As a journalist, I’ve been fortunate enough to write about many projects supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development, from Bangladesh, India, Senegal and other countries.
A recent opinion piece by a former USAID employee makes an excellent case for why international aid helps those in need — and also creates a more stable, safer world, including for U.S. citizens. But in less than two months, an agency established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 has been axed under President Donald Trump. The headline of Mona Charen‘s column called this attack on USAID a “humanitarian scandal.”
I’ve seen firsthand the kinds of projects that have been killed. In 2013, I wrote articles analyzing how Bangladesh had so dramatically reduced deaths of young children and new mothers. It was one of just eight countries that reduced death rates of children under 5 by at least two-thirds since 1990.
In a rural village two hours from Dhaka, I visited a one-room healthcare clinic. Shefali Akhter, a 24-year-old health assistant vaccinating children that morning, mentioned she had saved a newborn’s life through techniques she had recently learned: clearing mucus from babies’ airways, so they wouldn’t asphyxiate.
Would I like to meet the mother and baby, Akhter asked. “Yes!” I replied. We walked for more than a mile across rice fields to a cluster of homes with corrugated metal walls. The mother appeared holding her 6-month-old baby and smiled at the health worker. Now the mother, “loves me very much,” said Akhter.
Coincidentally, the infant had the same birthday as me. It was moving to think that this baby would have died if not for Akhter. Our birthday was a celebration for this mother, when it easily could have been a day of mourning.
A year before, Akhter was trained to treat neonatal asphyxia, then one of the largest killers of newborns in Bangladesh. She learned to use a tiny plastic face mask, air bag and suction device through a program called Helping Babies Breathe. It was an international collaboration with USAID, Save the Children, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Laerdal Foundation of Norway and others. By 2013, the program had trained 20,000 skilled birth attendants in Bangladesh alone, giving newborns like the one I met a chance to live.
Now under Trump, some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs have been eliminated. Typically less than 1% of the U.S. federal budget funded those programs.
I wrote about another USAID-supported project from Bangladesh in 2015. The country was the world’s sixth-largest rice producer, and its population of 160 million relied on the crop. But more farmland fell fallow after flooding rendered soil salty. That threatened Bangladesh’s food security, and more farmers struggled to eke out a modest living.
By 2015, the USAID-backed program had given saline-tolerant rice seeds and training to about 180,000 farmers in Bangladesh. Timothy Russell, an agricultural scientist and then head of the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia in Bangladesh, accompanied me on that field visit. “If you can bring in salt-tolerant rice or other salt-tolerant crops…you can utilize the land,” Russell said. “That’s the dream.”
For NPR I wrote that agriculture that can withstand climatic threats is especially important in Bangladesh. The country is on a low-lying river delta vulnerable to floods and cyclones. In 1970, a cyclone notoriously killed as many as 500,000 people there. Bangladesh is also one of the world’s most densely populated countries with the equivalent of nearly half the U.S. population crammed into an area the size of Iowa.
In a village called Patrakhola, we met barefoot farmers who paused from harvesting golden fields of salt-resistant rice.
I spoke to Din Mohammed, a 42-year-old farmer. He estimated his rice yield fell one-third because of increased salinity after Cyclone Aila hit Bangladesh in 2009. The storm broke river embankments and flooded the village’s precious farmland with salty water. But the new saline-resistant variety yields more rice, he said.
We also visited a well and hand pump that the project had supported. It gave locals access to fresh water, so they didn’t have to drink salty water or walk miles to another well. Dozens of locals — women in colorful saris, children, barefoot farmers — gathered around the water pump. “We need more of these,” one man told me.
I don’t have space to write about other USAID initiatives such as clearing landmines in Southeast Asia, where unexploded bombs from the Vietnam War have killed tens of thousands, or humanitarian aid for war-torn Ukraine and Gaza.
Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency charged with slashing federal programs, wrote on X, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” The billionaire made the flippant comment without citing evidence. Ironically, USAID is known for its strict oversight and audits of grantees.
And tragically, gutting USAID will mean death — for the vulnerable who need help, like a newborn baby struggling to take her first breath.
Amy Yee is a business and economy reporter for the Sun-Times. She is author of “Far From the Rooftop of the World: Travels among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents,” with a foreword by the Dalai Lama.
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