On July 1, the Trump administration will effectively dissolve the United States Agency for International Development and shunt the agency’s few remaining contracts to the State Department. Over the next two months, remaining employees will be terminated — including the entirety of the government’s global humanitarian aid work force. Quietly, America will abandon the fight against global famine.
Most Americans won’t notice.
For many, it may take months or years to connect reports of mass death abroad back to these decisions made at home. That’s because after six decades, U.S.A.I.D. became so efficient at quietly stopping millions of deaths worldwide that most Americans didn’t even know many of the humanitarian disasters were occurring. Because they never heard about the lives regularly saved by their tax dollars, Americans don’t realize the generosity that has been stolen from them.
I worked for U.S.A.I.D. in East Africa over the past eight and a half years, selling the story of American foreign aid to people in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Kenya. Our inability to tell this same story to Americans is our great failure. It is what put the agency into the Department of Government Efficiency’s wood chipper first. It’s what allows Secretary of State Marco Rubio to get away with insisting that lifesaving humanitarian aid would continue while the administration drastically slashed its funding. And it’s what I fear will let this presidency cast the deaths from the next preventable catastrophe as unstoppable or inevitable.
In East Africa I saw our development projects during times of peace and our humanitarian aid during crises and conflicts. Yes, our agency was often tangled in a slow, maddening bureaucracy. But I believe most Americans would be horrified to learn what they’re forfeiting.
One example is enough.
In April 2022, I flew eight Ethiopian journalists to Gode, a dusty city in southeastern Ethiopia, where the temperature that week neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We were there to see communities ravished by the 2020-23 Horn of Africa drought, the longest ever recorded in the three countries it spanned — Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. We took the journalists to a temporary tented camp for 2,500 families that was built in part with American funding. We saw a hospital saving children from malnutrition death with American-bought nutritional medicines. Soaked in sweat, we visited a cavernous warehouse stocked with just a fraction of the more than 150,000 tons of food that included American-grown grain, dried peas and cooking oil that our nation was rushing into the region each year.
During the drought, more than 40 million people were helped by humanitarian aid, of which over 70 percent was paid for by the United States. Dr. Oliver Watson, a lecturer at Imperial College London who has modeled drought deaths, estimates that without American aid, between 2.1 million and 3.9 million more excess deaths would have occurred. That’s an especially grave figure, given that half of those who died from the region’s last famine were newborns or young children.
It was not a complicated story to tell — Americans were paying to stop a famine and keep fleeing families alive. Yet it barely registered in American public life.
We’ve been told of late that programs like these were undue, wasteful expenses of American taxpayer money. That raises the question: How much did this humanitarian aid really cost?
For the most expensive fiscal year, 2022, the American government spent over $2 billion for the entirety of the drought response. That means it cost the average American household roughly $6 a year in taxes to prevent about half as many deaths as occurred in the Holocaust.
It sounds absurd to justify something so self-evidently humane. And in the end, I don’t believe individual Americans would believe it even needs justification. For any of our faults, we are not so small a people as to refuse such a financial and moral bargain.
When the drought ended in 2023, U.S.A.I.D. stood down the emergency response. Though America had just completed one of the most successful humanitarian responses in modern history, we didn’t even attempt a victory lap. There was no presidential address. No plaque in Washington. Not even a full public report. We merely shared some ineffective social media posts and moved on to the next disaster. It is baffling in hindsight.
This failure is partly because after decades of routine silence, the agency could only see the banality in the extraordinary and partly because of a broader incompetency by the federal government to communicate directly to the public it serves. But the biggest reason we never got the story out is that the American public was never U.S.A.I.D.’s primary audience.
Instead, a majority of our communication efforts were aimed entirely at Congress and other government insiders. This was our choice. Our flawed logic was that if lawmakers understood the agency’s impact, they’d protect its work.
They did, at least, understand. Members of Congress and their staffs regularly joined delegations overseas. They met U.S.A.I.D. staff members, received private briefings and toured lifesaving projects. And they came often, often praising the work in private. In Kenya we hosted over 35 such high-level delegations in 2024 alone.
That’s what makes this moment so bitter: The people who know exactly what we’re losing are the ones letting it happen. They know that when the next drought happens, America won’t be able to replicate our former successes. Not after cutting America’s humanitarian contributions or the contracts with warehouses to store food aid, or after crippling our support for the world’s only famine early-warning apparatus, FEWS NET. And certainly not after purging the very humanitarian professionals whose work embodies some of America’s highest values.
What I described here is just one example of U.S.A.I.D.’s work. It doesn’t account for the lives saved worldwide from H.I.V., tuberculosis and childbirth complications. It says nothing of the children who got their first book, classroom or shot at something better.
With no other nation stepping in to fill the void America is leaving, we must not forget the lesson of this moment. If we ever return to serious global aid, we cannot rebuild on the same broken foundation that treated public awareness as optional.
It’s too late to save U.S.A.I.D. The question now is whether we can still save America’s willingness to show up when people are dying.
William Herkewitz is a journalist and a former head of communications for U.S.A.I.D. missions in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Kenya.
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