George W. Bush Rebukes Trump Cuts to USAID by Citing Lives the Agency Saved

“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work – and that is your good heart,” Bush told USAID staffers. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you,” the former president said, praising the agency's past work in an emotional farewell via videoconference to staffers of the shuttered aid service, joined by U2 singer Bono and former president Barack Obama.

More than 14 million of the world’s most vulnerable, a third of them young children, could die because of the Trump administration’s move, a study in the Lancet journal projected Tuesday.