How many voters in the 5th district do you think have:
given money to an organization that’s fighting AIDS or malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, or
studied, or sent their kid to study, public health at Liberty University or UVA, or
gone on a mission to vaccinate kids in poor countries, or
thought that people in poor countries shouldn’t die of diseases we can prevent easily and cheaply?
However big that group of voters is, every one of them should know that John McGuire voted to kill the programs that did the things they care about. Those cuts saved almost no money, but they’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people.
I’ve written about this before, but the monstrosity of it bears repeating.
First, McGuire voted for Trump’s budget, which cut more than $1 trillion in federal spending, including foreign assistance. Then he voted to cancel $5.5 billion in aid that Congress had already appropriated. And he stood by while USAID was shut down entirely.
At the time, he told 29 News, “We cut the programs that didn’t make sense so we could make better use of those taxpayer dollars.”
What McGuire surely didn’t know, because he’s not the type to ask, is that those dollars amounted to less than 1 percent of the federal budget. Depending on which programs you include, that’s about $60-$100 a year per American. It bought food and medicine for people who couldn’t afford them, and now that it’s gone, people are dying.
Researchers at Boston University have estimated that the cuts killed more than 700,000 people in the first year, including more than half a million children. A study published in The Lancet projects more than 7 million deaths by 2030, plus more than 12 million unsafe abortions.
As a reminder that there are real people behind those mind-boggling numbers, NPR told three stories:
· Abdullahi Ibrahim, a 10-year-old Nigerian boy who died from an asthma attack. For years, his family got his asthma medicine from a USAID-funded clinic. Last year, he had an especially severe episode. “He was just lying there, helpless,” his dad said later. Abdullahi’s family rushed him to the clinic, but USAID wasn’t paying anymore, and the family couldn’t afford treatment on their own.
· Purity Womboi, a 16-year-old Kenyan girl who stopped getting treatment for TB when USAID money disappeared. “Purity died when I was holding her,” her mom told NPR. “We didn’t think that Purity was going to die…. Then all of a sudden, boom, Purity was no more.”
· Ibrahim Garba, an 8-year-old Nigerian boy who died of typhoid fever because his family couldn’t afford his medicine after the cuts. “We delayed, hoping we could find money or that he would get better,” said his father. “But he did not.”
None of this is to diminish the damage McGuire has done at home, with his votes to cut Medicaid for 160,000 of his constituents, hike insurace premiums for 37,000 of them, cut school lunches for 50,000, and more. When Virginians can’t pay the electric bill or afford their heart meds, it’s because of policies like these.
The suffering overseas is just as tragic. McGuire helped consign 700,000 people to senseless and miserable deaths, because Donald Trump and Elon Musk told him to. If the next Congress doesn’t undo these cuts, millions more will die.
700,000 dead and counting. McGuire and his supporters ought to be reminded of it every day between now and November. The voters of VA-05 are better than this, right?