PIH Statement on the Targeting of USAID

Partners In Health vehemently opposes actions underway by the Trump Administration to dismantle and dissolve USAID. USAID was established as an act of Congress in 1961 as part of the Foreign Assistance Act to keep America safe and promote global stability and can only be undone through the same means. Any actions taken by the Trump Administration to unilaterally “shut down” USAID would put millions of lives and decades of global health progress at risk.

At this moment, the president has ordered a 90-day freeze of U.S. foreign aid. One does not need PIH’s nearly four decades of global health experience to understand the impact will be immediate: women will die in childbirth, children will die of pneumonia and malaria, and resistant forms of infectious disease may develop, spreading and taking more lives. Congress, the representatives of the people, has directed USAID to carry out work to prevent those things, but now that lifesaving work is being targeted for being “inefficient.”

One percent of the U.S. federal budget goes to USAID, a small yet critical expenditure for global cooperation.  Without U.S. foreign aid support, health and social progress we’ve made over decades is at risk, systems will fail, people will die, and the U.S. will be less secure.

PIH has received critical USAID funding to: respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, bolster medical oxygen systems, care for pregnant mothers and newborns, provide food for acutely malnourished children, enable supply chains, and prevent and treat infectious diseases. PIH also works alongside USAID-funded government and implementing partners that further ensure the functioning of country health systems and care delivery operations.

PIH stands with people around the world who have been abruptly and arbitrarily harmed by these policies, with people who have shown up to locked clinics and schools, with people who don’t know if they will be able to refill the prescriptions that keep them alive. We deplore the rhetoric being used to vilify international cooperation and hurt those who are already most vulnerable. We will continue to work in solidarity for the right to health.