in South Africa gain access to clean water. (Photo/Keith Schneider)
Last February, when Elon Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development “a criminal organization” that had outlived its usefulness, the full calamitous measure of closing the world’s most important human aid organization was not yet apparent overseas or in America.
Seven months later it is brutally apparent. Across the planet a shameful retreat is occurring in the global work to secure clean water and safe sanitation for millions of people in Africa and Asia. And across the American Heartland, the end of U.S.A.I.D. is simultaneously wrecking business plans for thousands of American grain producers who are perilously close to losing their farms.
Since 2020, the authors of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report has identified water pollution, water scarcity, and storm-related flooding as among the most serious threats to people and businesses. Somehow the administration does not recognize all the evidence of water-related peril as a legitimate health, resource, and business train wreck.
Water and Woke
Instead, it views the closing of U.S.A.I.D as a signature achievement for its “America First” governing strategy. The president and his aides are intent on draining the life (and of course federal funding) out of agencies, policies, and programs they view as “woke,” but that much of America once thought sacrosanct – protecting water, air, and other natural resources, securing civil and human rights, guarding right-to-vote privileges, providing affordable health insurance, developing world-class science, and undertaking path-breaking research.
Providing food and humanitarian assistance to nations in need was another of those venerated, generous, characteristically gracious American projects. But in its breathtaking absurdity and phenomenally catastrophic consequences, the purposeful closure of U.S.A.I.D has no equal in the catalogue of Trump’s America First senselessness. It was reckless in the way it was executed. It is causing terrible human suffering in foreign nations and heedless disruption at home. Billions of American taxpayer dollars have been wasted.
Here’s a sampling of what’s going on. Clean water and safe sanitation projects have been particularly hard hit. At least 21 unfinished projects across 16 countries have been halted. More than a quarter of the $826 million initially lost by contractors was directed to water and sanitation projects in Africa and the Middle East. The largest was a $115.9 million dollar project to improve sanitation and water conservation in Lebanon.
In Mali, towers that were intended to store water to serve schools and health clinics have been abandoned, keeping children and sick patients scrambling for safe drinking water.
In Nepal, construction was halted on more than 100 drinking water systems needed to serve poor rural communities.
In Kenya, residents of Taita Taveta County are more vulnerable to flooding because construction on irrigation canals stopped and the unfinished waterways could collapse and wash crops away. “I have no protection from the flooding that the canal will now cause,” 74-year-old farmer Mary Kibachia told Reuters in July.
“The impact is real,” Mattias Ohlson, chief executive officer of a non-profit humanitarian agency in Zambia, told Bloomberg. “We were told overnight to stop what we were doing. It was very abrupt.”
Even the agency’s clean water collaborations with Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other big U.S. corporations were killed.
Damage to U.S. Farm Country
Here at home, food providers also are in disarray. U.S.A.I.D. purchased $2 billion a year in American wheat and other grains for the Food For Peace program, a humanitarian export program launched 71 years ago by President Eisenhower. Those contracts have been dissolved.
U.S. wheat prices are down nearly 10 percent this year to a little over $5 a bushel, and a full $7 a bushel less than in 2022. The closure of the program could put hundreds, maybe thousands of farms in the Heartland out of business. Tom Giessel, a retired Kansas farmer, told the New York Times: “Farmers shipping grain to where people were hungry — that we did these kinds of things is really what made America great.”
U.S.AI.D. was formally closed on July 1, 2025. Less than three weeks later the extent of the suffering, the risks to international stability, the clear disregard for the quality of drinking water and access to safe sanitation came into much clearer focus. On July 19 The Lancet, a leading medical journal, forecast the American foreign assistance cuts could kill 14 million people, including 4.5 million children.
Summed up, what’s happened to U.S.A.I.D. is an international disaster and a national disgrace. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was right on the mark last spring when she assessed the terrible injuries America and the world sustained in closing the agency. “The Trump administration has undone six decades of investments that made the United States more respected and influential than any other nation,” she said. “The resulting chaos has left us weaker and more vulnerable.”
— Keith Schneider
