00:00I want to turn to the issue my colleagues have mentioned, and that is there is a legal way to restructure the Secretary of State's department, and USAID specifically.
00:12But what we saw on February 3rd was Elon Musk say, over the weekend, I tossed USAID into the woodchipper.
00:20That's a pretty profound weekend. It didn't involve consultation with Congress over the consequences.
00:27There was no rewriting of the law. There was no discussion of what funds could be delayed, frozen, redirected.
00:35And the result is different groups have estimated how many people have died to date and will die over the course of a year
00:44or a prolonged period as a result of the destruction of the weekend of February 1st and 2nd.
00:50But did Elon Musk have your support in putting USAID into the woodchipper?
00:58Well, I don't think that's an ex-post, or I guess you're imagining a social media post, is not a government ad.
01:04Not at all. That's a quote. That's what he said.
01:06Yeah, that's okay. That's what he said. But that's not ultimately what happened as acting director, is all these decisions have to come to me.
01:11Did his actions have your full support?
01:13The ones that I signed off on, yes, which is the ones that happened.
01:15Of what Elon Musk did with USAID?
01:17No, no, but understand, these are contracts. All these contracts...
01:20Did he do it without or with your support? That's what I'm trying to understand.
01:23Well, not with my support, it was my actions.
01:26His Doge team did a lot of cancellations very, very quickly, and it fired a lot of people.
01:31It just wasn't clear to me whether that had your support or not.
01:34No, no. His Doge team didn't do anything. I did it.
01:37I was the one that made the decisions. I went through contracts, literally spreadsheets, line by line.
01:41I remember being in a hotel, I believe in Guatemala, going through line by line on spreadsheets
01:45of contracts that were canceled, contracts that were approved, contracts that were amended.
01:50These are all contracts.
01:52So, in that case, I'll put the responsibility with you, since you're taking credit for it,
01:57rather than with Elon Musk.
01:58But the Boston School of Public Health has a kind of a website where they post their estimated deaths
02:09as a result of the actions that were taken to dismantle USAID.
02:13And they're updating it continuously.
02:15So you go to it, the numbers keep changing.
02:17They have a one-year estimate, but they also have what they estimate has happened to today.
02:22And as of today, they estimate that the actions taken in putting USAID in the wood chipper.
02:28Child malnutrition, 53,500 more deaths.
02:32And I'm rounding off because the numbers are continuously changing.
02:35Child diarrhea, 45,400 more deaths.
02:38Child pneumonia, 59,200 more deaths.
02:41Malaria, 25,100 more deaths.
02:44So what happened that weekend has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of children.
02:50And the estimate for the end of this year is much, much higher.
02:54This happened because the law was not followed for consultation with Congress,
02:59analysis, bringing in experts, holding hearings.
03:02How do you kind of accept what you just put forward, that it was your action to cancel these contracts?
03:10Your contracts, in this fashion, freezing fun, firing individuals, has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of children.
03:18That's false. That's fake.
03:20That's just not true.
03:21That's a study based on if we canceled every one of these programs permanently.
03:25Okay, and I'm reading it right here because I'm glad you brought it up.
03:28It assumes a near total freeze in U.S. foreign aid for HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases.
03:36There is not a total freeze. 85% of PEPFAR recipients are receiving their care right now.
03:42But the numbers you're saying, those aren't real numbers.
03:44I understand that's what the school said in the worst case dramatic scenario.
03:47And even then I think it's exaggerated.
03:49But there's just no evidence of the fact that, I don't remember the numbers,
03:52100,000 children have starved to death in the last four months because the United States made reductions to USAID.
03:58Well, that, first of all, is pretty atrocious.
04:00That would mean that nobody else in the world is doing anything.
04:02We're taking care of the entire planet?
04:04Well, I must say, I think your response is not fit with what the published results were.
04:09But there's other groups that have done this as well.
04:11There's a study in Nature with healthcare experts from a whole number of leading universities.
04:16And they said, basically, if you shut down USAID, and it may not be fully shut down,
04:20but my colleagues who follow this closely say, you know, it's 80, 90% shut down.
04:25And Nature study, or published in Nature, said, look, because of what has happened,
04:32we will see some 15 million additional deaths over 15 years just from HIV, producing 14 million orphans,
04:41and another 10 million people, children and adults, dying from malnutrition, tuberculosis, diarrhea, malaria, and other diseases.
04:51And there's even higher numbers from the Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS.
04:55I think it's this rash shutdown without due process of law that is not coming and doing it in collaboration with rewriting the law, freezing funds,
05:06canceling these contracts without constitution, that you have exacted enormous harm on the world.
05:12Again, those numbers you're saying are staggering and unrealistic.
05:15The reality of it is that what you're saying is that unless the United States funds foreign aid at these levels in perpetuity,
05:21the world's going to suffer 50 million, 15 million deaths in 15 years,
05:25and every country should be voting for everything we want at the UN.
05:27The number was 15 million in the study of Nature, yes, from the shutdown of these programs.
