Oluhle Shezi, 17, holds her 2-month-old baby in KwanGode, a rural area outside Hillcrest, South Africa. When she goes to school, her grandmother helps care for the child. She and her grandmother benefit from a counseling program that’s threatened by American cuts to foreign aid. Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty
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When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, went looking for government agencies to axe last year, one of its first targets was the US Agency for International Development. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, USAID spent billions of dollars on food aid, public health, and emergency relief for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. In return, the US hoped to gain allies and goodwill. Call it a decades-long exercise in soft power.
But since President Donald Trump returned to office, soft power is out. And so is USAID, which has been slashed and reorganized. The Trump administration is trying to close the agency altogether by September. This has led to some horrific consequences for the people who relied on USAID to get by.
“Everyone, especially in South Sudan, wanted to know if the US really had cut off aid. It was easier for them to believe that the aid organizations were lying to them than to think that the United States would do this,” says Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a journalist at ProPublica who traveled to South Sudan and Kenya alongside her colleague Brett Murphy to report on how foreign aid cuts were directly affecting the people who live there. Earlier this month, their reporting was recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
On this week’s More To The Story, Barry-Jester and Murphy join host Al Letson to talk about their on-the-ground reporting from Africa and how the aid cuts are leading to deadly consequences for people who’ve long relied on USAID to survive.
