I have, like I suspect many readers, been in quite a bad mood for the last two months. My go-to joke explaining why — which I feel like should land with readers of this newsletter — has become: “I didn’t realize quite how much my overall optimism about the state of the world depended on the fact that Lindsey Graham likes foreign aid.”

To unpack that a bit: For many years, the US spent tens of billions annually on foreign aid, including billions on vaccinations, preventive gear, and treatments for cheap-to-treat killers like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis.

It did that not because a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals have been in power continuously for decades, but because a critical mass of conservative Republicans like Graham (and former President George W. Bush, and former House foreign affairs chair Michael McCaul, etc.) genuinely supported foreign aid, often out of sincere moral conviction. Aid actually grew dramatically under Bush, and remained roughly constant through President Barack Obama’s time in office and during Donald Trump’s first term.

This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.

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This, obviously, has not been the story of foreign aid under Trump’s second term. Already, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, acting as the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) interim head, has canceled programs amounting to at least a third of USAID’s annual spending. Some areas were hit even harder: Efforts to improve maternal and child health are in for an 83 percent cut, and pandemic prevention is getting a 90 percent cut. (On Wednesday, a federal judge said that the Trump administration’s efforts to close USAID were likely unconstitutional and ordered the government to reinstate USAID systems, though it’s anyone’s guess how meaningful that ruling will prove to be.)

Despite Elon Musk’s lies that the cuts in funding haven’t killed anyone, the lack of funds at HIV clinics caused by Musk, Rubio, and Trump has already led to children dying. Journalist Nick Kristof has some of the names of the dead. Working with the Center for Global........

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