Trump's desired cuts to America's global health programs are going to cause untold suffering, will save a relative pittance, and are likely to worsen epidemics overseas that we will then have to deal with at home. But let's just focus on the untold suffering part.
[T]he Trump administration has embarked on a historic retrenchment that many fear threatens the health of millions and jeopardizes America’s standing in the world.
Since taking office, President Trump has proposed dramatic cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has historically spearheaded U.S. efforts to improve women’s and children’s health.
The White House is urging reductions this year to major international heath initiatives, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which provides life-saving medicines to millions of AIDS patients in developing nations.
The "Trump doctrine," if any can be deciphered from the man's spittle-flecked incoherence, is that America should do no good in the world for anyone. We won't acknowledge refugee crises; we won't fight epidemics overseas; we won't do anything for anybody because Donald Effing Trump and his personal golf partners refuse to pay the same tax rates that their fathers did, and their fathers before them, in order to do it. So unless it involves bombing someone or landing troops on foreign soil—good, proper things that allow small-minded men to savor a bit of testosterone-fueled violence—everybody else, whether it be Meals on Wheels or efforts to combat ebola, can sod right the hell off.
Or that is what we might say if we thought Trump, himself, knew the details of any of his own budget plans. He most obviously doesn't, and as per usual has passed those details off to a phalanx of far-right idea men whose sole idea, ever, is that America should do no good for anybody. We can't pin this one on the gilded moron; it is the Republican hacks around him coming up with these schemes, not the empty-headed twit shouting at the crowds.
Cuts on the scale proposed by the president could be devastating, said former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon who has worked extensively on global health since retiring from Congress in 2007.
Ah yes, the part of the story where even the most partisan members of the previous incarnation of conservatism go pale at the inhumanities of the current version. Glad we could wedge that in there.
There is an obvious solution to all of this, of course. Put the goddamn medicines in the goddamn missiles. If we cannot stomach sending $500 worth of urgently needed medicine to some sub-Saharan African town, put the medicine in a $1 million+ Tomahawk and launch the bastard from a Navy ship stationed offshore. Small men will get their videotapes; a few lives will be saved; and a few hundred more people overseas will see the United States as a force of progress, rather than destruction. The Republican Party cannot stomach the thought of fighting ebola overseas, rather than waiting until the moment it again reaches Texas. So launch wave after wave of bombers to dispense supplies as an elite team of night vision goggles-wearing doctors parachutes in to teach the virus not to mess with our public health sphere of influence.
What we need around here, apparently, is the militarization of our overseas influence efforts. Put the AIDS medication in camo-patterned pouches. Deliver the vaccines via something, anything, that explodes. Do something to convince the small-minded men that they are committing an act of violence in order to protect the nation and spread U.S. influence, instead of an act of charity to protect the nation and spread U.S. influence, and we might just get somewhere.