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Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?

USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.

We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.

We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.

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But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?

Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.

I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"

Maybe the deaths would have happened, or maybe these places would have become self sufficient or received aid elsewhere. There’s really no way to know.

But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.

Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.

Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.

You make a pretty fair point there. It would have been better to announce a timeline even if it's like a year. If nobody wants else to help, at least we would have forced our allies and enemies to all go on the record that they won't.

The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).

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