1051 - The Fate of Foreign Aid in 2026
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
About this episode:
A recent study by the Rockefeller Foundation and ISGlobal estimates that cuts made to foreign aid last year could result in 23 million more deaths globally by 2030. In this episode: how researchers calculated this figure, why funding has slowed, and what global development leaders are trying to do about it.
Guest:
Eric Pelofsky, JD, MPP, is the vice president of international policy at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Host:
Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs.
Show links and related content:
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93 Countries Worldwide at Risk of Losing Nearly 23 Million More People by 2030—Rockefeller Foundation
-
"Taxpayer Money Went to Buy Food to Feed People… Now It's Being Burned"—Public Health On Call (September 2025)
-
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—Public Health On Call (April 2025)
-
What Foreign Aid Means for National Security—Public Health On Call (February 2025)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:30.6 | Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:33.2 | Today, foreign aid cuts and new estimations of the impact of those. |
| 0:38.5 | A new analysis in the Lancet Global Health estimates that up to 22.6 million additional deaths could occur by 2030, including more than 5 million children. |
| 0:50.5 | Stephanie Desmond is joined by Eric Polofsky of the Rockefeller Foundation to talk about what's driving these projections and what they could mean for health systems and communities. Let's listen. |
| 1:01.2 | Eric Polofsky, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:03.7 | Happy to be here. |
| 1:04.7 | I wanted to talk today about a recent study, an analysis in the Atlantic Global Health that estimated that reductions in foreign |
| 1:12.8 | aid could lead to as many as 22.6 million additional deaths by 2030 across 93 countries. |
| 1:19.0 | More than 5 million of those could be children. Could you talk us through how the researchers |
| 1:24.3 | made that connection between funding and lives lost? |
| 1:27.3 | Sure. And again, thanks for having me. The IS Global Data is how the researchers made that connection between funding and lives lost? |
| 1:34.9 | Sure. And again, thanks for having me. The IS Global Data is really startling, and they started with a study at the end of last year as some of these cuts were becoming realities as opposed to |
| 1:40.0 | threats and did some retrospective analysis and tried to project it forward. And we were obviously |
| 1:47.7 | intrigued, given all of the work that we do in this area and also Rockefeller's conviction that |
| 1:53.6 | you have to be data driven. And so asked them to continue the work and use some projections |
| 2:00.1 | forward that were sort of the continued |
| 2:03.4 | cuts and sort of deeper cuts. And so they did this much larger, more detailed forecast of the |
| 2:11.0 | implications and came up with, as you said, 22.6 million additional deaths as a result of dramatic cuts. And I think it's somewhere in the |
... |
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