Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it!
[1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
A lot of the assistance and programs provided help children in ways they are particularly vulnerable to. As a cliched example children are disproportionately vulnerable to malaria. They account for something like 75% of malaria related deaths.
The reason this situation more closely matches the posters analogy and not your unserious reply; The children USAID helped 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years ago are adults now and have been helped in ways that don't require ongoing "70 years" support.
Children and parents may have been able to rely on programs funded by USAID. However by abruptly shuttering it (ie "kicking them in the face")critical, life saving services were not afforded the opportunity to fight for their continuation through political advocacy or finding alternate funding sources. We were committing to helping in ways others could have helped if we had not. Then we suddenly stopped helping.
Regardless, even if your amoral nihilism were correct rather than the hallmark of a morally repulsive psychopath with the imaginative capacity of a tapeworm, there were two things DOGE did wrong. First, much of the actual damage they caused was not from the US cutting aid per se, but rather how quickly and with such little warning they cut aid. DOGE denied aid recipients that were relying on the US to keep people alive with life saving medicine and food a reasonable opportunity to make alternative arrangements. People are dying not because the rest of the world is incapable of supplying ARVs to HIV patients in Africa, but because we took those critical life saving drugs away in a manner that made it impossible for the people depending on us to adapt. We killed many those people. You can't just stop taking ARVs and be OK, and someone make a few hundred dollars per year in rural Africa is not well positioned to find alternative suppliers. Many thousands of HIV positive pregnant women who would otherwise have been able to give birth to a child without the child contracting HIV now have to figure out how to survive HIV themselves and how to care for a child needlessly infected with HIV. Many of these people are now dead because of our negligence, arrogance, and stupidity. Because of your negligence, arrogance, and stupidity.
And it didn't even save us any money to do it that way, it was nothing less than abject cruelty and racism. DOGE let perfectly good drugs and food we had already paid for go to waste in warehouses rather than allow it to be delivered. For literally no reason, it saved us not a single penny and instead deprived many innocent people.
Above all, cutting aid like this was unbelievably stupid and self-defeating. Because even if psychopaths like you are objectively correct about reality (you aren't), when the world's richest man and the world's richest country murder millions of the world's poorest people for literally no reason, that makes us look really bad to the rest of the world. And then they do not cooperate with us. See, e.g., Trump begging the Europeans he so frequently attempts to bully for help with Iran. Idiots like you and Musk have trashed America's hard-earned reputation as benevolent superpower. That will cost us trade deals. It will force our allies to hedge against us by making trade deals with China instead as a counterbalance, as Canada has begun to do. The US is so phenomenally wealthy we can afford to be sociopathic assholes to the rest of the world for a little while at least, but it is difficult to overstate just how naive, ignorant, and outright moronic you are if you think that doesn't come at a price to American interests that far outweighs the negligible amounts of foreign aid spending DOGE illegally cut.
And I won't even get into the illegality of an unelected jackass impounding congressionally authorized spending because you do not seem like the sort of person who has any concept whatsoever of the value or importance of the rule of law and respect for the constitutional order.
Edit: Not to mention billions sent to ICE.
It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.
But just to engage with your numbers (which I don't agree are fully accurate and are definitely not at all a complete picture):
Getting the rate of starvation down from 33% to 20% in an already food-stressed region that has experienced 5x population growth could be presented as an accomplishment, yes. Flip your numbers around. In 1961 200m Africans were food-secure. Today 1200m are. A billion extra properly fed people, by your (possibly bad and definitely over-simplifed) numbers.
This is effectively what DOGE did by "feeding USAID into the woodchipper" rather than developing a plan to gradually taper aid. Thousands of people in the middle of medical treatment just died. Thousands of children relying on USAID food and supplies just died. There are plenty of articles with first-hand accounts of this.
Worst part is, Musk and his boys did it this way for shits and giggles, or maybe for the adrenaline rush. Monsters.
(though still far too many)
they are responsible because they took that responsibility. If I say to someone that I will sponsor them through collage, and than drop sponsorship without warning – I'll be an asshole too.
Also, everyone knows that USAid was a bargaining chip that bought USA ability to build military bases on a foreign land. It's not like USA just did it because they were great of heart.
It was not as in not responsible, since international agreements between countries are de facto non-enforceable. Such programs though did help the US in gaining influence and soft power in those parts of the world