Lancet Study: USAID Cuts Risk Causing Over 14 Million Deaths by 2030

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A study published in the medical journal The Lancet, as reported by Aljazeera and ABC News, on Tuesday, July 1, 2025, revealed that programs funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have prevented over 91 million deaths globally over the past two decades.

The figure includes 30 million deaths among children.

Based on data from 133 countries, an international team of researchers estimated that USAID funding has prevented 91 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.

They also used modeling to project how an 83 percent funding cut—a figure announced by the U.S. government earlier this year—could impact mortality rates.

The study found that USAID funding is associated with a 65 percent decrease in mortality due to HIV/AIDS, 51 percent due to malaria, and 50 percent due to other tropical diseases.

However, the sharp funding cuts currently underway ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump could result in over 14 million deaths across all age groups by 2030, the researchers stated.

This includes 4.5 million deaths among children under the age of five—or approximately 700,000 child deaths per year.

For comparison, approximately 10 million soldiers were estimated to have died during World War I.

The prestigious Lancet study was published on Tuesday as world leaders and business figures gathered for a UN conference in Spain this week, with hopes of bolstering the struggling aid sector.

The United States is the largest humanitarian aid donor in the world, amounting to at least 38 percent of all contributions recorded by the United Nations (UN). The U.S. disbursed $61 billion in foreign aid last year, with over half channeled through USAID, according to government data.

This came to an end when Trump returned to the White House in January. Two weeks after, a close advisor to Trump at the time, Elon Musk, boasted of having dismantled the agency.

"Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030," the study remarked.

These funding cuts "risk abruptly halting, and even reversing, two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations," warned study co-author Davide Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).

"For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict," he said in a statement.

Following the USAID cuts, several other major donors, including Germany, the UK, and France, followed suit by announcing plans to reduce their foreign aid budgets.

These aid reductions, particularly in the EU, could lead to "even more additional deaths in the coming years," stated study co-author Caterina Monti from ISGlobal.

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