Nicholas Kristof writes:

The Trump administration has claimed that no one has died because of its cuts to humanitarian aid, and it is now trying to cancel an additional $4.9 billion in aid that Congress already approved. Yet what I find here in desperate villages in southwestern Uganda is that not only are aid cuts killing children every day, but that the death toll is accelerating.

Stockpiles of food and medicine are running out here. Village health workers who used to provide inexpensive preventive care have been laid off. Public health initiatives like deworming and vitamin A distribution have collapsed. Immunizations are being missed. Contraception is harder to get. Ordinary people are growing weaker, hungrier and more fragile. So as months pass, the crisis is not easing but growing increasingly lethal — and because children are particularly vulnerable, they are often the first to starve and the first to die.

It’s difficult to know how many children are dying worldwide as a result of the Trump aid cuts, but credible estimates by experts suggest that the child death toll may be in the hundreds of thousands this year alone — and likely an even higher number next year. In short, President Trump’s cuts appear to be by far the most lethal policy step he has taken.

Some will think, at least this is saving taxpayers money. But hold on.

I obtained a June 3 State Department memo, headed “sensitive but unclassified,” saying that the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development will cost taxpayers $6.4 billion over two years. The memo, the subject of earlier reporting by Bloomberg Government, said the money is necessary to manage “litigation, claims, residual payments and closeout activities.”

That’s enough money to save more than one million children’s lives. Instead, it is being used to shut down programs that save lives.

Let me introduce Trump to the mothers of children that his cost-cutting has killed.

Valentine Tusifu, a 36-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is mourning her 10-year-old daughter, Jibia. The girl excelled in school here in Rwamwanja, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class, and dreamed of becoming a nurse.

But the family had to pull Jibia out of school in May when the loss of American funding led to a mass firing of teachers. Jibia cried inconsolably, her mother recalled, as the girl became an elementary school dropout.

Then it got worse. The family’s mosquito nets developed holes, but with aid cuts, the health center had run out of new nets, so Jibia slept unprotected. She contracted malaria. Normally, a village health worker would have handed out an inexpensive medicine, but that system disintegrated along with aid budgets, and so did the supply of anti-malaria medication.

So Jibia’s mom took the girl, feverish and vomiting, to the local health center, but it, too, had run out of necessary medicines. Doctors say they tried to rush the girl to a regional hospital. But ambulances were unavailable because drivers had been laid off as a result of cuts in U.S. assistance.

By the time Jibia arrived at the hospital, the malaria had destroyed her red blood cells, leaving her urine dark with their residue, medical records show. A person normally has a hemoglobin level above 10; Jibia’s stood at just 2.9. So she desperately needed a blood transfusion, but Uganda’s blood transfusion program relied on American support and is now struggling. A transfusion was unavailable.

So Jibia died on July 7.

“It was aid cuts,” her mom told me — without bitterness or any sense of entitlement, simply stating a fact that is obvious on the ground here. “People are dying every day and night.” [Continue reading…]