ProPublica published a piece yesterday that should be dominating the news cycle but probably won't. It reported how people died of cholera in South Sudan because the Trump administration basically shut down USAID. And South Sudan isn't some outlier. It's just one example we happen to know about. The gutting of USAID has killed thousands and counting.

Marco Rubio has said repeatedly, including in congressional testimony, that nobody died because of cuts to foreign aid and that lifesaving operations were back up and running. ProPublica found that was BS. The programs stayed on the books, but the money stopped flowing. In some cases for months. In other cases permanently. Jeremy Lewin (more about him below) blocked funding for TB treatment in Tajikistan, emergency earthquake response in Myanmar, and god knows what else. Dozens of programs that were supposed to be "active" just sat there doing nothing for most of the year. Other programs that depend on annual grants simply expired.

South Sudan got hit especially hard. It's the youngest country in the world, the poorest, and massively dependent on American aid.

Career staff at USAID and State spent months after Trump's inauguration warning anyone who would listen that the funding cuts would make a catastrophic cholera epidemic even worse. They needed less than $20 million for three months of lifesaving health programs, including cholera response. That's one-eighth of what Trump just approved for private jets for a single cabinet secretary. It's 3% of what USAID's South Sudan budget was the year before. Rubio and his people ignored their own agencies' warnings.

People died.

Now about this Jeremy Lewin. He is 28. He has zero background in public health or government administration. He's one of the Elon Musk guys who got plugged into DOGE and turned loose on the federal government with no oversight. Earlier reporting showed how DOGE operated: Lewin was making life-and-death calls based on spreadsheets he didn't understand, apparently with a strong bias against poor Black countries. The exact countries Trump has spent years denigrating in openly racist terms. When it was over, ProPublica reports that Lewin and his colleagues celebrated with a cake.

Something important: USAID is an independent agency created by Congress. Only Congress can dissolve it or fold it into something else. What Trump, Musk, and the DOGE people did was illegal. Not "arguably illegal" or "possibly illegal." Just illegal.

And in terms of actual human consequences, this is up there with the worst thing Trump has done. Thousands dead. More dying. All of it completely pointless. Just racism and indifference dressed up as efficiency.

Trump, Musk, Rubio, Lewin, everyone involved, should be in prison.