For decades, the United States has played a major role in reducing child mortality. The Trump administration’s stance seems to be “well, what if we didn’t?”
The Gates Foundation issued a report Thursday that said about 200,000 more children worldwide under age 5 have died or will die this year compared with 2024. Last year saw 4.6 million children die before their age 5, but that is projected to increase to 4.8 million in 2025.
This is the first time this century that annual child deaths have increased. Child deaths have declined sharply since 1990, when 11.6 million children under 5 died. Nations made a concerted effort to drive that rate down, and it’s a genuine miracle that the number of deaths has been more than halved in just 35 years.
Bill Gates called the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development “a gigantic mistake,” which undersells it. The United States played a big role in decreasing child deaths, and now we are playing a pretty big role in increasing them.
The administration shuttered USAID in July because that is apparently now a thing we let the president do, even though the power to create and eliminate agencies rests with Congress. The courts stood aside as well, letting President Donald Trump slash billions in foreign aid.
These cuts have already directly impacted hundreds of thousands of children.
In Ethiopia, the cuts mean a shortage of hospital staff, leading to children being discharged prematurely. In Nigeria, children are dying from malnutrition. The administration is so dedicated to abject cruelty that it even destroyed food bound for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, food that could have fed 1.5 million kids.
Impact Counterwhich projects the human costs of these cuts, estimated that over 600,000 people have died, two-thirds of whom are children. Reviewing the breakdowns of that data and the methodology is an emotional gut punch. How do you feel about 14.7 million fewer children receiving treatment for pneumonia or diarrhea? How about roughly 168,000 children dying per year from malnutrition? And here’s malariawhere aid cuts are projected to lead to over 6 million additional child malaria cases.
Children are also at greater risk thanks to the arbitrary termination of maternal and child health funds. The administration did that even in the face of a USAID memo saying this would eliminate postnatal care for over 11 million children.
A modeling study published in The Lancet in April predicted that the cuts to this funding would reverse the decline in maternal and child deaths, with maternal mortality increasing 29% by 2040, under-5 child deaths increasing by 23% in that time, and stillbirths by 13%. These are grim, brutal numbers, and Trump owns them.
The United States has removed itself from the global stage, stepping away from obligations and refusing to see itself as part of the larger world. Sure, millions of children may die, but that’s just the price we pay for “America first.”
