Starting in early 2025, Elon Musk and the Trump administration began terminating USAID's programs and firing its staff — with Musk himself boasting about "feeding it into the woodchipper." One year ago today, USAID was officially dissolved, its remaining programs haphazardly folded into the State Department. Amid all the lies and misinformation that have followed, some facts about what has actually been lost:
• USAID saved more than 3 million lives a year at a cost of less than $10/month per American. That is what was destroyed. On purpose.
• According to Boston University's Global Impact Counter — which tracked deaths attributable to the cuts until it stopped operations in February 2026 — an estimated 781,000 people died preventable deaths in the first year, including 518,000 children.
• Global child mortality (the number of children who die before their fifth birthday) rose in 2025 for the first time in 35+ years — by 200,000 additional deaths.
• USAID's 50-country disease surveillance network — the system that cut outbreak response times from 2 weeks to 48 hours — is gone. We are now watching an unprecedented Ebola outbreak unfold in real time — with the highest first-month caseload and death rate in modern history.
• Programs reaching 93 million women and children were cut 92%. TB programs cut 56%. Water and sanitation cut 86%. Over 2,000 health facilities permanently closed.
• 25 million fewer people received humanitarian assistance in 2025. The overall humanitarian budget was slashed 74% — from $14.1 billion to $3.7 billion.
• 363 million people face acute hunger in 2026. The famine early-warning system that would have seen it coming went dark for five months.
• $1.7 billion in democracy and governance funding (election monitoring, anti-corruption work, support for independent media and civil society) was terminated.
• 360+ independent media outlets lost funding. Hundreds of legal clinics closed.
• Far from saving money, the Trump administration itself has already said the dismantlement will cost taxpayers at least $19.2 billion in cancellation fees, severance, and penalties. That's more than half of USAID's annual budget — spent on destruction and closeout, not support for vulnerable people.
• American farmers, universities, and businesses are among the casualties too. USAID partnered with more than 3,500 U.S. companies and maintained 17 university-based research labs. Its work with U.S.-based contractors and the private sector generated hundreds of thousands of American jobs and multiplied the return on every dollar spent. Those markets and partnerships are gone.
He wore the uniform.
He knew the law.
He knew the prison time.
He stepped onto the Capitol steps and said: IMPEACH Trump.
They arrested him. Not because he was wrong—because he was loud.
Courage isn't safe. It's standing up when silence is cheaper.
History won't forget...
Acabo de descubrir la cuenta de este hombre.
Es el profesor perfecto de inglés.
Escribe como un Lord británico con la mala leche de un fontanero español.
Es mi nuevo mejor amigo de Twitter.
It’s still Twitter.
It’s still the Kennedy Center.
It’s still the Department of Defense.
It’s still the Gulf of Mexico.
And Donald Trump is still a rapist.
True #Peace begins in a heart that loves. It is witnessed to by lips that speak words of reconciliation. It is reflected in eyes that look upon the world with gentleness and wisdom. Only the strength of truth and love is true strength. Whoever trusts in God understands this proclamation of peace and becomes an instrument of peace, building it with their own hands.
https://t.co/Po2jfSy5lg
Deep inner suffering inevitably arises when the human person is reduced to performance, consumption, or a statistical datum. Many young people today live under the yoke of expectations to perform, immersed in an exasperated competitiveness that generates anxiety, fear of not measuring up, and disorientation.
J.K. Simmons did not appear in a film until he was 39. He did not win an Oscar until he was 60. And for the last 30 years, every time you have heard the Yellow M&M talk in a commercial, that voice has been him.
He grew up wanting to write classical music. He got a music degree from the University of Montana in 1978, spent six summers acting at a small playhouse on a lake in Montana, then eventually drove a broken-down Fiat across the country to New York with $400 in his pocket.
For the next decade he was a musical theater actor, scraping by in regional theaters before finally making it to Broadway in 1990. He played Captain Hook in a Peter Pan revival, a fast-talking hustler in Guys and Dolls, and dozens of smaller stage roles.
His first big break came at age 42. He played a frightening neo-Nazi inmate named Vern Schillinger on Oz, HBO's first hour-long drama series. Five years later he was J. Jonah Jameson, the bellowing flat-topped newspaper editor with the cigar, in the 2002 Spider-Man with Tobey Maguire. He fit the role so completely that whenever Jameson has appeared on the big screen since, in Tobey Maguire's films, in Tom Holland's films, in the animated Spider-Verse, the voice and face have been Simmons. Twenty-four years on, no other actor has ever been cast as Jameson in a Spider-Man movie.
Then came Whiplash in 2014. The whole film was shot in 19 days on a budget of $3.3 million. Simmons played a brutal jazz teacher who breaks his student to try and make him great. The movie made $50 million at the box office, and Simmons walked away with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He was 60. Up to that moment, he had spent 30 years on screen as the guy you recognized but couldn't name.
The Oscar did not slow him down. At 61, he hired a personal trainer and started lifting weights, until people on the internet were posting photos of his arms. He also kept showing up everywhere as a voice actor. He played Mayor Lionheart in Zootopia, Kai in Kung Fu Panda 3, and Omni-Man in Amazon Prime's Invincible. He was also Stanford Pines on Disney's Gravity Falls, Tenzin on Nickelodeon's The Legend of Korra, Cave Johnson in the Portal video games, and the main villain in Baldur's Gate 3, which won Game of the Year in 2023. Six films on his resume have been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars: The Cider House Rules, Juno, Up in the Air, True Grit, Whiplash, and La La Land. And he is still the Yellow M&M.
He turns 72 in January. The work keeps coming.
Time I address the elephant in the room…..There I was, trying to enjoy a Mets game like a normal American. And who shows up sitting behind me? THAT WALL-CRAWLING MENACE! And what is he doing? Save the city? OH NO!!! SITTING IN PREMIUM SEATS PROBABLY PAID FOR BY MY TAX DOLLARS!!!