What Happens When We Stop Caring?

Last updated: July 7, 2025

What Happens When We Stop Caring? RIP USAID

By 2030, more than 14 million people—many of them children—could die preventable deaths. That staggering number isn’t from war, famine, or a new pandemic. It’s the projected human cost of a single decision: the elimination of USAID’s global health programs.

More than 4.5 million of those deaths will be children under five. That’s not a distant threat—it’s a direct and foreseeable consequence of shutting down one of the most effective life-saving agencies in modern history.

For two decades, USAID’s global health work quietly helped transform survival rates in some of the world’s poorest regions—providing vaccines, HIV treatment, maternal care, malaria prevention, clean water, and basic health infrastructure. According to extensive research, these efforts saved more than 90 million lives between 2001 and 2021.

But that’s over now. The agency has been effectively dismantled, its programs halted or defunded. The effects are already being felt. Hundreds of thousands of people—many of them children—have already died as a result.

The projected death toll over the next five years would be more than twice the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust during a similar time span. All preventable. All avoidable.

And yet, this happened with barely a ripple of public attention.

The absurdity is hard to overstate. USAID’s global health budget once made up just 0.3% of federal spending—the equivalent of 17 cents a day per American. For that small cost, we helped stop pandemics, save children, and build goodwill in regions where hope is often in short supply.

An administration that speaks often of protecting life—especially unborn life—has now turned its back on millions of already-born children, facing death not from rare disease but from the lack of basics like antibiotics, clean water, and mosquito nets.

This isn’t just about policy. It’s about who we are—and what we’re willing to let happen in our name.

Global health aid used to be one of the few issues that crossed political lines. It was smart, cost-effective, and deeply moral. It served both compassion and strategy. And it worked.

Now it’s gone.

If Americans knew the cost of walking away—millions of dead children—most would be outraged. But they don’t know. This happened in silence.

We can’t undo the deaths already unfolding. But we can choose to stop more from coming. Rebuilding what’s been lost will take political will, public pressure, and moral courage.

The question is whether we still have any of that left.