NYT’s Nick Kristof Rips DOGE For Shutting Down USAID: ‘Spent $6 Billion Killing a Lot of Kids’
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof spoke to Tim Miller on a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast and chronicled his reporting from Africa on Elon Musk’s DOGE shutting down USAID.
Kristof wrote several heavily reported columns on the toll the shutdown took on some of the poorest areas of Africa, and he relayed some of the horror stories to Miller. Miller asked Kristof to go into detail about how he traveled around South Sudan and met with locals.
“Yeah. So I had a translator, and we found a local health worker who had been laid off in all this chaos. But he showed me around and I asked if anybody had died in that village,” Kristof began, adding:
And they said, ‘Oh, this little boy died.’ So we went and talked to the mom and it turned out that he had had malaria. Normally, the local health worker would have had the malaria treatment, the medicine, and also the hospital would have had his backup.
Because of the collapse of USAID, neither of them had this really cheap malaria medicine and the baby died. And as it turned out, that mom’s second child was also sick with malaria. And the hospital and the health worker still didn’t have anti-malarials.
And you just, you know, you just see this mom with a sick child and all these arguments that I hear about, oh, this isn’t our responsibility and we should look after our own kids. This is a mom with a sick child. She’s already lost one child because of the sudden way in which USAID was cratered.
Kristof detailed other tragedies, including a woman dying in childbirth because USAID funding for the fuel for an ambulance had been cut, and young children dying after losing access to HIV medication.
Miller then asked Kristof if any of the DOGE cuts had been put back. “So you were there most recently. Like, you know, help me sort through that. Like what is still, you know, what is still part of the DOGE cuts, you know, what have they put back into place?”
“So that is true, that some things have been uncancelled. The problem is it’s very hard to figure out what is being uncancelled, and it was this quite complicated system where you had different groups doing different things. So one group would supply the ARVs (antiretrovirals), another would provide the health workers who’d administer them, another would look after the supplies in a warehouse,” Kristof explained, adding:
You know, somebody else would coordinate among the different NGOs. Somebody else would do viral load checking. And, you know, this all kind of collapses.
So some elements have been preserved, but they often don’t work together with the other elements. And so some malaria programs are coming back, for example, but the malaria medicine in one county in Liberia, it was being stored in this medical warehouse that the county had, and USAID had contracted to upgrade the warehouse. And they started the work and the roof was torn off.
And then that’s when the stop work order went out. So now the medical warehouse has no roof. So, okay, in theory, they’re providing malaria medicine again, but suddenly there is no roof on the medical warehouse.
And, you know, it’s just things like this you hear over and over and over. And it’s just maddening, I mean, especially for something that said it was about government efficiency. To see the toll of the inefficiency, the State Department has one estimate that the cost of shutting down USAID was $6 billion.
You know, someone said it’s saving money, they’ve spent $6 billion killing a lot of kids.
Listen to the full episode here.
