Mary Trump - The Cruelty Is the Policy

Regarding the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D), Atul Gawande writes in The New Yorker:

On a budget of just twenty-four dollars per American—out of the fifteen thousand dollars in taxes paid per person last year—they had saved lives at an almost unimaginable scale. An independent, peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D. assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.

Despite that, when Donald came into office, he almost immediately defunded the organization. There are many reasons that defunding an agency like U.S.A.I.D. was a horrific idea. Doing so hobbled America’s ability to deploy soft power which is a vital tool it has used in the past to create alliances, spread democracy, and expand its global influence.

Leaving a soft power void for our adversaries like China to fill is destructive in both the short and long term, but there is a much bigger and permanent cost: since the Trump regime defunded U.S.A.I.D., at least 600,000 people who should still be alive are dead. 400,000 of those who’ve died are children.

https://www.marytrump.org/p/the-cruelty-is-the-policy