People are going to die
North Carolina is a center for public health organizations, both here and abroad.
In the early 1990s, my ex-wife entered the Health Behavior and Health Education program at the UNC School of Public Health. A lot of the students were recent Peace Corps volunteers. Almost all of them were smart, interesting, and committed people who want to leave the world a little better place than they found it. I made lasting friendships through her connections that have stayed with me until today. Now, many of them are the targets of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
The people at the school of public health built their careers around the notion of helping communities and protecting populations from disease and injury. Ones with an international background worked in developing countries in some of the most impoverished and war torn regions. They help build infrastructure that improves sanitation. They teach health practices that prevent the spread of diseases. They feed starving children. And they make the world feel a little bit better about America.
The cuts to USAID are devastating to their work. They are ending the careers of thousands of talented and committed people. My community, in particular, is going to suffer from the loss of their jobs. Because of the School of Public Health, the Research Triangle is home to some of the largest recipients of USAID money.
The people who work for these organizations aren’t just dedicated to helping people in developing countries, they are committed to building stronger communities where they live. They’re the volunteers at the PTA, the church, and the Food Bank, using skills they gained professionally to improve lives locally. And not for money, but because that’s the type of community in which they want to live and raise their families.
Foreign aid is easy to cut because most people don’t understand it or don’t believe it helps them. They’re wrong. USAID makes up less than 1% of the federal budget, but its the face of United States in developing countries throughout the world. It’s been a key part of our foreign policy, building relationships with countries and better understanding the politics on the ground.
I’ve seen conservatives defending the cuts by saying “soft power” doesn’t work. China would disagree. They spend a huge amount of money building infrastructure and providing public health in developing countries. They will see opportunity when the US leaves regions behind. So will terrorist organizations. Suffering people will take help where they can get it. If the US is going to cede that role in the world to other countries and nefarious organizations, we will pay a price. The perception of the world will be that the richest country in the world is turning its back on the poorest ones. That’s not very Christian.
Other graduates of the public health program serve domestically. They are the people doing to the research at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health. They are the reason we’ve ended diseases like polio, controlled the spread of AIDS, and reduced infant mortality to the point that most babies born are likely to reach adulthood. Like their peers working in foreign countries, they are under attack by Musk and Trump. Employees of the Department of Health and Human services, which includes NIH and CDC, have been offered a $25,000 buyout.
USAID, NIH, and CDC are on the chopping block because they are easy political targets. Most people don’t feel the pain of the cuts until it’s too late and they often are too unsophisticated to make the connections. Our enemies will fill the void when we abandon countries and regions. The next pandemic will spread more quickly. Diseases like measles will make a comeback. We’ll see outbreaks of new diseases or ones that we’ve kept at bay like Ebola.
Gutting these agencies is just unbelievably irresponsible. We don’t know all of the effects of abandoning foreign aid and public health research. The implications aren’t as clear or immediate as, say, cutting Medicaid, but they will be traumatic. People are going to die, both in this country and abroad. Many will be children. And all to give tax cuts to billionaires.
Right now, I’m concerned about my friends who have dedicated their lives to protecting the vulnerable and making the world a little bit better. They don’t deserve what’s happening to them. They are the people who give back to society. And they are under attack by people plundering it.
Thank you, Thomas Mills. I value your perspective and your thoughtful reporting. And your NC focus!
So here’s what Thom Tillis had to say in his prepackaged Made From MAGA response to an email on the subject of cuts to USAID:
“Thank you for contacting me about the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). I appreciate hearing from you. (I seriously doubt that. Ed.)
Many USAID core functions provide key assistance across the globe such as food assistance and combatting infectious diseases with programs like PEPFAR. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have been demanding transparency and accountability from USAID on all funding, programming, and internal structure for years to ensure that USAID is using taxpayer dollars in the United States’ national interest, not as a blank check to foreign entities and special interests.
USAID has continuously resisted and circumvented efforts of Executive and Congressional oversight, allowing concerns to go unanswered and unchecked. There is a long history of wasting taxpayer dollars at USAID on baseless and unwarranted projects, such as the $7.9 million used to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language” and $10 million worth of meals that went to an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group.”
So this “long history of baseless and unwarranted projects” is… two? Even if (and this is a stretch) everything he says about those two projects is 100% true (an impossibility considering the source) that’s $18 million (maybe) out of a budget of around $40 billion (with a B). For those watching without a calculator handy, that’s 0.045%. Even if every word is completely accurate, that’s a fucking ROUNDING ERROR.
I’d also be interested in knowing who this “al Qaeda-linked terrorist for up is, and who gave them that classification. If he thought about it for 10 seconds rathe than simply parroting his provided talking points, it might occur to him that they might have been linked to al Qaeda because al Qaeda FED THEM. (I also suspect that the $7.9 million for the Sri Lankans included a lot more than a seminar on avoiding binary gendered language, because in Sri Lanka $7.9 million would buy a university library.)
But this perspective — how it impacts the people he supposedly represents in the Senate — is one I hadn’t considered. And I’m sure Tillis didn’t either, but I can plead ignorance. He should have known. It’s not like he didn’t spend time in the legislature making sure that such projects were brought into the state’s economy.
Once again, Tillis (and the rest of the NC congressional delegation) were given the choice of voting with the people of NC or voting with Musk. And once again… Tillis voted with the money. Which is how he got to the Senate in the first place.