by Anna Maria Barry-Jester | Aug 8, 2026 | foreign aid, News, South Africa, Trump Administration, USAID
Since he returned to office, President Donald Trump’s administration has upended foreign aid. It’s labeled well-established, long-running programs as “not aligned with American interests” and slashed their budgets. Still, the billions of taxpayer dollars Congress has allocated for foreign aid programs must be spent; lawmakers have insisted the government continue to fund humanitarian aid…
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by Sasha Abramsky | Jul 30, 2026 | ACA, Affordable Care Act, CDC, cyclospora, DOGE, DOGE cuts, Ebola, Ebola outbreak, Measles, News, Polio, Public Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump Administration, USAID, USAID cuts
As the diarrhea-causing cyclospora parasite continues to spread through the U.S., now having sickened an estimated 11,500 Americans in at least nine states since May, it is becoming increasingly clear that the situation has been massively worsened by the actions of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) over the past 18 months. CNN reported last week that cuts to the Centers for…
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by Sharon Zhang | Jul 27, 2026 | Billionaires, Department of Government Efficiency, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, News, USAID
Elon Musk has shared that he got “carried away” during his time heading the supposed “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, in the early months of the second Donald Trump term — with the billionaire seeming to express only mild regret for the sweeping, illegal government cuts that are slated to kill millions of people across the world over the coming years. “I think I got a little…
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by Sasha Abramsky | Jun 12, 2026 | anti vaxxers, anti-vaccine, Anti-Vax, CDC, Department of Health and Human Services, Ebola, Marco Rubio, News, Public Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump Administration, USAID, USAID cuts, Vaccines
In an extraordinary public display of administration infighting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate foreign relations committee on June 2 that he was wresting back control of U.S. contributions to an international vaccine consortium — Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaxxer entourage. It was time…
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by Sasha Abramsky | Jun 5, 2026 | CDC, Democratic Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, diseases, DRC, Ebola, Ebola outbreak, News, Public Health, Trump Administration, USAID, USAID cuts, WHO
In 2018, when the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) experienced a severe Ebola outbreak, more than 30 experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), close to 20 disaster-response specialists from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and 120 additional USAID staff were on the ground attempting to manage the outbreak, according to estimates from Friends of…
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by Julia Conley | May 27, 2026 | Africa, Donald Trump, Ebola, Kenya, Marco Rubio, News, Trump Administration, USAID
In what one emergency physician and public health expert called “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own,” the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to send Americans with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola to a facility in Kenya, instead of repatriating them and treating them in the state-of-the-art quarantine and treatment facilities the U.S. has for dangerous diseases that pose…
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