PARIS: More than 14 million of the world’s most vulnerable people, a third of them small children, could die by 2030 because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of US foreign aid, research projected on Tuesday.

The study in the prestigious Lancet journal was published as world and business leaders gathered for a United Nations conference in Spain this week hoping to bolster the reeling aid sector.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had provided over 40 per cent of global humanitarian funding until Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.

Two weeks later, Trump’s then-close adviser and world’s richest man, Elon Musk, boasted of having put the agency “through the woodchipper”.

The 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.

Looking back over data from 133 nations, the international team of researchers estimated that USAID funding had prevented 91.8m deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.

That is more than the estimated number of deaths during World War II, history’s deadliest conflict.

A recently updated tracker run by disease modeller Brooke Nichols at Boston University estimates that nearly 108,000 adults and more than 224,000 children have already died as a result of the US aid cuts.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2025