Yes. I think it is appropriate, as New York Times‘ very conservative columnist David Brooks did last Friday on PBS, to compare Elon Musk to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong and Stalin. The number of deaths around the globe that he — and his boss Donald Trump — are arguably directly responsible for has not yet reached into the millions. But, according to data compiled and tracked by our guest today, it shouldn’t be long. More than 300,000 are already unnecessarily dead in just 4 months since the Trump/Musk/DOGE closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Tune in to today’s BradCast for a full explanation from the woman who has been compiling the numbers to decide for yourself. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
FIRST UP, however, Team Trump seems almost as eager to help Americans die unnecessarily here at home. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” they are hoping to ram through Congress in the next several weeks will cut more than a trillion dollars from health care and food nutrition for as many as 14 million low-income Americans in order to pay for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. But what bothers Republicans about it is that it doesn’t cut enough, apparently, from the needy.
Today, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came out with their scoring of the legislation, finding, among other things, that the bill, as recently passed by Republicans in the House, would increase the federal budget deficit by nearly $2.5 trillion dollars over the next decade. So, naturally, the White House and Republican in Congress are on a tear to…attack the CBO, claiming the non-partisan agency created by Congress and headed up by a Republican since 2019, are actually a bunch of partisan Dems trying to undermine Donald Trump.
That lie, put forward most directly by professional liar and Trump’s WH Press Sec. Karoline Leavitt yesterday — even before the CBO numbers were published today — is also a “ridiculous” lie, as detailed today by WaPo‘s fact-checker.
THEN… You may recall Elon Musk in the early DOGE Days of February celebrating how he and his DOGE Bros “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” The United States Agency for International Development is (or was) the tip of the spear for critical foreign aid programs around the globe. Its small budget punches far above its weight and wins big returns for the world and for the U.S., with critical “soft-power” programs delivering nutritious food to starving populations and medicines to combat HIV, tuberculous, malaria, Ebola and much more. At least it did all of that, and more, before Musk, the richest man in the world, gleefully fed it into the wood chipper on behalf of the Trump Administration four months ago.
Since USAID’s sudden shutdown, as my guest today, infectious disease mathematical modeller and health economist Dr. BROOKE NICHOLS, associate professor of Global Health at Boston University, has determined, more than 300,000 people have unnecessarily died around the globe, including more than 213,000 children. The number of chid deaths was in the 212,000 region a few hours ago before airtime, according to Nichols’ Impact Counter website. The site tracks ongoing estimates of the number of those who have died since the shutdown of USAID programs, as well as the numbers estimated over the coming year. The carnage — now tracking as more than 100 deaths per hour — is broken down between adults and children, and many different causes of death, from HIV to tuberculosis to malnutrition to diarrhea.
Nichols herself says she was horrified by the numbers when she saw what the data at her own tracker was showing her about what she described recently to The Times of London as “100 percent preventable” deaths around the world.
“I was horrified,” she tells me today about those “huge” numbers, “because they represent people. I was shocked.” She clarifies that the total numbers (300,000+ deaths as of now) are “to date. That number will grow to close to a million by the end of the year if funding isn’t restored in some way.”
Having worked for years specifically on HIV via PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, initially begun during the George W. Bush Administration), she disputes the Musk/Trump/Republican claims that USAID’s programs were riddled with “waste, fraud and abuse.” Nichols says she had seen none of that. “Were there small bits and pieces that could have been programmed better? Maybe,” she concedes. “But I’m sure that that is a tiny fraction of the budget. And certainly not worth throwing anything into the wood chipper and losing all these tens of thousands of lives.”
On PEPFAR, specifically — which is credited with saving the lives of some 26 million people since its launch in 2003 — she tells me that before the program, the death toll of those, including children born with HIV, “was unimaginable. Through PEPFAR, it was a complete turnaround. All of a sudden people stopped dying. We were finally getting to the point to meeting all of these UN goals. If you’re on treatment and you take your pills everyday, you can’t transmit the virus. How cool is that? So we started to reach this tipping point where the epidemic was going down, it’s more and more under control. And to have the carpet pulled out from under us as we get so close? It sets us back a decade.”
Nichols has much more to share with us today from her home in The Netherlands, about how and why her Impact Counter came together; whether she had reason to believe any of this would be happening during last year’s Presidential campaign (“No! I was shocked!,” Nichols responds); and how all of this harms not only the direct victims of Trump’s foreign aid shutdown, but also Americans here at home in several ways.
She also discusses the politics behind this unspeakable global disaster; the “broken trust” the U.S. is now facing “with a lot of countries, a lot of other organizations”; the mass of death threats and hate mail she has received for simply documenting the numbers; and what she ultimately hopes her work on the Impact Counter might lead to.
“I really hope that it can be used to understand and document what is happening, but also hopefully to advocate for change,” she asserts. “Ultimately, I want this to be used so that fewer people die. If that’s through people understanding what is happening in a political shift, that would be great. If it’s from mobilizing other donors, that is also great.”
All of that, as the NY Times‘ Nicholas Kristof reminded us back in March after he traveled overseas to personally document a number of the tragic deaths as they began to pile up, this all came on the heels of Musk’s false insistence at the time: “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”
Turns out that was just another Trump Administration lie. If a particularly horrific one.
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