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Earlier this week Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83% of current contracts the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has made will be canceled. He claimed in a post on X that “the 5,200 contracts that are now canceled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.” This sweeping claim needs to be examined.
Rubio thanked the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose self-proclaimed mission is to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government programs, for implementing “overdue and historic reform.” But there is a difference between reforming a program and gutting it, and Elon Musk, the head of DOGE, and Rubio have strode over that line and have not looked back.
The problem with this kind of haphazard cutting is that millions of lives will feel its impact. That they are not primarily American lives should not constitute an acceptable reason for hurting them.
According to Nicholas Enrich, a top USAID official (from the time when there was such a thing as USAID—the agency has now been absorbed by the State Department)—the cancelations “will lead to increased death and disability, accelerate global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks—directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public health.”
Enrich went on to project the following dire consequences if the cutbacks are not restored:
  • 1 million starving children won’t have access to food and nutrition.
  • Up to 17.9 million more people will get malaria and as many as 166,000 people will die from it—a 39% increase from current rates.
  • Tuberculosis cases, including multidrug-resistant TB, will soar by 28 to 32 percent.
  • As many as 28,000 people will suffer from emerging infectious diseases, like Ebola and Marburg.
  • Hundreds of millions of people will be sickened by polio infections over the next decade, with an additional 200,000 people paralyzed by polio.
Those projections hold true for each year the aid is suspended. Next year’s numbers could very well be worse.
Both testaments of the Bible instruct people of faith to look out for the most vulnerable members of society. There are about a thousand verses that speak of God’s concern for these vulnerable ones and our responsibility to share that concern. Isaiah 1:17 is one of the many. It says, “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
I encourage you, regardless of whom you voted for, to consider these words of the prophet, to consider the impact on the lives of children all over the world, to consider the revealed will and intention of God, and to speak out. I have called Senators Fetterman and McCormick and Congresswoman Houlahan to urge them to take a stand for the poor and vulnerable by demanding that the USAID contracts be restored.
Our decision-makers need to hear from us. Let us do our small part in defending the orphan and pleading for the widow.
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Source:
Melody Schreiber. March 10, 2025. “Rubio announces that 83% of USAID contracts will be canceled.” Online: https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/03/10/g-s1-52964/rubio-announces-that-83-of-usaid-contracts-will-be-canceled
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