Obama and Bush call Trump’s USAID closure a ‘travesty’ as report warns of 14 million extra deaths

WASHINGTON, D.C., USA- Barack Obama and George W Bush have criticised the closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as a study warned it could result in “a staggering number” of avoidable deaths – more than 14 million over five years.

The former US presidents made rare public criticisms of the Trump administration as they took part in a video farewell for USAID staffers on Monday on its last day as an independent organization.

In March, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced that 83% of USAID’s programmes had been cancelled. The agency is being folded into the state department, where it is to be replaced by a successor organisation called America First.

A study published in the Lancet found the cuts could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, with a third of those among children.

USAID funding for health care, nutrition, humanitarian aid, development, education and related sectors have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries over the past two decades, the multinational group of researchers calculated.

They concluded: “Unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.”

For many of the world’s poorer countries “the resulting shock would be similar in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict”, they said, but “would stem from a conscious and avoidable policy choice”.