Doctors Say the Axing of USAID Has Already Cost Lives in Latest Ebola Outbreak

We seem to be in the midst of an ongoing surge of the “find out” portions of your typical FAFO, when it comes to the delayed impacts of canceled funding for medical preparedness. Just a week or so ago, we were writing about how the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health, had stripped millions in funding from the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2025, only to now find that it had canceled critical research specifically into the Andes strain of hantavirus that had experienced an outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius. At that time, the word “Ebola” was nowhere in the pop-culture zeitgeist, but fast forward a week and there have now been 600 or more suspected cases in the latest African outbreak of the highly deadly virus, which has claimed the lives of roughly 160 people so far. Would you believe that doctors in the region are saying that the axing of USAID funds probably played a major role there?

“We are really very scared,” said one of those healthcare workers, Dr. Herbert Luswata of the Bwera Hospital in Kasese, Uganda, saying that his hospital was lacking in personal protective equipment (PPE) necessary to keep healthcare workers safe, and that the American CDC has been slower to respond than in past outbreaks. “We are not safe at all. The response is too slow and inadequate, not anywhere close to the standards that are required in a response for an epidemic like Ebola, which we know has a very high fatality rate. We are too exposed as health workers.”

Trump and Musk’s profoundly evil decision to cut off U.S. aid is now making an Ebola outbreak in the DRC much worse.

The world will live to regret the cruelty and stupidity of Trump, Musk, their flunkies, and the scumbags and fools in the U.S. who voted them in.

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— Faine Greenwood (@faineg.bsky.social) 7:47 AM · May 21, 2026

Speaking with NBC News, former officials and workers from USAID, the CDC and the NIH said that if USAID hadn’t been stripped for parts by the Trump administration and DOGE at the beginning of 2025, that its resources could have helped to contain this latest Ebola outbreak, or at least identify it significantly earlier, allowing it to potentially have fewer fatalities. They fear that the virus was likely spreading undetected for weeks in regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo before detection, allowing it to gain a foothold that could result in mass deaths.

“What we’ve lost is speed, which is the most important thing in an outbreak like this,” said former acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, Nicholas Enrich.

In previous outbreaks of a deadly pathogen like Ebola, USAID-funded programs would have been aiding laboratories in identifying and analyzing the strain of the virus, distributing PPE to hospitals and outlying clinics, and sending community health workers into far-flung communities to conduct contact tracing and provide educational support. Those same community health workers, many of whom have critical direct experience in dealing with Ebola from previous outbreaks, are largely no longer employed in the health field because there are no local programs able to pay them to do so, after USAID was dissolved. Instead, their skills and knowledge are being completely wasted at the time when they’re most needed.

“Now they’re driving a taxi in Kinshasa or selling fruit somewhere,” said Dr. Daniel Bausch, a former medical officer at the CDC, of the missing community workers with Ebola experience. “So this cadre of reasonably trained people that you can employ just isn’t around.”

The Trump administration, naturally, has more or less responded to all of these doctors and researchers by saying “nuh uh,” and insisting that USAID’s programs and efforts would have made no difference. As State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said to NBC: “It is false to claim that the USAID reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola.” Another unnamed State Department official claimed that “there was no specific person or program associated with USAID in this region that would have detected this.” But ah, they sort of need for that to be the case, don’t they?

The fact of the matter is, in its last full year of operation, USAID spent roughly $21.7 billion, a paltry .3% of the overall federal budget. In exchange for that expenditure, it distributed millions of meals, aided in disaster recovery around the globe, and guided medical efforts in impoverished communities everywhere, in a critical demonstration of American soft power. The Lancet estimated that USAID assistance that historically had been aimed at combatting diseases such as HIV, malaria, polio and tuberculosis had likely saved roughly 92 million lives worldwide over the course of two decades. Losing that funding and those programs for 2025, meanwhile, would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious disease and malnutrition that were otherwise preventable. Now you can add a major Ebola outbreak on top of that for 2026.

But hey, we needed to save the money, right? Except oops–we proceeded to completely negate any potential savings whatsoever with a couple of weeks of the Iran War, which the Pentagon said has already cost $25 billion, more than the entire USAID yearly budget, by the end of April. In other words, we traded a million global lives saved in 2026, and the invaluable diplomatic benefits that come with that, for the ability to fire million dollar missiles at Iranian schools. What an incredible deal for us.

The richest man in the world gutted USAID and bragged about “feeding [it] into the wood chipper.”

Remember who is responsible for this suffering.

www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/b…

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— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) 1:52 PM · May 19, 2026

With local programs funded by USAID now missing in action, more pressure is put on the CDC to both directly respond to the Ebola outbreak and keep Americans in the region safe–the virus has already infected one medical worker, Dr. Peter Stafford, who the White House reportedly wanted to bar from returning to the USA to receive treatment despite the fact that he’s an American citizen. Except, wouldn’t you know it, turns out that the CDC is also in many ways poorly equipped to deal with the local, ground-level challenges of responding to a public health emergency in a country like the Congo.

“They don’t speak the language, they don’t know the culture,” said Bausch, the aforementioned former CDC employee. “They don’t know the geographic terrain. They don’t have expertise in the region’s security and safety issues. Those people who really make things work are local people that are hired, who may have experience with this from previous outbreaks.”

Not to mention: The CDC was gutted at the same time as USAID, with up to 3,400 positions axed in 2025, making up as much as 25% of the entire agency’s workforce. Everyone is spread thin; everything is less efficient, and the cost of it is human lives. And when you’re dealing with something as profoundly deadly as Ebola, those lives can add up real quick.