Trump's Foreign Aid Cuts Have Already Killed More People Than The Iraq War

The projected death toll is well over one million

In the earlier part of the year, there was a flurry of media coverage about Trump’s foreign aid cuts. After an initial failed attempt to vaporize nearly all of foreign aid, the programs shambled on, zombie-like, with diminished functionality. Things were constantly changing. The legal status of the foreign aid cuts were in constant limbo, and it was very difficult to keep track all the things going on. Well, now that the cuts have receded from the headlines, the results are in.

Millions of extra people are dead, unnecessarily.

Or so say the estimates of Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur, two leading experts at the Center for Global Development. They estimate both lives lost due to outlays (current spending that’s been terminated) and obligations (commitments to future spending that were axed). They conclude that outlay cuts have cost between half a million and a million lives, and that cuts to obligations have cost between 670 thousand and 1.6 million lives. The situation, they conclude, looks even worse than it did in June.

Now, one could quibble with the exact numbers, but something in this ballpark is likely correct. Foreign aid saves about 3 million lives a year, and was at a high-point in 2024. Trump reducing foreign aid’s functionality in 2025 by 1/6 seems pretty conservative, and yet that means that it will induce an extra ~500,000 deaths immediately. Given cancellation of future contracts, it’s not at all surprising that the cuts have a projected future death toll of millions more.

This should be in the headlines every single day. If we average out the two estimates and ignore the termination of obligations, we get a death toll of 750,000. That is 2,000 deaths, every day, for a whole year. That is the equivalent of four boeing 747’s crashing daily, leaving no survivors.

It is more deaths than were caused by the Iraq war. It would be like a big college lecture hall full of people being systematically exterminated every single hour, for a year—and that is not even counting the deaths lost from the terminated contracts. The Rwandan genocide, perhaps the single most grisly atrocity of the last 40 years, didn’t even leave that many dead. It’s about the number of Americans who die annually from heart disease. And remember: if we count terminated obligations, things are more than twice as bad.

And what justified this unimaginable carnage? The answer is that the Trump administration did not want to continue spending less than 1% of the budget saving millions of lives. The administration was predictably willing to enact a policy that would predictably lead to thousands of people dying every day, many of them children, because it did not want to spend a tiny slice of the budget keeping them alive.

Why did this happen? Why are these extra people dead? The answer is that a relatively small number of high-level political operatives sat in air-conditioned rooms in Washington and decided to cause millions of deaths. They concluded that, because foreign children with horrific diseases do not vote and most Americans don’t know much about foreign aid, it would be best for their political career to axe lifesaving programs. Most probably knew that millions could die. Others didn’t bother to check.

There is a common idea that Democrats should stop talking so much about foreign aid. It’s one of the few bits of federal spending that isn’t popular, so instead Democrats should talk about popular spending items. This is both politically and morally wrong.

It is politically wrong because, though Americans don’t like foreign aid, they are totally misinformed about it. They think it takes up a much larger portion of the budget than it does. They don’t know that it takes up less than 1% of the budget and saves millions of lives. It is easy to campaign on “spend less than 1% of the budget to save millions of lives.” About 95% of Americans support a higher level of foreign aid spending than we have currently; they just think we spend way more than we do. And most Americans don’t support Trump’s extreme foreign aid cuts.

Americans aren’t ghouls. People care a lot about, say, the war in Ukraine. The foreign aid cuts have caused more deaths this year than all the deaths in the Russia-Ukraine war. Most people would support spending a tiny fraction of the budget to end the Ukraine war. Foreign aid is a better bet than that!

Democrats neglecting foreign aid is morally wrong because foreign aid is the best thing the government does. I’d guess more good is done by the 1% of the budget spent on foreign aid than the approximately two-thirds of the budget spent on entitlements. Foreign aid cuts are not like compromises on other unpopular positions; moderating on trans sports does not leave a million extra people dead.

And while one often hears the canard that “a nation should solely represent its own interests,” few people actually believe it. Most people think part of the reason it was good to intervene in world war two is that it prevented lots of people from dying unnecessarily. Even if the Nazis had stayed in Europe, it was worth paying a cost to prevent a sizeable segment of the world from descending into tyranny, genocide, and madness. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s failure to do anything about Rwanda, even as women were being raped in front of their husbands and teenagers were being hacked to death with machetes, is frequently considered one of the central failures of his presidency.

People additionally tend to think that it’s wrong to actively harm foreigners, even if we have no obligation to benefit them. But as Kelsey Piper notes, if you abruptly shut off medicine, without giving people the opportunity to find an alternative provider, what you have done is more like killing than letting die. It is additionally rather odd to hold that foreigners matter, so we can’t harm them, but their mattering doesn’t give us any reason to save millions of their lives at low cost. Normally if it is wrong to harm someone, you have some reason to benefit them. And on top of these moral arguments, foreign aid likely benefits us both by improving our soft-power and making the world more stable.

Washington has been taken over by a rogue administration without any respect for the rule of law. This administration’s wild incompetence led them to sabotage the economy, which is why their approval rating is underwater. Their wickedness led to them gutting foreign aid programs, killing millions. The first is more direct and visible, but the second is likely worse.

As far as I can tell, the ghouls who sabotaged lifesaving foreign aid programs, predicting that their actions would lead to millions of extra people dying, are the scum of the Earth. They are the Eichmanns of the modern era—they follow the orders of higher-ups, even when the predictable result of such orders is millions of extra people being dead. This administration’s moral rot will be visible for decades in global disease statistics; one will be able to pinpoint on a graph of deaths exactly when the administration gutted foreign aid. On an individual level, the thing to do is donate to the charities that perform the functions that foreign aid used to perform.

In a sane world, anyone who cooperated with this lawless and criminal administration would be blacklisted from public life entirely. The best we can hope for is completely eviscerating them in the next election and restoring the programs that prevented a hundred deaths an hour.