The cost of USAID’s withdrawal from the Congo

With 2,235 deaths and 4,945 cases, according to the latest figures provided by the Kinshasa government, the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has become the worst in the country’s history, having already exceeded the death toll from the 2018–2020 outbreak. The World Health Organisation warns that it is likely to become the largest Ebola outbreak in history, surpassing the 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths recorded in 2014–2016 across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Back then, it took five months to reach 1,000 deaths, whereas we have now already reached 2,000 in just three months. “Ebola is winning in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” the UN has stated, noting that one person is dying every 30 minutes. And at least twenty cases have already been reported in Uganda.

The “first major post-USAID epidemic crisis” was described as such, according to fears and predictions that had begun to be voiced when, in January 2025, the Trump administration began dismantling the US Agency for International Development. If aid systems developed over decades are destroyed, global health experts from around the world warned, knock-on effects will be inevitable for years to come: ranging from individual patients being denied life-saving treatment to the collapse of entire supply chains. USAID was officially closed on 1 July 2025 and around 80 per cent of its global health funding was cut, with $12.7 billion in already allocated funds withdrawn. US aid to Africa has fallen to its lowest level in the last ten years. The Disaster Assistance Response Team model – the operational backbone of the Ebola response between 2018 and 2020 – no longer exists in its previous form. Due to a lack of resources, vaccination has largely been replaced by non-pharmaceutical interventions. Furthermore, the measles outbreak in Texas highlights problems with the use of vaccination even in the United States.