Almost a quarter of a million more children are projected to have died in 2025 than in 2024 following a decline in global aid from the U.S. and other nations, reversing steady declines in child deaths dating back to 1990.
An estimated 243,000 more children under 5 years died last year, according to a report from the Gates Foundation, most of them in troubled African nations. A major factor in the increase is a 27% decrease in aid from wealthy countries, reported the Wall Street Journal.
In January 2025, the Trump administration suddenly cut funding for foreign aid as it tried to close the U.S. Agency for International Development, citing waste, fraud and abuse. USAID had been administering foreign aid since 1961, with its annual budgets approved by Congress.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly has insisted no food aid was cut. That’s not true. State Department officials have repeatedly claimed no one has died from foreign aid cuts. That’s not true, either. Following court orders, partial aid has been restored in some cases.
“2025 is the first year of this century where child deaths will increase,” said the Gates Foundation’s 2025 Goalkeepers Report. “The death of a child is always a tragedy. But there’s something especially devastating about a child dying of a disease we know how to prevent.”
“There’s something especially devastating about a child dying of a disease we know how to prevent.”
Aid organization Mercy Corps told the Journal it was seeing increases in the numbers of children suffering malnutrition across Africa. The U.N. reported 200 health facilities are no longer serving people in Somalia.
News outlet ProPublica sent reporters to Kenya, which has seen a dramatic rise in child deaths since USAID abruptly and without warning cut off all aid to the country in January last year. The U.S. provided $978.4 million in aid to Kenya in 2024, including $112 in to the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya.
ProPublica found aid cuts had led to significant malnutrition and starvation at a Kenyan refugee camp housing more than 300,000 souls. It called what’s happening there “the Trump administration’s man-made hunger crisis.”
“Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud,” the report says.
Other groups also have offered their own estimates of the increased deaths resulting from the USAID cuts:
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Center for Global Development
- The American Prospect
- The New Yorker
Since 1990, when 11.6 million children died around the world, deaths have declined every year until 2025, when 4.8 million children were projected to die.
In March, leaders from World Vision, Compassion International, World Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, Christian Aid, Food for the Hungry and the National Association of Evangelicals urged Trump administration officials to reverse the unprecedented and chaotic cuts. As BNG reported, an official told them cuts would be rescinded.
Susie Wiles, Trump’s White House chief of staff, told Vanity Fair she was “aghast” at Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts to USAID, saying, “I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
Evangelical groups that are adamantly pro-life when it comes to abortion have supported the Trump cuts to USAID and echoed administration claims that the cuts have harmed no one:
- “It doesn’t take a wizard to figure out that USAID squandered Americans’ money on stupid and immoral causes,” Focus on the Family claimedin an article, “Closing USAID Isn’t Crazy — Here’s Why.” The article cited no positive work done by USAID.
- In another article, Focus claimed “Trump is right” to cut aid because “Dependency on Foreign Aid Hurts the Very People it Aims to Help.”
- In another article, Focus said federal judges who ruled that Trump must restore Congressionally approved USAID grants are guilty of “judicial tyranny.”
“Are the American people governed by our lawfully elected representatives, including the president of the United States? Or are we ruled by roughly 700 unelected, unaccountable federal district judges?” Focus asked.
The Family Research Council, which was founded by James Dobson four decades ago, also has supported the aid cuts and denied harm: “DOGE is not cutting off life-saving aid … in deeply poverty-stricken nations where there is a life-or-death situation,” said FRC President Tony Perkins.
“USAID Bankrolls Far-Left Activists,” claimed FRC’s Washing Stand. Perkins accused USAID of “imposing some kind of immoral agenda.”
FRC previously praised USAID when it worked to implement Trump’s recent executive order on advancing international religious freedom. “USAID Does a World of Good for Religious Freedom,” said FRC in 2020.