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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lickman. Today in the podcast, the repercussions of

dismantling USAID and withdrawing from the World Health Organization.

It's sending a signal to the world that we are going to be leaders of American health.

And as far as global health is concerned, that's your problem.

On his first day back in office, President Trump issued an executive order targeting foreign aid.

Funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, has been frozen, and most of the staff has been placed on leave or laid off.

Last week, the Supreme Court rejected a bid to keep some of those funds frozen.

But what does that mean in practice for the agency's global health initiatives?

That's what we're talking about today.

The repercussions for people and medical care across the world and what it means and why it matters

that the U.S. is stepping back from being a leader in global health.

Let me introduce my guests.

Dr. Atoll Gawande is a surgeon and former head of

global health at USAID. And Dr. Salim Abdul-Kareem is an epidemiologist and director of the

Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa. Welcome to Science Friday.

Pleasure. Delighted to be here. Atul, the news is changing fast. Can you just catch us up on where

things stand with USAID? Yeah. The core of it is that a month ago, a freeze on foreign aid froze all

funding. This is work that then last week was formally terminated with 90% of the staff being let

go as well. So the results are that virtually the entirety of the president's malaria initiative

reaching 53 million people, mostly children, has been

terminated. Virtually all of the tuberculosis control program terminated. All of the 50 country

...