Beyer Leads Special Orders Highlighting Urgent Need to Restore USAID

Congressman Don Beyer, who represents a Northern Virginia district that is home to many of the former U.S. Agency For International Development (USAID) employees who were fired by President Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE through no fault of their own last year, spoke yesterday evening on the House floor on the short- and long-term impacts of dismantling the United States’ largest foreign assistance agency. Along with Representative Beyer, Representatives Lois Frankel (D-FL), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Gabe Amo (D-RI), Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA), Madeleine Dean (D-PA), and Brad Sherman (D-CA) spoke in support of restoring funding to the critical agency, and rehiring the dedicated civil servants who provided essential supplies and assistance to people around the world. Beyer’s remarks follow below, and video is available here . Last year, President Trump teamed up with his trillionaire donor Elon Musk to dismantle USAID and pause or permanently cancel a large portion of our international assistance programs. This was done in the name of furthering Trump’s “America First” policy, but it’s mostly combating mostly fictional and exaggerated claims of waste. The authors of this policy claimed their goal is to achieve “deficit reduction,” to further “America First” policy on largely imaginary claims of waste. But far from reducing waste, the headlong rush to shutter USAID has forced the government to set aside billions of dollars for lawsuits, pay former employees to stay at home, and settle outstanding agreements with contractors. Our national debt passed 40 trillion dollars this week, the latest in a long string of facts that show how little Trump and company actually care about fiscal responsibility. The decision and the chaotic and callous way it was implemented has led to needless death, suffering, and damage to our national security and international reputation. But the worst impacts have been the devastation this has inflicted on poor and sick people around the world. You know, in defense of the aid cuts, Elon Musk claimed “zero” people in Africa died. Secretary Rubio likewise claimed “no one has died,” claiming that lifesaving aid and programs would be maintained or replaced. But these statements are lies and they’re insults to our intelligence. Available government data shows large reductions in spending from 2024 to 2025: 48% to global health programs, 39% cut to the Food for Peace Program, a 65% cut in development assistance, and a 21% cut to international disaster assistance. Several large-scale independent studies and reporting from numerous news outlets have shown the human toll of these reductions. I want to thank my colleagues who have pointed out names and photographs. Let me give you some examples: The Gates Foundation estimates that child deaths will rise for the first time in the 21st century in 2025, and projects that if the aid cuts continue at a similar scale, we should expect an additional 12 million child deaths by 2045. 12 million kids. Harvard University’s Atul Gawande, look, he’s one of the leading public health experts in the world, published everywhere, [he] published analysis nearly a year ago finding that hundreds of thousands have already died as a result of the USAID cuts, less than ten months after they were implemented. A study published by UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health projected that the elimination of foreign aid funding last year would lead to 14 million preventable deaths by the end of this decade, over a third of them children. And in a more granular report, research from Oxfam has shown that cholera cases have risen by 62% in 2025 compared to the previous year, just as USAID clean water and sanitation programs were cut. One to one correspondence. Look, these are numbers, but these statistics represent suffering and misery that our government chose to inflict on some of the most vulnerable people in the world. I love and greatly appreciate the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. He has gone to Africa and written in heartbreaking detail about the individual human cost of the aid cuts. He writes about the deaths of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Uganda dying due to the lack of ordinarily available food assistance, medicine, mosquito nets, and other US-provided aid. I’m a Representative serving Northern Virginia, so I’ve heard from hundreds of former USAID employees and private sectors partners who worked on these cut programs. Besides the justifiable outrage felt by these men and women due to how they were treated by this Administration, Elon Musk, and his band of DOGE acolytes, what’s really struck me is the grief that they feel being unable to continue to serve our country and help some of the world’s most vulnerable people. And they understand that U.S. international assistance is not charity. It is a critical component of our national security strategy, alongside diplomacy and defense. They reduce the risk of lethal diseases like Ebola and avian flu from spreading to our shores, promote economic growth and democracy in developing nations, enhance counterterrorism initiatives, and alleviated international crises and disasters. But it’s up to us to build and improve on what remains of our aid infrastructure. We can and should work to reduce the risk of this happening again. And I look forward to rebuilding USAID in the years to come.