Trump's foreign aid cuts could cost a lot — 14 million lives by 2030, to be exact: Study

More than 14 million people—many of them children—could die by the end of this decade as a direct consequence of the Donald Trump administration's sweeping rollback of US foreign aid, according to a new study published in The Lancet. The research arrives just as world leaders gather in Seville, Spain, this week for a UN conference hoping to bolster the reeling aid sector—one that the United States has conspicuously chosen to skip. The study warns that Trump's funding cuts could potentially reverse "two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations".

Study findings

The new study by a team of international researchers from Spain, Brazil, Mozambique and the United States paints a grim picture. As per AFP, before Trump's return to the White House, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) provided over 40 per cent of the global humanitarian funding. Just two weeks into his 2nd term as POTUS, Trump's then-close advisor and DOGE chief Elon Musk was seen boasting about how he put the aid agency "through the woodchipper".

Drawing on health data from 133 low- and middle-income countries, researchers found that USAID helped prevent nearly 91 million deaths between 2001 and 2021—more than any other source of humanitarian funding during that period. But with foreign aid funding slashed by around 83 per cent – a figure announced by the US government earlier this year – those hard-won gains are now at risk.

The funding cuts "risk abruptly halting – and even reversing – two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations," said Davide Rasella, a global health expert at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and co-author of the study.

"For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict," he added.

The researchers estimate that by 2030, more than 14 million preventable deaths could occur if the current level of US disengagement continues, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. That's roughly 700,000 young children dying each year.

The findings underscore how devastating the pullback from global aid could be, not just symbolically, but in sheer human cost. USAID's funding might have seemed modest—just 0.3 per cent of total US federal spending—it carried enormous weight. "US citizens contribute about 17 cents per day to USAID, around $64 per year," said study co-author James Macinko of UCLA. "I think most people would support continued USAID funding if they knew just how effective such a small contribution can be to saving millions of lives."