By Noel Fernandez, age 10
You may be wondering: What is USAID, and why is it so important? The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is a program that distributed food, healthcare, and education to the so-called poorest countries. It also helped with responding to climate change and other crises throughout the world. USAID was started in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. He didn’t do it just to be helpful, though—he wanted to spread U.S. influence around the world. Still, it has become very important.
The United States spent roughly $40 billion annually on USAID, according to NPR, allowing it to provide education to youth, food to starving children, and healthcare to foreign countries.
USAID has saved an estimated 90 million people in the past two decades, according to a study in The Lancet. And the entire USAID program succeeded by costing normal taxpayers just 18 cents per day, health policy researcher James Macinko told NPR.
President Trump recently decided to discontinue USAID because he said it is unfair that the United States has to pay more than other countries to support the most impoverished people in the world. Trump’s decision to discontinue foreign aid has affected people’s health, and some countries are at risk right now. “We have been forced to suspend or cut back or drastically reduce many of our programs, and that includes nutrition programs,” Ettie Higgins, UNICEF deputy representative in Lebanon, said to NPR.
According to The Lancet, 4.5 million children could die by 2030 due to the lack of services that were once provided by USAID. A project that has succeeded but is now at risk is the delivery of ready-to-use therapeutic food to villages in South Sudan. The program was sending jars of peanut paste that were healthy and nutritious to kids, but now this program and many others are being shut down. Until recently, 70% of South Sudan’s nutrition assistance came from the United States, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF. Fortunately, recently the United States decided to bring back some funding for the peanut paste to be sent to South Sudan and other poor countries.
The end of U.S. humanitarian aid has impacted conflict zones like Lebanon and countries in crisis. USAID being discontinued will really affect countries in need. In 2023, the country that received the most U.S. funding was Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia. Other countries that received a lot of assistance were Ethiopia, Jordan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Yemen, according to UNICEF.
USAID helped people with emergencies in Haiti and helped to rebuild damaged property in Pakistan from major flooding. The agency also secretly provided education to girls in Afghanistan, where the Taliban forbids girls from receiving a full education. USAID helped people who were living in conditions of war, such as Gaza and Lebanon. USAID also provided people with medical care to prevent disease outbreaks.
Ending USAID will affect millions of lives around the world. People will have harder lives and could become more vulnerable. Without assistance, people will have an even more difficult time getting access to clean food, drinking water, education, shelter, and medicine. The suffering of this many people will have a ripple effect on the rest of the world. As the Harvard Center for International Development wrote in early 2025, “As pandemics know no borders, … the rising Ebola cases in Uganda [are a] warning of the very real dangers should outbreaks spiral out of control.”
