To face the world in the morning, I make a cup of tea and turn on the computer to find out what’s happening. I stream BBC World Service for East and Southern Africa, Newsday first edition, then PBS News Hour. On a recent morning, BBC devoted the first 20 minutes to the Ebola outbreak in Congo, spilling over to Uganda and maybe elsewhere, getting worse by the day. PBS News Hour led with a story about Senate Republicans. Ebola was the ninth item, wedged between Trump rolling back a Biden-era regulation on refrigeration and the stock market report. The Ebola story ran at just under one and a half minutes.
The first Ebola outbreak occurred 50 years ago in Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – near the Ebola River. Since then, the country has had another 16 outbreaks: more than any other nation. This time around, the first case was suspected on 24 April in the conflict-ridden Ituri province bordering Uganda and South Sudan. DRC alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) on 5 May. It had taken a while to identify it, but this was the very rare Bundibugyo type of Ebola – no vaccine, no treatment. The WHO sent out a response team to investigate, and Bundibugyo Ebola was confirmed on 14 May. The WHO declared it an international public health emergency on 17 May.
America has turned inwards
How to explain the difference between BBC and PBS coverage of Ebola? BBC World Service, as the name states, broadcasts all over the planet. PBS caters to an American audience. Ebola is ‘out there somewhere’.
While roughly three-quarters of Americans have left the country at least once in their lives, most go to Canada, Mexico and Europe. Fewer than 3% have ever set foot in Africa.
It’s no coincidence that one of Elon Musk’s first acts with DOGE was “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”. Polls have shown that a significant majority of Americans think the government spends a quarter of the budget on foreign aid. My hillbilly uncle Manny told me he didn’t want half his tax dollars “goin’ ta ferners”. In 2023, foreign aid got 1.2% of the federal budget. About 80% of US funding for global health, $12bn, evaporated in 2025.
Once USAID became wood chips and burned up, America could no longer mount a quick response to international emergencies. As Nicholas Enrich relates in his exposé, Into the Wood Chipper, the DOGE crew that Musk brought to USAID were for the most part clueless. One thought USAID health projects funded abortions, an action specifically prohibited by US law. Another said Ebola is a “scam”.
The US responds…slowly
On 19 May the State Department said that it “mobilized an initial $23 million in bilateral foreign assistance to immediately bolster each country’s own response, supporting surveillance, laboratory capacity, risk communication, safe burials, entry and exit screening, and clinical case management” and would fund “up to 50 treatment clinics, and associated frontline costs being established in Ebola-affected regions of the DRC and Uganda.” They added that they’d sent Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DARTs) to DRC on 21 May.
Former USAID staff who had worked on the 2018 Ebola outbreak in DRC said the State Department was more than a few days late, and more than several hundred million dollars short. In 2018, USAID spent over $324mn to combat Ebola.
Not our fault, said Trump officials. The WHO didn’t declare a public health emergency until 17 May. We responded two days later.
Leadership lacking in health crisis experience
This is the first international health crisis that the second Trump administration has had to deal with. Their response falls on two bureaus in the State Department: the Bureau of Global Health Security and the Bureau of Disaster and Humanitarian Response.
The acting head of the Bureau of Global Health Security is Jeffrey Graham. He joined the foreign service eight years ago. Before that he was a teacher in Mongolia. He has no background in health and no experience dealing with emergencies.
Ryan Shrum, head of the Bureau of Disaster and Humanitarian Response is even less qualified. As chief of staff to Jeremy Lewin, Under Secretary of State. his job entailed “ensuring U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used responsibly.”
Both these men work for the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs and Religious Freedom, Jeremy Lewin. Before taking this position, Lewin was one of Musk’s DOGE crew who dismantled USAID. These three stooges oversee America’s response to this very lethal international crisis in a distant part of the planet.
The pre-DOGE system worked
Prior to being fed into the wood chipper, the Ebola response would have been handled by the USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA)—one bureau, no other agenda.
I was a contractor at USAID/Tanzania from 1984 to 2000. One of my many jobs there was Mission Disaster Response Officer (MDRO). Over those 16 years, I worked closely with the BHA. Of all the bureaus I dealt with, in my view, the BHA was the best with the best people.
Other bureaus managed development projects where you win some, you lose some. BHA handled emergencies. Get it wrong and people die.
BHA had a phone line open 24/7/365 and would respond to an emergency within 24-48 hours, with a DART if needed. Only the best of the best got selected for DARTs.
Trump’s guys are chuffed because they sent a DART to DRC on 21 May, four days after the WHO declared a public health emergency.
Had this happened back in my day, once DRC informed the WHO this was Bundibugyo Ebola on 5 May, USAID staff on the ground in DRC or Uganda would have immediately gone to check it out, called the BHA and said ‘send a DART’, who would have been in Ituri by 8 May, at the latest.
No decline in US response? – wapi!
Instead, we got a bunch of Washington suits thinking about it on the 19th and getting around to it on the 21st, with their DART arriving in the general vicinity on the 23rd, or 24th, or 25th … maybe.
To be fair, as of 12 June, the US had upped its direct assistance to $220mn and had DARTs active in Ituri by 28 May.
Yet CNN had reported in February, well before the DRC Ebola outbreak, that The Lancet has estimated that, with the dismantling of USAID and global cuts to aid, 9.4million people may die by 2030. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, 11,325 died, including two Americans.
On 23 May, Africa CDC warned that Ebola could possibly spread to 10 countries. Among them Tanzania, where I live.
An unnamed senior State Department official, quoted by CNN, said: “There was no specific person or program associated with USAID in this region that would have detected this or contributed to a detection framework here”.
In Swahili, wapi? (with a question mark) translates as “where?” Wapi! (with an exclamation point) means “BS”. To this anonymous State Department bozo, I call “WAPI!”
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