The world's richest men take on the world's poorest children

The world's richest man is boasting about destroying the US Agency for International Development, which saves the lives of the world's poorest children, saying he shoved it "into the wood chipper."

- By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

By my calculations, Elon Musk probably has a net worth greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth. Just since Donald Trump's election, Musk's personal net worth has grown by far more than the entire annual budget of USAID, which in any case accounts for less than one percent of the federal budget. It's callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as President John F. Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it's also myopic.

Cutting aid, Kennedy noted, "would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive." He added: "Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled."

Perhaps that's why Russia has praised Trump's move.

In contrast with Kennedy, the Trump administration braids together cruelty, ignorance and shortsightedness, and that combination seems particularly evident in its assault on US humanitarian assistance.

One person has already died of bird flu in the United States, and there is growing concern of a pandemic - yet Trump's suspension of foreign aid has interrupted bird flu surveillance in 49 countries, according to the Global Health Council, a US-based nonprofit.

Remember the American panic over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014? (Trump was particularly hysterical back then.) In the end, an Ebola pandemic was averted - in part because of USAID's work in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

As it happens, another Ebola outbreak has just been reported in Uganda, with 234 contacts identified so far. USAID would normally help suppress it - but now Trump and Musk have put it out of commission.