I'm Marissa Wong in Turnitla

with an episode from the Lawfare for May 24th, 2006.

On May 19th, the death toll from an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa rose sharply,

causing the World Health Organization to express concern over the, quote, scale and speed, unquote,

of the epidemic. Until last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S. aid,

was part of the global system for dealing with and stopping the spread

of Ebola. Now, dozens of former federal employees are saying that the U.S. response to the outbreak

has been slow and disjointed. For today's archive, I chose an episode from April 2, 2025,

in which Natalie Orpitt sat down with former head of global health at USAID, Atul Gawande,

to discuss what USAID did to protect public health domestically and globally,

and the potentially devastating effects of the Trump administration's plan to dismantle

the organization. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Natalie Orpat, Executive Editor of Lawfare, with

A Tool Gawande, a surgeon and public health expert who previously served as assistant administrator for global health

at the United States Agency for International Development.

There are multiple layers from the most distant, compassionate effects that I think are really in our national security interest

and have demonstrated value to the most immediate

ways in which you're stopping diseases, you're stopping spread of conflict.

Today we're talking about the dismantling of USAID, the cuts to public health funding both

domestically and globally, and what it all has to do with national security.

Okay, so Atul, I've invited you on to talk about what I think is probably a somewhat

unexpectedly broad topic, which is how in the first only couple of weeks of the Trump

administration, the policy changes, the actions that are taking

...