Trump global aid cuts risk 14 million deaths in five years, report says

Donald Trump's move to cut most of the US funding towards foreign humanitarian aid could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.

A third of those at risk of premature deaths are children, the research finds.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that President Trump's administration had cancelled over 80% of all programmes at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.

"For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict," Davide Rasella, who co-authored the Lancet report, said in a statement.

The funding cuts "risk abruptly halting - and even reversing - two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations," added Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.

The report comes as dozens of world leaders are meeting in the Spanish city of Seville this week for a United Nations-led aid conference, the biggest one in a decade.

Looking back over data from 133 nations, the team of researchers estimated that USAID funding had prevented 91 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.

They also used modelling to project how funding being slashed by 83% – the figure announced by the US government earlier this year – could affect death rates.

The cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, the projections found. That number included over 4.5 million children under the age of five – or around 700,000 child deaths a year.

The Trump administration, previously led by billionaire Elon Musk's cost-cutting initiative, aimed to shrink the federal workforce. It has also accused USAID of supporting liberal projects.

The US, by far the world's largest humanitarian aid provider, has operated in more than 60 countries, largely through contractors.

According to Rubio, there were still approximately 1,000 remaining programmes that would be administered "more effectively" under the US State Department and in consultation with Congress.

Still, the situation on the ground has not been improving, according to UN workers.

Last month, a UN official told the BBC that hundreds of thousands of people were "slowly starving" in Kenyan refugee camps after US funding cuts reduced food rations to their lowest ever levels.

At a hospital in Kakuma, in northwestern Kenya, the BBC witnessed a baby who could barely move and was showing signs of malnutrition, including having parts of her skin wrinkled and peeling.