The Guardian: ‘Trump’s aid budget is breathtakingly cruel — cuts like these will kill people’
Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development

“President Trump’s new budget plans take particular aim at foreign aid spending, proposing [cuts to] civilian foreign affairs spending. … U.S. funding provides the backbone of global humanitarian response and saves millions of lives each year. The Trump administration proposes to drive it over a cliff … Global health funding takes a huge hit … The administration has tried to obscure this by claiming that it is shielding AIDS funding from debilitating cuts. … [D]on’t be fooled. AIDS funding would be cut by [roughly] a fifth, which would allow people currently receiving treatment to stay on their meds, but would dramatically reduce the number of new enrollees … [and] would likely disrupt testing too. … Incredibly, this is not even the worst news on the global health front. The budget proposal seeks to take a much bigger chunk out of non-HIV health programs … These programs work … Cutting these programs means more children dying of malaria, resurgence of preventable diseases like polio and measles, and many, many other deaths besides. By weakening public health systems, these cuts also increase vulnerability to major epidemic threats like Ebola and Zika. … This budget will harm tens of millions of lives to save fractions of pennies. … President Trump and his budget director should think hard about the standard they’ve expressed for themselves — and begin to refocus this budget on ‘actually helping’ people” (5/31).