Diplomats in Vietnam warned Washington that halting USAID’s efforts to clean up the massive deposit of postwar pesticides would be a catastrophe for public health and relations with a key strategic partner in Asia.
One million children will go untreated for severe malnutrition, up to 166,000 people will die from malaria and 200,000 more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade, the memos estimated. The programs were cut anyway.
The axing of some 10,000 programs has consigned untold numbers of children and refugees to death, officials say. Documents and interviews reveal that the State Department appears to have made the cuts without the careful review it described in court.
Now one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government, Peter Marocco’s turbulent tenure during the first Trump administration sheds light on his current efforts to dismantle the American foreign aid system from the inside out.