In the comments section of his New York Times column titled “ Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True,” Nick Kristof wrote: “I think that President Trump and Elon Musk thought the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would be an easy target and could be a practice run for raiding something harder, like Medicaid. In reporting this story, I tried to put human faces on the aid cuts and appeal to readers' consciences, but I wonder whether it's more effective to appeal to the public's sense of self interest? Which arguments do you think are most effective in reaching people and changing minds?”
As a citizen advocate who has spent more than 40 years working to improve USAID, waves of grief keep coming over me due to the reckless and shameful dismemberment of the agency. Attempts by Musk and Trump to shut down USAID amount to vandalizing America’s soul.
Here's why I say that demolishing USAID is like vandalizing America’s soul, why it is wrong to decimate an agency that Elon Musk calls “evil” and “a criminal organization” that “needs to die” and that President Trump said is run by “lunatic radicals”. Listen to the late-U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) who, in 1982, spoke to our deepest aspirations as individuals and as a nation. In an Oregonian op-ed Hatfield wrote, “We stand by as children starve by the millions because we lack the will to eliminate hunger. Yet, we have found the will to develop missiles capable of flying over the polar cap and landing within a few hundred feet of their target. This is not innovation; it is a profound distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.”
USAID is not a perfect organization, but it is one key tool the U.S. has for correcting that distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.
Here’s an example of USAID’s importance. In the mid-1980s, globally, 3.5 million children were dying each year from six vaccine-preventable diseases (listen up RFK Jr.!): diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, polio, and tuberculosis. At the time, a dose of vaccine to prevent the greatest killer, measles, cost a mere six cents. By 2017, globally, an estimated 700,000 children died each year from these vaccine-preventable diseases—a reduction in child deaths of 80 percent.
USAID matters not only for what it does but for how it impacts other donor countries. In a New York Times interview in 2013, former UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Kul Chandra Gautam said that it was the U.S. leadership on child survival “….that led many other countries to come on board.” Will our abandonment of the world’s poorest children and their families lead other nations to follow our lead and result in an alarming rise in global child deaths?
Hearing about millions of lives saved can make our eyes glaze over and miss the impact on individuals. UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 1986 Report concluded with the words of Maria Auxilia Paja, a mother from a rural area in South America. A trained health worker arrived in her village but only after two of Paja’s children had already died, one from a respiratory infection and the other from measles. Paja said:
“For the baby boy, I tried to get help, but as I was carrying him for help, he just died in my arms. My daughter was older. I had got used to playing with her, being with her. It’s difficult. . . . It’s sad to remember those times with my children. She was alright when she went to bed. By midnight she was sick. She died just as day broke. I am not alone. It’s happened to a lot of women.”
“Maria Auxilia Paja is indeed not alone,” the report concluded. “In the last 12 months, approximately 15 million mothers like her have been forced to watch their children die.”
Because of the work of USAID and others, 10 million of those 15 million child deaths are now prevented each year, a two-thirds reduction in global child deaths. But with five million children still dying each year from mostly preventable causes, now is not the time to retreat from the parts of the aid budget that work.
We should locate wasteful spending in all areas of government but you don’t do that by firing USAID’s Inspector General and putting Elon Musk’s army of 20-somethings in charge. The Congress should do its job; protect effective aid and remove any abuse. When the Senate approved a continuing resolution in early March to extend federal funding for the remainder of the fiscal year, they voted down, by a vote of 73-27, an amendment introduced by Sen. Rand Paul that would cut foreign assistance funding by $16 billion. Twenty-seven Republicans voted against Sen. Paul’s amendment to cut foreign aid. Maybe some in Congress are finding their conscience (and some backbone).
Andrew Natsios, a lifelong Republican who ran USAID under President George W. Bush, said that what Musk and Rubio are doing “is criminal”. I agree with Natsios and I think Hatfield would too. I look at what Musk, Trump and Rubio are doing and see a profound distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.
Sam Daley-Harris is the author of “ Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy ” (Rivertowns Books, 2025 paperback) and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.