling most of it. As a result, the Trump administration has blocked billions of dollars of funding for foreign aid, https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/08/13/nx-s1-5501666/trump-administration-foreign-aid including for efforts to combat malaria, https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-trump-administrations-foreign-aid-review-status-of-the-presidents-malaria-initiative-pmi/ tuberculosis, https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-trump-administrations-foreign-aid-review-status-of-u-s-global-tuberculosis-efforts/ and HIV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief?#PEPFAR_under_second_Trump_presidency

This included cuts for PEPFAR which is arguably the most effective government program in recent history. It annually costs about 14 dollars per American, https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-trump-administrations-foreign-aid-review-status-of-pepfar/ and saved somewhere around 19 million lives https://pepfarreport.org/ since its implementation under George W. Bush. The Trump administration has seriously undermined it in several ways.

>>23264872 (OP)
1. The initial 90-day shutdown of foreign aid shut PEPFAR down. This was reversed by a waiver signed by Rubio, but despite the waiver, functionality was still decreased. https://www.them.us/story/aids-relief-pepfar-activists? Many funds were not properly disbursed.

2. Around 60% of PEPFAR funding and deployment was through USAID. When USAID shut down, most of PEPFAR disappeared with it.

3. The federal government has dramatically decreased grants for PEPFAR. https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-trump-administrations-foreign-aid-review-status-of-pepfar/

4. The state department has a plan to reorganize PEPFAR to limit its effectiveness (making it about stopping threats to U.S. markets rather than saving lives). https://healthpolicy-watch.news/us-officials-draft-plan-replaces-pepfar-with-bilateral-relationships/

The PEPFAR cuts alone could very well cost millions of lives. It’s already conservatively cost around 100,000 lives, https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ and numbers of deaths are only increasing. And while it’s hard to figure out exactly how many lives PEPFAR saved, it’s easy to see it saved many—just look at this chart of HIV deaths before and after PEPFAR: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Deaths-from-hiv-by-age.png (embed) (embed)

You have to screw up pretty badly to eviscerate the best government program in the last 30 years. And this is just one of the many programs Trump has undermined. Foreign aid—despite taking up less than 1% of the budget—has been significantly wrecked.

>>23264877
This will likely cause millions of deaths, according to the studies that have been done on the topic. One report claimed USAID (eliminated by Trump) saved 92 million lives https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext in the last two decades. Another study estimated that 7.9 million extra children https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5199076&fbclid=IwY2xjawK33KhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE4TExZd3ZHNFpSUXRsbXkwAR76ORhFayZzhN0m_kImLiBmaZ1BDAmshvRZvOqCucONgp5jVE5MRtFR9ZMM8A_aem_Zec5BpVMaTbVz-fsnnahgA would die in the next 15 years, and a lower end estimate guessed foreign aid saves about 3 million lives a year. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/how-many-lives-does-us-foreign-aid-save If we assume Trump will halve the lives saved by foreign aid and go by the low-end estimate, this means his cuts would cause over 22 million deaths in the next 15 years—consistent with another study estimating 25 million excess deaths https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z from foreign aid cuts.

So, on its face, it looks like Trump’s foreign aid cuts will bring about over ten million extra deaths if not reversed. However, there are various defenses that people give of the foreign aid cuts. Let me address them in turn.

A first defense: why should we spend so much on foreign aid? Why can’t the rest of the world pay for stuff, when we disproportionately foot the bill? In reality, we spend less per capita https://fpa.org/u-s-foreign-aid-spending-too-much-or-not-enough/ on foreign aid than other industrialized nations. America isn’t getting taken advantage of and giving too much—we give far too little. Also, even if other countries were slacking, it would still be good to prevent millions of deaths.

>>23264903
A second defense: the millions of deaths numbers are inflated because other countries will fill in. If the U.S. stops funding these programs, it is argued, other countries will take them up. In reality, however, other countries have tended to cut aid https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/03/first-usaid-closes-then-uk-cuts-aid-what-western-retreat-foreign-aid-could-mean in response to the U.S. cuts. While some countries have spent more, others https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/countries-still-want-save-world-110000873.html have cut their aid budgets after we cut ours. 2025 is the first time in nearly 30 years that France, Germany, the U.S., and the UK have all cut foreign aid budgets.

So this defense backfires. If anything, it makes foreign aid cuts even worse!

A third defense: why can’t other countries pay for these programs? If African countries love AIDS medicine so much, can’t they fund it? This isn’t a defense so much as a question. And it ignores that:

1 These countries are often very poor, so it’s hard to fund medical projects. PEPFAR has a budget of around 6 billion. U.S. GDP is about 30 trillion. Malawi, one of the recipient countries, has a GDP of about 11 billion dollars. For us, PEPFAR is a tiny investment—for them, it’s a lot of their GDP.

2 Even aside from funding, these countries don’t have the doctors and medical infrastructure needed for these programs.

3 Even if the reason why PEPFAR and other foreign aid programs weren’t funded was because other countries sucked, it would still be good to fund PEPFAR and save millions of lives. PEPFAR wasn’t funded before the U.S. came in and hasn’t been funded in other similar places.

A fourth defense: the PEPFAR recipients are homosexual. Why should we fund them? This response has been popular on the right. https://benthams.substack.com/p/matt-walshs-noxious-mix-of-malevolence However:

>>23264909
1 Most PEPFAR recipients are women and children. https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/who-are-pepfars-beneficiaries-analysis-of-populations-served-in-2022/ While HIV in the west disproportionately affected gay men, not so in other places.

2 Even if it was mostly gay men, it’s bad for gay people to die!

3 This obviously doesn’t apply to the rest of foreign aid.

A fifth defense: foreign aid doesn’t work that well. Various people have claimed that foreign aid isn’t particularly effective and often backfires, making countries dependent on us. Now, overall I don’t think that’s super plausible. My read of the literature is that development aid tends to be positive. https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/meta-analysis-literature-aid-and-growth

But more importantly, the kind of foreign aid that’s controversial is economic development aid that comes with strings attached. There’s basically no serious dispute about the efficacy of PEPFAR or anti-malaria programs. https://blog.givewell.org/2015/11/06/the-lack-of-controversy-over-well-targeted-aid/ The most famous critics of aid like William Easterly https://web.archive.org/web/20250306022939/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/elon-musk-and-donald-trump-are-not-fixing-us-foreign-aid-but-destroying-it support these programs. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/08/16/how-and-how-not-to-stop-aids-in-africa/

A final defense: why spend money helping out people in other countries? A nation’s obligation is to its own! The people saved by foreign aid aren’t Americans, so why should we bother to help them? In response:

>>23264913
1 I think this is quite ethically objectionable. Imagine we could spend .5% of the budget annually to stop the Nazi holocaust every decade or so. It seems obvious that we should do that. Thus, it seems we have at least some obligations to foreigners! And this looks similar to the number of lives saved by foreign aid. Similarly, it’s widely regarded as a great failure that we didn’t act to stop the slaughter in Rwanda, even though the number of lives we would have saved would have been far less great than the number PEPFAR has saved. Maybe we have stronger obligations to Americans than to people in other countries, but the idea that we shouldn’t care at all about foreigners dying by the millions is deeply wicked, and one who seriously adopts it has lost part of their soul.

2 Even if our only concern was for America, there’s still a strong case for foreign aid. Disease does not respect borders—epidemics have a way of making it to the U.S. We also trade with other countries. If entire countries are devastated by disease, they won’t be trading with us, and this will be bad for the economy. Foreign aid is also a tool of soft power that helps shore up our influence with other countries and makes it easier to achieve foreign policy objectives.

3 People who make this argument tend not to be consistent. When complaining about foreign wars, they’ll often note that wars kill large numbers of foreigners, and treat this as a relevant consideration. They’ll talk at length about the scourge of Muslim grooming gangs in Britain, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian?utm_source=publication-search and seem to think it would be worth doing something about that at low cost. But the victims of such gangs are, of course, foreigners. It can’t be that people in other countries only matter when they’re the victims of policies you don’t like.

>>23264919
Thus, the facts are clear: Trump’s foreign aid cuts will cause large numbers of people to die. Depending on exactly when they’re reversed, they are likely to kill millions of people, potentially tens of millions

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-anti-foreign-aid-right-is-low?utm_source=publication-search

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-comprehensive-case-against-trump?utm_source=publication-search

https://benthams.substack.com/p/shoeonheads-insane-falsehoods-about?utm_source=publication-search

https://benthams.substack.com/p/shoeonhead-doubles-down-after-lying?utm_source=publication-search

And no, the excuse that failing to save is different from killing doesn’t hold any sway here. If you stop providing aid to someone who needs it when they have no ability to provide it themselves—abruptly, without giving them any time to find another source—you have killed them. If an aid facility is feeding infants, and you cut off all funding to it so that the infants starve to death, what you have done is far more akin to homicide than failing to save. And even if it were only failing to save, it is deeply evil to refuse to spend a few bucks per American to avert a death toll greater than that of the Nazi holocaust.

>>23264925
Another concern: perhaps donating to effective charities that save lives will produce overpopulation. This will hold the nations they affect back economically and socially. Now, it is true that donating to life-saving charities likely raises the population somewhat, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.11388 but I don’t think this means that they’ll hold the affected nations back.

First of all, being stricken by horrendous diseases tends to hold nations back economically. This effect seems vastly more significant https://blog.givewell.org/2013/05/15/flow-through-effects/ than the negative economic impact of a slightly larger population, particularly because it’s not clear whether a larger population will develop more slowly or more quickly. America is better-off economically than we were in the 1800s, when the population was lower and disease was a greater burden.


Second, it looks like effective charities tend to lower the fertility rate somewhat but this effect is counterbalanced by the lives saved. But things go much better in society if fewer people are born and die, rather than if more people both are born and die. Vast amounts of resources are wasted if people die shortly after birth.


Third, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities. Give to charities that make people’s lives better—e.g. by curing blindness— https://www.givewell.org/charities/helen-keller-international or that help animals on factory farms. https://www.farmkind.giving/ If you end up concluding that charities saving lives are bad, then just give elsewhere! It would be shocking, and suspiciously convenient, if every single charity on the planet did more harm than good!

>>23264938
Fourth, I find this idea pretty intuitively repugnant. Imagine that you could save an African child drowning in a pond. This line of reasoning would seem to imply that doing so would be actively bad because of the impact on overpopulation. This kind of reasoning is not something we’d normally take seriously. Suspiciously, it only crops up when people are justifying not giving away their money. Hmm…

Another concern: shouldn’t we donate locally? Why should we help people overseas when those around us are suffering?

The answer is that it’s much easier to help people overseas. Most of the people who have fallen through the cracks in wealthy country are hard to help. It’s hard to help a homeless person who is on the streets. In contrast, saving lives overseas is cheap and easy—it costs just around 5,000 dollars to save someone’s life. https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities Plausibly, therefore, giving overseas does tens or hundreds of times more good than donating locally. So unless people in your city matter hundreds of times more than people overseas, it’s probably better to donate overseas.

I also find the idea pretty weird that we have extremely strong obligations to the people around us rather than far away. If you could save someone drowning in a pond, would it matter how far away they were? Would it matter if they were an American citizen? If people in your country matter more than people in another country, then people start mattering way more after they fly in a plane and fill out paperwork to become a citizen. But that’s very unintuitive. The reasons to save your life shouldn’t change because you signed some paperwork! In fact, holding that we have strong duties to our countrymen that don’t apply to foreigners often implies https://benthams.substack.com/p/america-second?utm_source=publication-search we should perform actions that harm one person and benefit no one!

Begging hands and bleeding hearts will only cry out for more.

They must evolve their societies if they wish to survive.

>>23264872 (OP)
>Eugenics for africa
Is this really a problem?

Africa is a shithole because of foreign aid. Like it or not, not all people are equal. Other countries are only better because they went through war and famine without modernized nations helping them so all the idiots died. Before all the war and famine, europe was africa tier.

>>23264945
Humanism is a farce.

I don’t give a shit about people outside my family so this means nothing

>>23264872 (OP)
I'm killing millions of people right now because I don't donate to African charities. I am literally the next Adolf Hitler.

>>23264872 (OP)
You cry for African children, but your soulless demonic heart feels nothing for the 1 million babies who are aborted every year, hypocrite.

>>23264872 (OP)
Kill all liberals. You are not even human. Burn in Hellfire.

>>23264872 (OP)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2J9jyrxV_M
Hes right, and you are wrong.

I'm not reading all that.

Damn, you gave me a reason to respect Trump today. I don't specially like him, but this is a good decision.
Foreign aid to the third world should've been cut to zero decades ago. Not just in the US but from all Western nations.

Subsidizing the life and reproduction of people who hate us and want to destroy us... beyond stupidity. We are suffering the consequences now.

i'm killing millions of children when i goon

>>23266914
>>23266906
Trump is pro choice

based, exterminate all africans. this is why i also support aborition, the demographics of abortions are heavily skewed black. kill all of them, they don't pass the IQ threshold of being considered human. bye bye!!!!

>>23264872 (OP)
Serious question:
> are the children brown?

not a thjread worth paying attentioeawng oirghaertgo

>>23267776
>>23267440
>>23266967
>>23266944
>>23266943
>>23266914
yallsabunchafaggots