In January 2025, the Trump administration effectively ended the United States Agency for International Development by freezing all foreign aid. By July, USAID was officially closed and absorbed into the State Department. USAID, the primary program responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development programs, was one of the few remaining forces of good that the U.S. utilized abroad. With MAGA calling the shots in the White House and the halls of Congress, naturally, USAID had to go. A year and a half on, that aid has been eliminated, and our leaders are reduced to sending bombs and CIA operatives.
In 2025, Donald Trump made his feelings about USAID very clear, saying it was run by “radical lunatics,” “it’s a whole, big scam,” and “the whole thing is a fraud.” This came from the man who created Trump University. With the arrival of Elon Musk and DOGE, USAID was systematically dismantled with virtually no oversight. Thousands of people were fired, programs that provided measurable benefits were cut, and, subsequently, tens of thousands of people died due to the sudden lack of aid. By mid-March last year, after a supposed six-week review, 83% of USAID programs had been terminated.
When Elon Musk took the stage at CPAC in February 2025 and waved his new chainsaw in the air, calling it “the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” he wasn’t kidding. The consequences of allowing a ketamine-addled megalomaniac and his group of DOGE employees to take a chainsaw to the government’s largest aid program with no experience, abilities, or common sense produced predictable results. By the time Musk and DOGE were done with USAID, all that remained was a smoldering pile of rubble filled with the bones of the people it was designed to help.
According to the Trump administration, USAID was full of waste, fraud, and abuse. Yet staff at the agency, including auditors and lawyers in both the agency and its inspector general’s office, found almost no wasteful spending. Over the last six IG reports on USAID, 94% of spending was audited, with only 0.3% found to have issues, and half of that 0.3% was reclaimed. However, in this foul year of our lord 2026, facts no longer matter; evidence to the contrary of right-wing talking points is fake news, and objective reality is so skewed that MAGA takes everything Trump says as gospel.
Last year, Trump praised his administration for finding the so-called waste, fraud, and abuse. “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” Trump said. “They used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?”
How about that, indeed.
The crack team at DOGE thwarted a nefarious plan, and they deserve all the praise we can muster. Except none of what Trump said is true. Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID’s COVID-19 assistance portfolio under Joe Biden, wrote on social media, “USAID procures condoms for around $0.05 a piece. $50 million would be ONE BILLION condoms. What’s going on here is NOT a billion condoms for Gaza. What’s going on is that the bros at DOGE apparently can’t read govt spreadsheets.” Jesse Watters of Fox News got in on the action as well, claiming Hamas was using the shipments for “condom bombs” to float explosive-filled balloons over Israel. I have a sneaking suspicion that Jesse Watters is not a real person, but rather something artificially created in a lab in the basement of Fox News headquarters.
No one knows where Trump got this information, since he never offered evidence. There is, however, a Gaza in Mozambique that received money for reproductive health projects distributed by an AIDS foundation and supplied by USAID. None of this matters now. Someone told Trump that Hamas is using USAID money to make condom bombs to blow up Israel, and he believed them. Because of that, people are dying from preventable and treatable diseases in impoverished communities.
It’s tough to estimate how many lives have been lost due to the suspension of USAID. Boston University’s public health tracking model puts the number at over 700,000, with two-thirds of those children under five. The prominent medical journal The Lancet predicts that if the dismantling persists, the cumulative death toll could rise into the millions by 2030. While it’s no surprise that the U.S. has an unquenchable thirst for global domination and a long history of imperialism and colonialism, what USAID did was maintain our soft power around the globe. That soft power is now gone.
What DOGE was supposed to do, or at least what the public was told, was to cut federal spending and lower U.S. debt. Waste, fraud, and abuse was the phrase used extensively, and the Republican Party has long touted itself as the party of fiscal responsibility. In fiscal year 2024, USAID’s budget was $40 billion, or 0.6% of the federal budget. At the same time, the U.S. military budget accounted for 13% of the federal budget and 52% of all federal discretionary spending. So while the war machine continues to eat up ever-increasing sums of money, life-saving programs get cut.
In 2015, Donald Trump ran on reducing federal spending, eliminating U.S. debt, and balancing the budget. In 2016, the federal deficit was $439 billion. In July 2026, the U.S. deficit for that one month alone was $432 billion. Gross national debt hit over $19 trillion in 2016 and, as of right now, is over $39 trillion. In the last ten years, the U.S. has spent almost $9 trillion on defense and is now close to running out of munitions while fighting a country with no air force or navy. In any other occupation, Pete Hegseth would have been fired. The priorities of the Trump administration are clear: we will not only continue to kill people actively, but now passively as well.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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