Has anyone checked whether Trump is good or bad for insect populations? I am told that would outweigh whatever trivialities this post talks about a million times over.
Edit: it seems like Trump is implementing several policies that would substantially reduce insect populations:
This also illuminates a general point about democratic insensitivity to various aspects of the good. Not just non-American lives, but even things that reduce number of life years without ending a particular life (eg the NIH, innovation, etc)
Thank you for amplifying this much-needed criticism of Trump. Average Americans need to be faced with the reality of just how terrible the demolishing of USAID really is. Good people need to care LOUDLY.
"PEPFAR, one of the programs Trump so casually axed"
So I used to think PEPFAR was done, I read a lot of reporting suggesting to that effect, I have a friend at State who's not a political appointee telling me earlier in Spring that the waivers allegedly being signed to keep PEPFAR online were effectively wasted ink, etc. But then it turns out, no, a ton of it is still running through CDC. Here's an excerpt from May 23rd[1]:
"This state of affairs is not good news. It is merely a qualitatively different calamity from the one most often described in American media coverage of PEPFAR. Conflating PEPFAR with USAID implies that the program has been bulldozed along with the agency when in fact PEPFAR is still standing, albeit with dangerous cracks in its foundation. It urgently needs to be repaired. The State Department's Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy, which oversees PEPFAR, should work with country teams to ensure that every single activity covered under the waiver in every PEPFAR-funded country is up and running. For activities that are not, an agency other than USAID, such as CDC, should be tasked to step in immediately. The July 1 date for reconstituting USAID within the State Department is too far away."
I think you should correct your piece to reflect this basic fact. I have my doubts on these estimates, but we can debate that. What we cannot debate is some basic factual grounding on what is going on is deserved to your readers. Your readership deserves to know that a fraction of major USAID programs were kept running, as the NYT has reported with hardly naivety and a great deal of scrutiny towards the administration[2]. You make no mention of this. Conflating the entire estimated deaths saved, a studies estimates of deaths "from eliminating foreign aid" with the enormous cuts of USAID and integration of its remaining programs into State, is simply a grossly inaccurate description. Before we even get to how seriously to take the study estimates on a very important matter, these things need to be clarified and stated.
It is true that a fraction of former USAID contracts and grants have made it over to State Department management. The number is not known exactly, but it seems it will be in the range of 5-15% (I think closet to 5% in the end). It seems that almost all of the State Department programs related to democracy and migration have been terminated too.
So, yes, but.. really not much left. The statistics on grant and cooperative agreements termination are pretty shocking. IIRC GAVI has had about 1.3b in terminations and Family Health International about 1.1b.
An additional wrinkle is funding. The contracts that have made it over to State need funding otherwise they will inevitably close down. The recissions bill that is in Senate at the moment is intended to claw back most of the current Fiscal Year funds that were appropriated for Foreign Assistancen as well as other funds (eg for public broadcasting). These would fund what is left of PEPFAR as well as other grants and contracts that suvived. It seems likely that Susan Collins will actually be able to carve out funds for PEPFAR, but not clear if anything else will be saved. In that case, State will be limited to other little pots of money that are sitting around and have not expired. This will allow some grants/contracts to continue at a much much lower level but inevitably quite a few will become inactive.
I love your stuff, and I hate it when my occasional comments weigh too heavily towards disagreement - your pieces generally leave me thinking. I should comment more on those. Sorry.
But this one, yeah, seems off. Trump murdered millions by decreasing foreign aid? Did Switzerland or China kill them too by not jumping in and picking up the slack? They could have done so. Did Biden kill three times that number by not increasing foreign aid a measly amount, to under 3% of the federal budget? We're talking children's lives here. And Biden could have done it.
I agree that this is a very, very good thing. I'm glad it's back. But there isn't a magical "correct" dollar amount of foreign aid that the US must meet in order to go to Heaven.
The problem with treating killing and failing to save is this. You disincentivise people from ever saving. There was a time before PEPFAR, a time when someone had to decide whether to create PEPFAR. They could have chosen not to. On your theory, choosing not to crate PEPFAR would not make Americans into murderers. Choosing to create PEPFAR, on the other hand, very foreseeably means that some future administration will kill PEPFAR when the political winds change. Choosing to create PEPFAR, therefor, on your reasoning, very foreseeably makes Americans into murderers. It arguably even makes the Americans who created PEPFAR, as well as the ones who cancelled it, into murderers. If we follow your reasoning, creating PEPFAR in the first place was a mistake. And I don't think it was. I think it is better to have PEPFAR for twenty years and then have it abruptly cancelled than not to have PEPFAR at all. And if that is what we want, 20 years of PEPFAR rather than 0, then we cannot place moral blame for killing on the people who cancel it. We can only place a much lesser moral blame for failing to save.
I think this is a puzzle for those who don't think there is a morally relevant difference. On your theory, why should anyone ever start saving people? Why take on the risk (more or less a certainty in the political realm) that you or your successors will stop saving people and thereby become murderers? If you don't think there is a morally relevant difference between ceasing a life-saving activity and murder, then the most reliable way to not become a murderer is to never begin any life-saving activity. That can't possibly be right, can it?
I mean, I think really the right way of thinking about it is in a scalar way--the more people you save the better! It's better to save some than none. It's quite bad to stop saving because then you save far less than you would have counterfactually.
So you would say that had we not created PEPFAR in the first place, we would still be on the moral hook for the people who are dying now, and we would also be on the moral hook for all the people who PEPFAR saved in the last 20 years? I guess that's a coherent position, and very much in the style of Singer. I just never found Singer convincing. I think the problem with your position then is that you aren't going around calling politicians murderers for all the people who could be saved by hypothetical programs. We could poor ten times as many dollars into foreign aid as we did last year, and save, well, probably not 10x as many people, but maybe 8x or 5x as many people. Yet I don't recall you accusing Biden of murder for not doing that.
The people dying from a lack of foreign aid would generally live lives full of suffering, because they were in shithole countries. If killing insects is a good thing because insects live short and painful lives, then letting third worlders die is also good because their lives are comparatively short and painful.
Cutting scientific research has negative long-term effects on animal welfare and reducing human population via USAID cuts increases insect populations in the short-run
I used to work for the Inter-American Development Bank. The IADB funnels money (mostly American but also from other Western donors) into useful projects in LatAm. The IADB is unquestionably good. Sometimes a bit corrupt, sometimes a bit wrong. Human. But good. Now, the only reason the IADB exists is because the US needs a carrot to go with the stick it uses to hit LatAm regimes and populations regularly with. The American Empire goes away, the IADB (at least in its current form) goes away.
It's the same story with USAID. It was never created to do good, it was created to do propaganda and intelligence work and other duties for the American Empire and, if that takes doing good, so be it (below a story detailing how that works). My question to you, BB, is would you sacrifice the empire so that USAID can survive as a much smaller neutral agency (sort of like the Swiss cooperation agency) or would you rather keep the empire, so you can keep the carrot too?
Unfortunately, you are right. This is so because our moral instincts evolved not for the purpose of good-doing, but for the purpose of policing behaviour that could be dangerous to us.
If I end up dying to my cancer because of research that got cut by Trump, then this "big difference" will surely make me feel better about the situation, thanks.
Removing or reducing foreign aid isn't 'killing.' Most Americans are less altruistic than you and therefore don't consider Trump's policies as morally abhorrent as you do. Simple moral frameworks, such as libertarianism, eliminate your Benthamite utilitarian calculus. Most Americans are more libertarian than you. Indeed, Americans at the median are more responsible than Trump or Republicans for current United States policies. Keep up the good work; I enjoy reading your blog, Mathew!
You wrote "If you stop providing aid to someone who needs it when they have no ability to provide it themselves—abruptly, without giving them any *time to find another source*—you have killed them. If an aid facility is feeding infants, and you cut off all funding to it so that the infants starve to death, what you have done is far more akin to homicide than failing to save. "
The key here is "time to find another source". I would note that after this "time" has elapsed and another government or private group could step in and replace what was lost, the number of deaths attributed to the sudden cutoff of aid would *not* number in the millions.
If no government or private group steps up to replace it and those deaths continue to happen, is THEY who will share responsibility for those deaths with the US, according to your calculus. Where does it end? And who is guilty for the deaths that were happening before the programs began?
Well, I said two things. First, is that if you cut off aid abruptly you kill people. I agree this would imply that if, say, PEPFAR is not reauthorized, ten years down the line the people who will die will not have been killed by Trump in the relevant sense--though they will have been caused to die by his action.
But second, failing to save people who you can save at minimal cost is culpable. If the U.S. could have stopped the holocaust for a few dollars per American, failing to do so would have been deeply immoral!
The question I ask is why should it fall to the US to do this? The answer seems to be that the US began PEPFAR. Had it not done so, you wouldn't be condemning Trump for ending it.
Had PEPFAR not been created, millions of lives saved by the program would have been lost. Had it not been created, the people you predict will die would still do so. Yet a program like PEPFAR could be conducted by China or the EU, or by billionaire philanthropy to replace PEPFAR in which case most of these people would not die. If these groups do not do this, are they responsible for these deaths?
Well sure, I strongly opposed getting rid of PEPFAR. It was a wholly evil action. Before that monster was elected, people could point to PEPFAR as evidence that Republicans did some good things.
But I do not see how it is the responsibility of others to protect people from the consequences of their own society’s actions. It is a good thing that the US did this but ending it does not mean we are any eviler than the billionaires (or China) who fail to take over where we left off.
Has anyone checked whether Trump is good or bad for insect populations? I am told that would outweigh whatever trivialities this post talks about a million times over.
Edit: it seems like Trump is implementing several policies that would substantially reduce insect populations:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/trump-plans-to-change-endangered-species-act-protections/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/08/national-forests-logging-forest-service-order/82974502007/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/10/30/opinion/trump-environment-biodiversity-regulation/
Bentham's Bulldog: The leader of the free world is implementing policies that will kill millions of people and no one seems to care.
Vikram V.: Yes, but have you considered this sarcastic bon mot?
Everyone Else: Letting children die isn't the same as killing children lol what are you stupid?
This also illuminates a general point about democratic insensitivity to various aspects of the good. Not just non-American lives, but even things that reduce number of life years without ending a particular life (eg the NIH, innovation, etc)
Thank you for amplifying this much-needed criticism of Trump. Average Americans need to be faced with the reality of just how terrible the demolishing of USAID really is. Good people need to care LOUDLY.
"PEPFAR, one of the programs Trump so casually axed"
So I used to think PEPFAR was done, I read a lot of reporting suggesting to that effect, I have a friend at State who's not a political appointee telling me earlier in Spring that the waivers allegedly being signed to keep PEPFAR online were effectively wasted ink, etc. But then it turns out, no, a ton of it is still running through CDC. Here's an excerpt from May 23rd[1]:
"This state of affairs is not good news. It is merely a qualitatively different calamity from the one most often described in American media coverage of PEPFAR. Conflating PEPFAR with USAID implies that the program has been bulldozed along with the agency when in fact PEPFAR is still standing, albeit with dangerous cracks in its foundation. It urgently needs to be repaired. The State Department's Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy, which oversees PEPFAR, should work with country teams to ensure that every single activity covered under the waiver in every PEPFAR-funded country is up and running. For activities that are not, an agency other than USAID, such as CDC, should be tasked to step in immediately. The July 1 date for reconstituting USAID within the State Department is too far away."
I think you should correct your piece to reflect this basic fact. I have my doubts on these estimates, but we can debate that. What we cannot debate is some basic factual grounding on what is going on is deserved to your readers. Your readership deserves to know that a fraction of major USAID programs were kept running, as the NYT has reported with hardly naivety and a great deal of scrutiny towards the administration[2]. You make no mention of this. Conflating the entire estimated deaths saved, a studies estimates of deaths "from eliminating foreign aid" with the enormous cuts of USAID and integration of its remaining programs into State, is simply a grossly inaccurate description. Before we even get to how seriously to take the study estimates on a very important matter, these things need to be clarified and stated.
[1] https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/life-less-pepfar-first-100-days-tanzania-and-uganda
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/22/us/politics/usaid-foreign-aid-trump.html
I'll add a note clarifying that PEFPAR has been mostly dismantled but not entirely destroyed, thanks.
It is true that a fraction of former USAID contracts and grants have made it over to State Department management. The number is not known exactly, but it seems it will be in the range of 5-15% (I think closet to 5% in the end). It seems that almost all of the State Department programs related to democracy and migration have been terminated too.
So, yes, but.. really not much left. The statistics on grant and cooperative agreements termination are pretty shocking. IIRC GAVI has had about 1.3b in terminations and Family Health International about 1.1b.
An additional wrinkle is funding. The contracts that have made it over to State need funding otherwise they will inevitably close down. The recissions bill that is in Senate at the moment is intended to claw back most of the current Fiscal Year funds that were appropriated for Foreign Assistancen as well as other funds (eg for public broadcasting). These would fund what is left of PEPFAR as well as other grants and contracts that suvived. It seems likely that Susan Collins will actually be able to carve out funds for PEPFAR, but not clear if anything else will be saved. In that case, State will be limited to other little pots of money that are sitting around and have not expired. This will allow some grants/contracts to continue at a much much lower level but inevitably quite a few will become inactive.
I love your stuff, and I hate it when my occasional comments weigh too heavily towards disagreement - your pieces generally leave me thinking. I should comment more on those. Sorry.
But this one, yeah, seems off. Trump murdered millions by decreasing foreign aid? Did Switzerland or China kill them too by not jumping in and picking up the slack? They could have done so. Did Biden kill three times that number by not increasing foreign aid a measly amount, to under 3% of the federal budget? We're talking children's lives here. And Biden could have done it.
It looks like Pepfar is back, by the way (https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/gop-senators-reach-deal-to-save-aids-funding-from-doge-cuts-e5289c97?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1).
I agree that this is a very, very good thing. I'm glad it's back. But there isn't a magical "correct" dollar amount of foreign aid that the US must meet in order to go to Heaven.
The U.S. is by orders of magnitude more wealthy than China and Switzerland combined.
The problem with treating killing and failing to save is this. You disincentivise people from ever saving. There was a time before PEPFAR, a time when someone had to decide whether to create PEPFAR. They could have chosen not to. On your theory, choosing not to crate PEPFAR would not make Americans into murderers. Choosing to create PEPFAR, on the other hand, very foreseeably means that some future administration will kill PEPFAR when the political winds change. Choosing to create PEPFAR, therefor, on your reasoning, very foreseeably makes Americans into murderers. It arguably even makes the Americans who created PEPFAR, as well as the ones who cancelled it, into murderers. If we follow your reasoning, creating PEPFAR in the first place was a mistake. And I don't think it was. I think it is better to have PEPFAR for twenty years and then have it abruptly cancelled than not to have PEPFAR at all. And if that is what we want, 20 years of PEPFAR rather than 0, then we cannot place moral blame for killing on the people who cancel it. We can only place a much lesser moral blame for failing to save.
Well, I don't think there is a morally relevant difference! Though I agree this is a weird puzzle for thsoe who do think that.
I think this is a puzzle for those who don't think there is a morally relevant difference. On your theory, why should anyone ever start saving people? Why take on the risk (more or less a certainty in the political realm) that you or your successors will stop saving people and thereby become murderers? If you don't think there is a morally relevant difference between ceasing a life-saving activity and murder, then the most reliable way to not become a murderer is to never begin any life-saving activity. That can't possibly be right, can it?
I mean, I think really the right way of thinking about it is in a scalar way--the more people you save the better! It's better to save some than none. It's quite bad to stop saving because then you save far less than you would have counterfactually.
So you would say that had we not created PEPFAR in the first place, we would still be on the moral hook for the people who are dying now, and we would also be on the moral hook for all the people who PEPFAR saved in the last 20 years? I guess that's a coherent position, and very much in the style of Singer. I just never found Singer convincing. I think the problem with your position then is that you aren't going around calling politicians murderers for all the people who could be saved by hypothetical programs. We could poor ten times as many dollars into foreign aid as we did last year, and save, well, probably not 10x as many people, but maybe 8x or 5x as many people. Yet I don't recall you accusing Biden of murder for not doing that.
I don't think Bush is going to go down in history as a war criminal.
The people dying from a lack of foreign aid would generally live lives full of suffering, because they were in shithole countries. If killing insects is a good thing because insects live short and painful lives, then letting third worlders die is also good because their lives are comparatively short and painful.
Cutting scientific research has negative long-term effects on animal welfare and reducing human population via USAID cuts increases insect populations in the short-run
I used to work for the Inter-American Development Bank. The IADB funnels money (mostly American but also from other Western donors) into useful projects in LatAm. The IADB is unquestionably good. Sometimes a bit corrupt, sometimes a bit wrong. Human. But good. Now, the only reason the IADB exists is because the US needs a carrot to go with the stick it uses to hit LatAm regimes and populations regularly with. The American Empire goes away, the IADB (at least in its current form) goes away.
It's the same story with USAID. It was never created to do good, it was created to do propaganda and intelligence work and other duties for the American Empire and, if that takes doing good, so be it (below a story detailing how that works). My question to you, BB, is would you sacrifice the empire so that USAID can survive as a much smaller neutral agency (sort of like the Swiss cooperation agency) or would you rather keep the empire, so you can keep the carrot too?
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/usaid-leaks-censorship-as-regime
Unfortunately, you are right. This is so because our moral instincts evolved not for the purpose of good-doing, but for the purpose of policing behaviour that could be dangerous to us.
This isn't a paradox, but a tautology! Non-voters do not vote.
Very unlikely to succeed by the way. I highly doubt the will change course on this.
Trump hasn't killed people via aid cuts - he's just let them die. Big difference.
See my response to that in the article!
If I end up dying to my cancer because of research that got cut by Trump, then this "big difference" will surely make me feel better about the situation, thanks.
Yes.
I hope you never get cancer, even though you're an asshole
Removing or reducing foreign aid isn't 'killing.' Most Americans are less altruistic than you and therefore don't consider Trump's policies as morally abhorrent as you do. Simple moral frameworks, such as libertarianism, eliminate your Benthamite utilitarian calculus. Most Americans are more libertarian than you. Indeed, Americans at the median are more responsible than Trump or Republicans for current United States policies. Keep up the good work; I enjoy reading your blog, Mathew!
Thanks! Though see the response I gave to that argument!
You wrote "If you stop providing aid to someone who needs it when they have no ability to provide it themselves—abruptly, without giving them any *time to find another source*—you have killed them. If an aid facility is feeding infants, and you cut off all funding to it so that the infants starve to death, what you have done is far more akin to homicide than failing to save. "
The key here is "time to find another source". I would note that after this "time" has elapsed and another government or private group could step in and replace what was lost, the number of deaths attributed to the sudden cutoff of aid would *not* number in the millions.
If no government or private group steps up to replace it and those deaths continue to happen, is THEY who will share responsibility for those deaths with the US, according to your calculus. Where does it end? And who is guilty for the deaths that were happening before the programs began?
Well, I said two things. First, is that if you cut off aid abruptly you kill people. I agree this would imply that if, say, PEPFAR is not reauthorized, ten years down the line the people who will die will not have been killed by Trump in the relevant sense--though they will have been caused to die by his action.
But second, failing to save people who you can save at minimal cost is culpable. If the U.S. could have stopped the holocaust for a few dollars per American, failing to do so would have been deeply immoral!
The question I ask is why should it fall to the US to do this? The answer seems to be that the US began PEPFAR. Had it not done so, you wouldn't be condemning Trump for ending it.
Had PEPFAR not been created, millions of lives saved by the program would have been lost. Had it not been created, the people you predict will die would still do so. Yet a program like PEPFAR could be conducted by China or the EU, or by billionaire philanthropy to replace PEPFAR in which case most of these people would not die. If these groups do not do this, are they responsible for these deaths?
I'd be in favor of other ocuntries like China doing foreign aid too! Europe spends a higher portion of GDP on foreign aid than the U.S.!
Well sure, I strongly opposed getting rid of PEPFAR. It was a wholly evil action. Before that monster was elected, people could point to PEPFAR as evidence that Republicans did some good things.
But I do not see how it is the responsibility of others to protect people from the consequences of their own society’s actions. It is a good thing that the US did this but ending it does not mean we are any eviler than the billionaires (or China) who fail to take over where we left off.