John Oliver unpacks how cuts to USAID put everyone at risk

The most obvious and most devastating impact of these cuts to the program is the immediate death left in their wake. As Oliver explains, these are not abstract numbers, but specific people. The host highlights how cutting off HIV medication in Uganda affected one orphanage in particular; it wasn’t long before a 14-year-old died from the lack of access to his medication. Oliver contrasts the images of the child’s funeral with Musk’s comments about how he wanted photographic proof of what USAID did, and with Marco Rubio’s comments from his failed presidential run in 2016, where he cited how important the work of USAID regarding HIV was on the African continent. 

But it’s not just people outside of the United States who are now more at risk without USAID. The segment ends with Oliver’s explanation of Trump’s new “America First Global Health Strategies,” which purportedly will offer foreign health aid to some countries. “I genuinely hope it works, but we have very little in the way of specifics and it’s going to be difficult to implement given that this administration just detonated the decades worth of expertise, goodwill, and institutional scaffolding that would help them deliver the aid,” says Oliver. The new program explicitly is designed to further the interests of the U.S., which Oliver points out the program was already doing. Even if saying lives wasn’t a worthy enough cause on its own for the people in the Trump administration, the work of USAID could have helped prevent the next global pandemic, which certainly would affect people in the U.S. You can check out the whole segment below.