‘A Midnight Global Health Massacre’
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‘A Midnight Global Health Massacre’
So read the headline in The Bulwark after the Trump administration eviscerated the US Agency for International Development.
Other massive cuts are on the horizon: Threats to eliminate two-thirds of EPA staffing, half of Social Security staffing, perhaps the entire Department of Education. Taken as a whole, it’s all starting to look like a bloodless coup, driven by one man who lied his way back into the White House and another elected by absolutely no one. Non-violent or not, the assault on our democracy is real, brutal and spreading rapidly.
The crippling of USAID topped the cruelty index. The Supreme Court helped the administration carve out 2,000 more jobs late at night on a glide path that the New York Times reported ultimately will leave the agency with 290 jobs of an original 10,000. The administration froze 10,000 USAID and state department contracts and grants in their tracks, ranging from funds for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to funds for urban rescue teams who rush to countries struck by devastating earthquakes.
The numbers are big. But big numbers too often leave us with a shrug and a sigh, before we move on to something else. Data doesn’t punch us in the gut. For that we need stories and powerful images that move us.
Nearly 53 years ago, an iconic photo, “The Terror of War,” captured the image of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked in agony and anguish away from an American napalm attack. The photo energized and amplified the anti-war movement. I’ve never forgotten it.
The current assault on humanity is more nebulous, and recent enough so that stories of its impact have barely begun to surface.
Surely, the victims of USAID’s dismantling are layered.
At the top layer we’ve seen the Washington, D.C., employees tearfully leaving their offices after getting 15 minutes Thursday to pack up. “It is a nightmare for young adults interested in public service,” wrote a college classmate whose daughter’s friends were among those fired.
Slightly less visible in big media markets are the farmers in red states like Kansas. Many, ABC News reported, sell surplus wheat and other crops to Food for Peace, which in 2022 distributed 4 billion pounds to help feed 58 million people in Africa, Asia, South America and Ukraine. Food is now rotting in warehouses and the farmers aren’t being paid.
“We are having a real crisis here in terms of income,” farmer Vance Ehmke told ABC.
And then there are world’s sick, weak and hungry, continents away, who rely on USAID for food, for medicine, for their very survival. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has covered USAID for decades, reached out to contacts to measure how they are doing. He found that in Sokoto, Nigeria, toddlers were starving and at risk of death because feeding centers formerly supported by USAID had run out of nutrient-rich paste. That in Kismayo, Somalia, a hospital serving 3,000 people a month “has had to close its doors … with patients carried away on donkey carts or in wheelbarrows.” That in Uganda, an Ebola outbreak was spreading as USAID froze the pay of much-needed medical staff.
“It’s a reminder that a robust USAID is a first defense against epidemics and pandemics,” he wrote, “whether involving bird flu, Ebola or other diseases.”
Kristof’s column is the closest I’ve come yet to sensing the crippling devastation of USAID’s virtual shutdown. Ultimately that shutdown will engender enmity toward the U.S., endangering Americans. It will hasten the spread of global diseases, possibly across our borders. It will kill hungry children, which will leave—or at least should leave—a moral weight on our hearts and minds.
For such tragedies to touch us, however, for the American public to awaken, we need to see the images and hear the individual stories that show the impact of Elon Musk’s meat cleaver method of governing. It’ll be the only way to jar significant numbers of the disengaged out of apathy and toward outrage.
It’s not too dramatic to say we are at the start of a battle for American democracy’s very soul. These times are nothing less. Journalists, already under fire, will need help. They’ll need others to overcome fear and find courage to talk. They’ll need tips from the eyes and ears of those who’ve already found that courage.
There already are inklings of a resurgent resistance: Rachel Maddow reported recently that 3,500 people showed up in Omaha in Republican Nebraska to hear Bernie Sanders. He’d booked a hall holding 1,000. My guess is many of them had personal stories to tell.
Let’s hope they, and others, especially in red states, soon will come forward to share them.