\n<\/p>\n
O<\/span>n the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examined the Trump administration\u2019s gutting of USAID, the international aid agency once described as \u201cthe world\u2019s single largest humanitarian donor\u201d. Donald Trump, naturally, called it \u201ca scam\u201d where there was \u201cvery little being put to good use\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cSet aside the irony of Donald Trump, of Trump University, accusing anything of being a fraud,\u201d said Oliver. \u201cYou can\u2019t just call something a scam because you don\u2019t like it. I want to call low-rise jeans a scam. I feel like Peppa Pig is a fraud. I believe that radical lunatics run Jamba Juice. But even I acknowledge that my feelings don\u2019t make any of those thoughts true.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Trump was \u201cfixated\u201d on USAID and its spending, even though it represented less than 1% of the federal budget. So when Elon Musk arrived in Washington to begin his so-called \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d (Doge) cuts in early 2025, he tweeted that he \u201cspent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper\u201d.<\/p>\n Those cuts \u201chave had real impacts on people around the world engaged in the act of saving lives\u201d, said Oliver, and have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in 2025 alone.<\/p>\n Oliver dug into what exactly USAID did, and the devastating toll of its absence. The agency, created in 1961 by John F Kennedy for both humanitarian reasons and to increase US soft power abroad, has generally enjoyed bipartisan support, particularly thanks to scenes of international disaster relief. But the Trump administration \u201cbrought USAID to its knees\u201d. By 1 February of last year, its website had been taken down; a week later, all its nearly 10,000 employees were put on leave. By March, 83% of its programs had been terminated.<\/p>\n Oliver dismantled the claims used by the Trump administration to discredit and defund USAID \u2013 for one, that the agency proffered waste and abuse, despite the fact that 94% of the spending had been audited and only 0.3% were found to have issues. \u201cBut even without knowing that, it\u2019s tough to take waste allegations from Elon seriously, given his Doge team seemed to have no idea what the programs they were cutting even did.\u201d Though Doge insisted that programs would be kept if they were considered \u201clife-saving\u201d, many were still eliminated; as one former USAID worker testified to Congress, everything without \u201clife-saving\u201d in the title had to go.<\/p>\n This represented a stark pivot from the first Trump administration, which shifted USAID\u2019s focus by deprioritizing areas such as maternal health and family planning while increasing funding for emergency responses and digital infrastructure, but did not slash the agency\u2019s funding. \u201cAll of which raises the question,\u201d said Oliver, \u201cwhat changed this time to make them want to put the agency through a wood chipper?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m afraid the answer to that is incredibly dark,\u201d as many observers think it has something to do with a man named Mike Benz, a rightwing activist who appeared on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast in late 2024 and criticized the agency. Since that episode aired, Musk retweeted, replied or mentioned Benz over 160 times, calling USAID a \u201cviper\u2019s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America\u201d, among other things.<\/p>\n USAID, Oliver reiterated, was hardly a viper\u2019s nest. As one expert put it: \u201cI think the best evidence that USAID works is how quickly people started dying when it went away.\u201d It\u2019s difficult to get close estimates on the impact, in part because the cuts have also halted data monitoring, but researchers have estimated that more than 282,000 adults and 518,000 children died in 2025 as a result of the cuts.<\/p>\n These include the demolition of nutrition assistance, the global supply chain that moves food to people who need it, and the closure of more than 2,000 health clinics in crisis zones. Oliver played a clip from one in the Congo, where 29 children died of malnutrition and illness just a month after its closure. \u201cWe\u2019ve never had such a high death rate,\u201d said one of the former aid workers. \u201cIt was catastrophic. These were deaths that we could\u2019ve avoided if funding had been maintained.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, it\u2019s appalling,\u201d Oliver responded. \u201cAnd it makes it even worse when you remember House Republicans literally celebrated these cuts with this shit,\u201d before an AI video of Trump, Vance, Musk and others carrying a coffin in Africa. \u201cYeah, it\u2019s true, you are killing a lot of people in Africa, you jibjabbed fucks.\u201d<\/p>\n The cuts have also terminated programs related to climate resiliency, cholera prevention and, perhaps most importantly, children\u2019s access to safe schools. In total, \u201cwhat this administration has done is beyond cruel,\u201d said Oliver. \u201cI haven\u2019t shown you anywhere close to the worst footage we had to watch putting this story together. And after seeing and reading about all of this, it\u2019s actually stomach-churning to think about coffin memes \u2026 you have to be an absolute ashtray of a person to cheer this thing on.\u201d<\/p>\n In September 2025, the Trump administration announced its own \u201cAmerica first global health strategy\u201d that is supposed to restart some forms of international aid in limited forms and countries, \u201cand I genuinely hope it works,\u201d said Oliver. \u201cBut we have very little in the way of specifics, and it\u2019s going to be difficult to implement given that this administration just detonated the decades\u2019 worth of expertise, goodwill and institutional scaffolding that helped them deliver the aid.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI know the Trump administration\u2019s constantly spitting out disasters. I really do,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m sure they\u2019d like nothing more than for people to move on from this, but it is crucial not to let what they\u2019ve done be forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUSAID was not perfect, but it was working miracles,\u201d he concluded. \u201cAnd this government decided to retract those miracles on purpose. This is a man-made disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examined the Trump administration\u2019s gutting of USAID, the international aid agency once described as \u201cthe world\u2019s single largest humanitarian donor\u201d. Donald Trump, naturally, called it \u201ca scam\u201d where there was \u201cvery little being put to good use\u201d. \u201cSet aside the irony of Donald Trump, of Trump University,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[794,14782,15161,262,1899,71,6951],"class_list":{"0":"post-46315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-administration","9":"tag-cruel","10":"tag-dismantling","11":"tag-john","12":"tag-oliver","13":"tag-trumps","14":"tag-usaid"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}