NYT Columnist Hammers Elon Musk’s Claim That ‘No One Has Died’ From Spending Cuts with Accounts of Deaths, Including Children

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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offered a lengthy report on the deaths of children relying on U.S. aid in response to Elon Musk saying “no one has died” from any foreign aid being cut off.

“Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that’s true. It’s not. Within an hour of starting interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington,” Kristoff wrote on X.

“No one has died as result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one,” Musk had previously declared.

“That is not true,” Kristof wrote in response in his report.

Cutbacks recommended through Musk and DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), including at USAID, are “leading children to die,” Kristof wrote after a visit to South Sudan.

The report includes accounts of the deaths of multiple children dependent on U.S. aid that had been paused or slashed entirely.

Among the deaths is Peter Donde, a 10-year-old boy who passed away from an opportunistic pneumonia infection after he stopped receiving his H.I.V. medicine.

Kristof wrote:

Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.

Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.

Another death was Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl who, like Donde, was infected with H.I.V. at childbirth. According to health outreach worker Moses Okeny Labani, Deng passed away after there was no case worker to help her get a new ID card to continue receiving her medicines through an American assistance program.

Kristof reported multiple other deaths, including a 35-year-old mother and her five-year-old son who died, according to a community health worker who worked with them, after they stopped receiving their H.I.V. medicines. Two other women also reportedly died because “they lived in a remote area of South Sudan and could not get antiretroviral drugs when U.S.A.I.D. shut down supply lines,” according to a health volunteer who had worked with them.

Kristof also visited South Sudan’s Aweil East County where a clinic has lost funding, leading to the potential that the area could revert back to losing thousands of women a year in childbirth.

The columnist argued reforms are needed at USAID, but argued most would support the foreign aid supporting sick women and children.

“I think most Americans would both welcome some reforms and also be proud to see how we save the lives of hungry children and sick orphans around the world by allocating just 24 cents of every $100 of national income to aid,” Kristof wrote. “And I find it odious when the world’s richest man cackles about America shoving programs for needy children “into the ‘wood chipper.'”