Marco Rubio Stands by Cuts That Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he’s proud of shuttering the U.S. Agency of International Development—but he really shouldn’t be.

During a press conference Friday, Rubio was asked whether he stood by his false claim earlier this year that the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the USAID haven’t killed anyone. Rather than fess up, he doubled down on his deadly decision.

“I’m very proud of the changes we’ve made on foreign aid,” Rubio said. The secretary claimed that the United States would enter into more than 50 “health compacts” with foreign countries by the end of 2025, in order to cut out the middleman NGOs that took a share of the assistance.

Under these health compacts ,foreign countries would not only receive assistance, but they would also be “provided a plan to build up their own self-sustainment,” Rubio said.

The state department has only recently begun to roll out its health compacts with foreign countries, deals that represent a major reduction in U.S. health spending in each of these nations. So far, only eight health compacts have been announced, all with the governments of sub-Saharan countries: Cameroon, Kenya, Lesotho, Uganda, Mozambique, Eswatini, Rwanda, and Liberia.

How the secretary plans to seal the deal on 42 more deals by December 31 is unclear.

But Rubio’s sweeping cuts have already taken a devastating toll on communities across the world. By November 2025, funding cuts to USAID assistance aimed at combatting infectious diseases had already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children, according to Atul Gawande, a former assistant administrator for global health at USAID during the Biden administration.

The Center for Global Development calculated that the number of potential lives lost from cutting current spending could span anywhere from from 500,000 to one million. Cuts to future spending could potentially lead to between 670,000 and 1.6 million lives lost.