Media Breathlessly Reports Ridiculous Claim Of 14 Million Deaths From USAID Cuts

Some members of the media just can't help themselves - if there's an opportunity to defend wasteful government spending, they will take it. No matter how misleading they have to be in the process.

One of the most substantial cuts made during Elon Musk's time at the Department of Government Efficiency was to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Musk and the employees at DOGE explained in detail how billions in taxpayer money was distributed to shady NGO's for often ridiculous causes. Like, say, funding a "transgender opera" in Colombia or millions to fund sex changes and "LGBT activism" in Guatemala. 

Unsurprisingly, after their endless stream of money was turned off, the NGO's and the political party they report to were furious. And when the left is furious, it quickly turns to activist researchers and their media partners to whip up and rapidly disseminate misinformation in support of their ideology. And boy they did not disappoint this time.

Elon Musk looks on during a Cabinet Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House March 24, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

No, USAID Funding Cuts Will Not Cost 14 Million Lives

A new "analysis" published Monday in The Lancet, a once-reputable medical journal that disgraced itself during the COVID-19 pandemic, made the absurd claim that "14 million people could die over the next five years" because Donald Trump and the Trump administration cut funding to USAID.

This "analysis" also claimed that from 2001-2021, per NBC News, that "USAID-funded programs prevented nearly 92 million deaths across 133 countries."

And there is NBC News working hard to once again demonstrate why trust in the media has never been lower. 

So what did this analysis actually show? Well, as always, quite literally nothing. Because it's not an analysis, it's a model. And models return results based on what the creators of the model tell it to assume. They admit as much in their description.

"In this retrospective impact evaluation integrated with forecasting analysis, we used panel data from 133 countries and territories— including all low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs)—with USAID support ranging from none to very high. First, we used fixed-effects multivariable Poisson models with robust SEs adjusted for demographic, socioeconomic, and health-care factors to estimate the impact of USAID funding on all-age and all-cause mortality from 2001 to 2021. Second, we evaluated its effects by age-specific, sex-specific, and cause-specific groups. Third, we did several sensitivity and triangulation analyses. Lastly, we integrated the retrospective evaluation with validated dynamic microsimulation models to estimate effects up to 2030."

That's a whole lot of words to say that they told the model that USAID funding was responsible for saving millions of lives, based on their own unsupported assumptions, then it spit out results that confirmed that USAID funding was responsible for saving millions of lives. This isn't "science," it isn't research, it isn't analysis, it's just guessing. 

But the media, especially left-wing media like NBC, never describe modeling as assumption-led guesswork if the results fit with their political goals. Instead, it's an irrefutable "analysis."

Simply, if you tell a model that USAID funding cuts saved lives, then forecast the next five years, you'll wind up with completely opposite results to this "analysis." That's how models work. Relying on them is absurd, just like it was during COVID when models said Sweden would have the worst outcomes on Earth because they didn't lockdown and mandate masks. They were wrong then, and they're almost certainly wrong now.