As an Ebola outbreak rages in central and East Africa, public health workers say that the response has been stymied by the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid and global health organizations.
“We are no longer able to get some supplies,” Amadou Bocoum, Democratic Republic of Congo country director for the anti-poverty nonprofit CARE, tells WIRED. “Because of that, we are not able to react immediately.”
Bocoum says that basic medical equipment like masks and hand sanitizers, as well as components necessary for testing, are in short supply due to funding cuts.
WIRED spoke to more than half a dozen global health experts who described how the Trump administration’s move to shutter the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), amid other funding cuts, has created a strained, increasingly fragmented disease prevention and response system in the lead up to this Ebola outbreak, one in which a severely reduced workforce already struggles with burnout.
“We are so far behind in this outbreak,” says a current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employee with outbreak experience. “This is a perfect storm.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak an emergency “of international concern” on May 16. There is no vaccine or treatment for this strain of Ebola, known as Bundibugyo. There were over 530 confirmed cases and 134 deaths as of May 19, and both numbers are rising quickly. According to the CDC, 25 to 50 percent of people who contract the strain will die from it.
“People really need to understand that if this is not handled carefully, it will get wild very easily,” says Bocoum. “It’s really key that we need to react fast to contain it.”
The outbreak was first identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri region, an area that borders South Sudan and Uganda and is known as a throughway for refugees. There have already been confirmed cases in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, from people who had traveled there from Congo. Travelers frequently cross the region’s border, especially at this time of year, with thousands of pilgrims expected to travel from Congo to Uganda for an annual event. While Uganda postponed the celebration due to Ebola fears, it’s not clear how quickly information about the cancellation will spread, especially in rural communities.
In February 2025, as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dismantled USAID, the billionaire told Trump administration officials that DOGE had “accidentally” cut funding to Ebola prevention and then restored it. However, as WIRED reported at the time, lifesaving work on Ebola and other infectious disease prevention was not restored. DOGE also slashed the CDC, causing another key global health player to atrophy. In April 2025, the Trump administration instructed a US National Institutes of Health facility tasked with studying Ebola to stop its research.
Prior to the DOGE cuts, USAID was a critical part of the DRC’s infectious disease prevention, treatment, and containment policies. The US embassy in Kinasha, the country’s capital city, noted in 2024 that the agency had provided treatment to 11 million people for deadly diseases like tuberculosis and HIV that year alone, and that it had also played a key role in containing six prior Ebola outbreaks.
“We’re missing a huge player in the response right now,” the current CDC employee with outbreak experience tells WIRED. “We used to coordinate really, really closely during these outbreaks with USAID, because we may be able to get public health responders out and public health response out immediately—that’s one of our jobs and our goals in these outbreaks at CDC—but USAID could get materials and funding out rapidly, and that was one of their specialties.”
“In a perfect world,” they added, “the WHO could pick up [slack]. But they’re also unfunded by the US. So we’ve cut off two of the main ways people would get support for this outbreak.” The United States withdrew from WHO in January 2026, completing a process started when Trump issued an executive order on the first day of his second term, contributing to major funding shortfalls and staff reductions.
The CDC did not respond to questions about how funding cuts had impacted its response.
CDC spokesperson Melissa Dibble referred WIRED to a statement the agency posted about its international response.
The CDC has teams on the ground working with the WHO to coordinate a global response. However, the employee says, the team’s capacity has been diminished by cuts and the loss of leadership. “They will get burnt out. They will not be able to work 16 hour days for two months in a row, and they will need backfill,” the employee says. “They will need people to come in and roll on and off the response to assist them, and that pool that they have to pull from is much, much smaller than it was just a year ago.” Other teams that would traditionally be part of the response, they add, aren’t currently joining, “because they’re already so short-staffed in their own work that they can’t safely do so.”
Infectious disease physician Joia Mukherjee, a Harvard Medical School professor and clinical advisor to the medical nonprofit Partners In Health, believes that the outbreak “unequivocally” could have been caught sooner, had US aid not been slashed.
Other experts concur. “When funding disruptions affect surveillance systems, workforce capacity, laboratory operations, vaccination efforts, infection prevention, and community-based response activities, it becomes harder to identify cases early and mount rapid containment measures,” says Anna Tate, a former biosecurity strategy lead at US Health and Human Services who now leads domestic programs for the global health nonprofit Project HOPE.
Tate says there’s a “broader lesson” to be learned from the debacle. “Outbreak response capacity cannot be built overnight during a crisis,” she says.
While the CDC does have intensive monitoring systems, and travel bans have already been put in place, experts are concerned that the outbreak could spread—including to the US. “If this is not under control immediately, we will have cases here in no time,” says one former deputy assistant administrator for global health at USAID.
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