USAID squeeze: Trump’s cut-back of aid is a wake-up call for India
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Donald Trump seems to be in a tearing hurry to make America great again.
No one should quibble with such a mission: the world needs a prosperous and stable US. But this should not come at the cost of the world’s poorest.
Yet, that’s precisely what appears to be happening—as a fallout of the US President’s decision to immediately halt all programmes of the world’s biggest aid agency, USAID, pending a 90-day audit. The overnight cessation of US development aid, whose biggest beneficiaries are some of the poorest people in Africa, South America and South Asia, puts lives at risk and threatens the funding of initiatives that deliver health, food and drugs to the needy.
Clinics providing life-saving HIV drugs in Africa have had to shut overnight. And, as we know from the 1980s, such infectious diseases can strike anywhere, even if the availability of cheap drugs—courtesy of generic drug-making countries such as India—makes the disease manageable.
This week, Elon Musk, head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, admitted that the USAID programme for Ebola prevention was “accidentally cancelled," before it was restored. He spoke of this in the context of what he called a “need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction by Financial Year 26." No one can object to cutting government debt, but, as one specialist pointed out on Musk’s X, “It’s NOT true to say ‘one of (the) things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola prevention’ and that it was quickly restored… Because you’ve hobbled or directly dismantled the response structures needed to end Ebola outbreaks abroad and protect us here in the US." Efforts to contain Ebola are just the tip of the
. Read more on livemint.com
