Harvard Study: USAID Shutdown Has Led to Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths — 9.4 Million Projected by 2030
A joint study by Harvard University and the Center for Global Development has confirmed what aid workers warned about a year ago: the dismantling of USAID under the Trump administration has resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths worldwide.
The study, released on the one-year anniversary of the agency’s effective shutdown, projects the death toll will reach 9.4 million by 2030 if aid programs are not restored. The figure accounts for disrupted vaccine distributions, shuttered maternal health clinics, and collapsed food assistance networks across 47 countries.
The scale of the catastrophe deserves a moment of pause. This is not a natural disaster. It is not a war. It is a policy decision made in Washington that has killed more people than most armed conflicts — and it barely held the news cycle for 48 hours before the Iran war consumed all available oxygen.
Meanwhile, Mother Jones has reported that Russell Vought — the Office of Management and Budget director who helped gut USAID’s funding — used money from the agency’s raided budget to pay for his own personal security detail. A federal court has cleared the way for Elon Musk to be deposed over his role in the dismantling through DOGE.
One year on from dismantling of USAID, study projects that global aid cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030
It’s been one year since the Trump administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), with aid cuts leading to the closure of HIV clinics in South Africa, the termination of medical programs in Afghanistan, and the end of numerous programs tackling malnutrition and preventable diseases around the world.
The slashing of US foreign assistance was followed by cuts by the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and other developed nations, which are set to take effect this year and next year, compounding the impact.
Now, a new study published in The Lancet medical journal aims to quantify the human toll of those budget decisions – projecting that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030, if the current funding trend continues. About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.
Impact of two decades of humanitarian and development assistance and the projected mortality consequences of current defunding to 2030: retrospective evaluation and forecasting analysis
USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths -Harvard
The dismantling of USAID, according to
models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.
“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.
Some of the info is from late 2025 and some from earlier this year. In case anyone wants the info.
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