Senators: Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts Are Putting Americans at Risk
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley said today they have joined their Democratic Senate colleagues in sounding the alarm on how the Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts under DOGE have led to a humanitarian health crisis as Ebola and Hantavirus continue to spread throughout central Africa.
“The Trump Administration’s withdrawal of global health funding that once supported outbreak detection and surveillance across parts of Africa has led to the erosion of the international disease-monitoring infrastructure relied upon to identify and contain emerging infectious diseases,” the senators wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “This erosion has been compounded by the Administration’s broader underfunding of global health security and other global health programs, despite bipartisan congressional support for sustained funding for such programs.”
Despite bipartisan congressional support for international public health organizations, the Trump administration made these lifesaving organizations one of the main targets for cuts under DOGE in 2025.
“The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the withdrawal from key international organizations such as the WHO, and the abrupt foreign aid cuts have had the combined effect of degrading our outbreak preparedness and seriously weakening the systems we rely upon to keep Americans safe from infectious diseases,” the senators continued.
For decades, federal agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), have collaborated with the World Health Organization (WHO) to help control major infectious disease outbreaks abroad. Due to major funding cuts and the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO under Trump’s direction, many humanitarian organizations have been forced to significantly reduce their frontline support services, contributing to a major spike in Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere.
In March of 2026, Senators Wyden and Merkley joined their Senate colleagues in demanding the Trump administration reverse its decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization.
Earlier this month, Merkley led his colleagues in sounding the alarm over the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) decision to undermine programs dedicated to fighting major outbreaks of diseases like Hantavirus. Wyden joined Merkley in sending the letter.
The text of the letter is here.
A web version of this release is here.
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