“No rational person could think the USAID process was a good one,” said White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in an interview with Vanity Fair published Tuesday of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development earlier this year. “Nobody.”
Her comment comes just after Elon Musk – the mega-billionaire who spearheaded the effort when he led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative earlier this year – admitted that DOGE was a disappointment. Before USAID staffing cuts were announced in February, Musk called the agency a “criminal” organization on X, the popular social media platform he bought and re-branded.
According to research published in the Lancet journal this summer, the USAID cuts may lead to more than 14 million deaths globally by 2030. Of those 14 million, an estimated 4.5 million would be children under age 5. That amounts to about 700,000 extra child deaths per year, said UCLA, where co-authors of the study are based.
USAID was established by the late former President John F. Kennedy and it was later mandated by Congress. For more than six decades, the agency helped save millions of lives and served to further U.S. interests around the world through humanitarian efforts.
“The study warns that the impact of USAID cuts could extend beyond the agency’s own programs: international donors may also reduce their commitments, further weakening service delivery in countries already dependent on external support,” UCLA explained.
After the USAID cuts made headlines in February, polling showed that a majority of people (58%) opposed abolishing the agency and folding it into the state department, as President Donald Trump’s administration sought to do. Nearly 90% also said they thought the U.S. should spend at least 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid.
Moves to take apart USAID were also swiftly met with protests and lawsuits. A suit filed by the Public Citizen Litigation Group and Democracy Forward alleged the actions caused a “global humanitarian crisis.”
Wiles said she was “initially aghast,” at Musk’s plans to gut USAID.
“I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” she told Vanity Fair.
Wiles said Musk’s plans were already underway by the time he announced them. She also said his desire for “fast-paced” action was shaped by his business experience, including his work at companies Tesla and SpaceX, and it’s not how she would have handled things.
“When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” she explained. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
Additionally, Wiles described Musk as an “avowed ketamine [user]” and an “odd, odd duck.”
Musk left the government in May after a public falling out with Trump. However, the impacts of DOGE continue in the form of downstream layoffs, disruptions to the real estate market and more, as Audacy covered last week.
As for the impact of the USAID cuts alone, Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and coordinator of the study published in Lancet, said projections indicate a “sharp increase in preventable deaths, particularly in the most fragile countries.” For example, Reuters reported last week that the Trump administration’s USAID cuts have disrupted life-saving treatment for starving children in Kenya.
“They risk abruptly halting – and even reversing – two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations,” Rasella said. “For many low and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.”