Lire la version en français / Hier auf Deutsch lesen/ Lea la versión en español
The new chief administrator at a big city hospital wants to trim the hospital’s budget. Those electricity bills look pretty high, so he orders staff to go into the wards and operating rooms and unplug all the machines pending a review of what those machines do. A few weeks later, he announces his review complete: he’ll keep the machines unplugged.
Money saved and, bonus, no more of that pesky beeping.
It’s absurd, of course, yet this is essentially what team Trump has been doing with US foreign aid. And the impacts will be similarly disastrous.
First, in January, Trump ordered a suspension of all foreign assistance, pending a program-by-program review. Now, the administration says, their review is complete, and they’re keeping most of those life-saving machines unplugged.
Last week, the Trump administration announced it would terminate more than 90 percent of the programming of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). That’s the key US government agency that administers civilian foreign aid and development assistance around the world. Cuts will also include thousands of State Department foreign assistance programs.
Altogether, it totals about US$60 billion. That’s a lot of money, but it’s less than one percent of the US federal budget. US taxpayers won’t likely notice any difference.
Where these cuts will have a massive impact, however, is overseas. This move will imperil millions of people and undermine human rights globally.
In fact, the aid freeze has already been catastrophic. For example, it’s ended online university classes for Afghan women and girls. It’s stopped the provision of medicines to avoid mother-to-child transmission of HIV for hundreds of thousands of newborns. It’s stripped funding from emergency food kitchens in famine-stricken Sudan.
Cuts have also had other devastating human rights consequences around the world. Human rights fact-finding groups face closure or staff reductions. (Not Human Rights Watch, by the way. We don’t take money from any government.)
Also on the chopping block are independent media working to expose human rights abuses and corruption. Cuts will likewise hit organizations providing legal services for victims of politically motivated prosecutions in authoritarian countries like Russia, Belarus, and China.
There is no way the Trump administration did a proper review of thousands of programs like these before cutting them.
The State Department’s “review process” was rushed. It lacked necessary internal guidance. It had no methodology for public comment. Most importantly, there was no process to mitigate the risks of stopping programs abruptly or in their entirety.
Look, it’s fine to review tax-funded programs. Any new government might want to do that, and they have the authority of a recent election behind them to do so.
But there are smarter ways to review such things – like looking carefully at what those beeping hospital machines are doing before unplugging them.
