Signing a truce with starvation and disease

Another massive lurch down:

The Trump administration said Tuesday that it is pulling almost all U.S. Agency for International Development workers off the job and out of the field worldwide, moving to all but end a six-decade mission to shore up American security by fighting starvation, funding education and working to end epidemics.

The administration notified USAID workers in emails and a notice posted online, the latest in a steady dismantling of the aid agency by returning political appointees from President Donald Trump’s first term and billionaire Elon Musk’s government-efficiency teams who call much of the spending on programs overseas wasteful.

Well, I consider much of what Elon Musk does evil, so we have to shut him down.

Even if he’s right that much of the “spending” is wasteful, how does that necessitate sudden instant shutdown of everything? What is that but a display of force and sadism?

“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on X.

The Nazi salute was no joke.

The U.S. is the world’s largest humanitarian donor by far. It spends less than 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, a smaller share of its budget than some countries.

Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medication already delivered by U.S. companies are sitting in ports because of the administration’s sudden shutdown of the agency.

Yay! No more food and medication! No more responding to outbreaks of contagious disease! Into the wood chipper with them! Aren’t we having fun?!

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