John Oliver on Trump’s dismantling of USAID: ‘What this administration has performed is past merciless’ | John Oliver

On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examined the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID, the international aid agency once described as “the world’s single largest humanitarian donor”. Donald Trump, naturally, called it “a scam” where there was “very little being put to good use”.

“Set aside the irony of Donald Trump, of Trump University, accusing anything of being a fraud,” said Oliver. “You can’t just call something a scam because you don’t like it. I want to call low-rise jeans a scam. I feel like Peppa Pig is a fraud. I believe that radical lunatics run Jamba Juice. But even I acknowledge that my feelings don’t make any of those thoughts true.”

Nevertheless, Trump was “fixated” on USAID and its spending, even though it represented less than 1% of the federal budget. So when Elon Musk arrived in Washington to begin his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) cuts in early 2025, he tweeted that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.

Those cuts “have had real impacts on people around the world engaged in the act of saving lives”, said Oliver, and have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in 2025 alone.

Oliver dug into what exactly USAID did, and the devastating toll of its absence. The agency, created in 1961 by John F Kennedy for both humanitarian reasons and to increase US soft power abroad, has generally enjoyed bipartisan support, particularly thanks to scenes of international disaster relief. But the Trump administration “brought USAID to its knees”. By 1 February of last year, its website had been taken down; a week later, all its nearly 10,000 employees were put on leave. By March, 83% of its programs had been terminated.

Oliver dismantled the claims used by the Trump administration to discredit and defund USAID – for one, that the agency proffered waste and abuse, despite the fact that 94% of the spending had been audited and only 0.3% were found to have issues. “But even without knowing that, it’s tough to take waste allegations from Elon seriously, given his Doge team seemed to have no idea what the programs they were cutting even did.” Though Doge insisted that programs would be kept if they were considered “life-saving”, many were still eliminated; as one former USAID worker testified to Congress, everything without “life-saving” in the title had to go.

This represented a stark pivot from the first Trump administration, which shifted USAID’s focus by deprioritizing areas such as maternal health and family planning while increasing funding for emergency responses and digital infrastructure, but did not slash the agency’s funding. “All of which raises the question,” said Oliver, “what changed this time to make them want to put the agency through a wood chipper?”

“I’m afraid the answer to that is incredibly dark,” as many observers think it has something to do with a man named Mike Benz, a rightwing activist who appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in late 2024 and criticized the agency. Since that episode aired, Musk retweeted, replied or mentioned Benz over 160 times, calling USAID a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America”, among other things.

USAID, Oliver reiterated, was hardly a viper’s nest. As one expert put it: “I think the best evidence that USAID works is how quickly people started dying when it went away.” It’s difficult to get close estimates on the impact, in part because the cuts have also halted data monitoring, but researchers have estimated that more than 282,000 adults and 518,000 children died in 2025 as a result of the cuts.

These include the demolition of nutrition assistance, the global supply chain that moves food to people who need it, and the closure of more than 2,000 health clinics in crisis zones. Oliver played a clip from one in the Congo, where 29 children died of malnutrition and illness just a month after its closure. “We’ve never had such a high death rate,” said one of the former aid workers. “It was catastrophic. These were deaths that we could’ve avoided if funding had been maintained.”

“Yeah, it’s appalling,” Oliver responded. “And it makes it even worse when you remember House Republicans literally celebrated these cuts with this shit,” before an AI video of Trump, Vance, Musk and others carrying a coffin in Africa. “Yeah, it’s true, you are killing a lot of people in Africa, you jibjabbed fucks.”

The cuts have also terminated programs related to climate resiliency, cholera prevention and, perhaps most importantly, children’s access to safe schools. In total, “what this administration has done is beyond cruel,” said Oliver. “I haven’t shown you anywhere close to the worst footage we had to watch putting this story together. And after seeing and reading about all of this, it’s actually stomach-churning to think about coffin memes … you have to be an absolute ashtray of a person to cheer this thing on.”

In September 2025, the Trump administration announced its own “America first global health strategy” that is supposed to restart some forms of international aid in limited forms and countries, “and I genuinely hope it works,” said Oliver. “But we have very little in the way of specifics, and it’s going to be difficult to implement given that this administration just detonated the decades’ worth of expertise, goodwill and institutional scaffolding that helped them deliver the aid.”

“I know the Trump administration’s constantly spitting out disasters. I really do,” he said. “And I’m sure they’d like nothing more than for people to move on from this, but it is crucial not to let what they’ve done be forgotten.”

“USAID was not perfect, but it was working miracles,” he concluded. “And this government decided to retract those miracles on purpose. This is a man-made disaster.”