Cuts to USAID left Congo unready for Ebola’s surge

Trump’s USAID – An Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has already produced more than 600 cases and at least 139 deaths, with experts warning it may be far larger than reported. Aid workers and health experts point to Donald Trump’s dismantling of USAID and the resulting near-col

By the time the virus was detected, it was already moving.

The outbreak began in a small village near the border of South Sudan. in the Democratic Republic of Congo—an area where mining towns pull in transient workers who travel through Ituri province in search of work. In the background. violence between the Congolese military and rebel groups from nearby Rwanda has driven others to flee across porous borders that touch South Sudan. Rwanda. Uganda. and Burundi. People come and go. and when some of the stricken miners traveled to other villages. the Ebola virus—incubating slowly in their systems—had time to spread before anyone knew what it was.

This is not a version of Ebola for which there is a cure or vaccine. What has been reported so far is severe: over 600 cases and at least 139 deaths. Experts on the ground in the DRC told Rolling Stone that the outbreak has likely spread far wider than what has been officially reported. and that it has a chance to become one of the largest in recent history—potentially on par with the 2014 West African epidemic that killed over 11. 000.

Aid workers describe a stark reason the situation deteriorated so quickly: they say the United States’ humanitarian response was hollowed out before the first chain of transmission was even visible.

Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, they argue, removed the “lynchpin” that helped keep the international humanitarian system ready to respond. Heather Reoch Kerr. the DRC country director for the International Rescue Committee. said in a WhatsApp call from Kinshasa that the pressure in eastern Congo is relentless.

“The health care centers in the eastern DRC are on their knees,” Kerr said. “They just don’t have the equipment that they need.”

Those shortages are part of a wider collapse in funding that many humanitarian groups depend on. The DRC’s health care system is heavily subsidized by organizations such as the International Rescue Committee. Doctors Without Borders. the World Health Organization. and dozens of other NGOs. Many of those groups, aid workers say, rely heavily on funding from Western countries—particularly the United States.

In 2024, the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, U.S. foreign aid obligations to Congo were somewhere around $1.4 billion. In 2026—after Trump dismantled USAID—that figure dropped to around $146 million, an almost 90-percent decrease. The Washington Post estimates that as little as $26 million could have been allocated to Congo. depending on how funding sources are tallied.

When the current outbreak started, Kerr said, responders were already behind.

She described a health network in Congo that. when illness began. was largely testing ailing patients for Ebola Zaire—the most prevalent strain that has caused outbreaks in Congo in the past and that was responsible for the 2014 pandemic in West Africa. Those tests came back negative. With limited resources, local workers didn’t have what they needed to investigate further.

The turning point came only after a health worker managed to get a sample from Goa—an eastern Congo city under the control of a Rwandan-backed rebel group called M-23—sent to Kinshasa. Kerr said the better-equipped clinics in the capital ran more tests and discovered the virus was not Ebola Zaire but a rarer form called Bundibugyo.

The geography itself became part of the delay. Kerr said the journey from Goa to Kinshasa takes more than a day and a half, and that M-23 has closed the airport there. By the time the disease was properly identified, Kerr said it could have been spreading through the region for a full month.

Once the virus was moving, the missing resources had consequences that went beyond laboratory delays.

Kerr said that because of the USAID cuts. many health care workers in isolated communities did not have proper protective equipment. When the disease wasn’t identified properly. she said. dead patients were buried using normal practices rather than the highly regimented procedures needed for heavily contagious Ebola cases. The virus spread—and kept spreading.

Cases have now appeared in urban areas, including the rebel-controlled city of Goa and Uganda’s capital, Kamapala.

The risk of rapid escalation in cities is not theoretical. Dr. Mesfin Teklu Tessema. a global senior health expert for the IRC. said he is very concerned the virus has reached deep into South Sudan. an impoverished. conflict-stricken country that borders the region where the outbreak began. But he said he has no way to know how far it has gone because surveillance and reporting networks there are even worse than in rural Congo.

What Tessema and Kerr say is being missed is the core mechanism that can still stop Ebola: isolating communities and tracing contacts with speed and discipline.

Ebola’s incubation period inside an outwardly healthy person can be up to three weeks, Tessema explained—meaning early detection is critical. But he said none of those steps happened.

“We just don’t know how many people have been exposed,” Tessema said. “We don’t know where they are. They have three weeks — they could travel and we’d never be able to find them.”

Unlike Ebola Zaire, the Bundibugyo variant has no working vaccine and few treatment measures. Tessema said tests are underway with versions of existing vaccines and the anti-viral drug Remdesivir. but that applying them in the field will take time and funding—time and funding that. in his account. are exactly what the outbreak is now denying.

WHO’s response has moved faster than some past emergency declarations. The World Health Organization immediately declared the current outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Tessema said that process usually takes several days of deliberation among a committee, but that WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the emergency unilaterally—assembling an emergency committee not to classify the problem but to immediately coordinate a response. Tessema said that approach emphasizes how severe the outbreak is.

The U.S., for its part, has mobilized a response slowly. The State Department announced earlier this week it would send $23 million in aid to the DRC through the United Nations and fund up to 50 clinics—though Kerr said those clinics may take weeks to come online.

For the people living in the places where Ebola often begins. the difference between weeks and months is measured in who survives—and how widely a virus can travel before anyone can stop it. Kerr said fragile health networks in Congo’s isolated, rural areas need constant funding to retain and train staff. She also described how Ebola containment depends on community participation: people encouraging each other to seek treatment. following protocols. helping each other when needed.

Those systems, she said, require trained and funded health officials to keep working. When Trump made cuts, those capabilities started to vanish. Armed conflict and poverty then eroded what remained. forcing communities to fracture in ways that make institutional structure harder to maintain during fast-moving outbreaks.

“All that knowledge seems to have disappeared from these communities, which is deeply depressing I must say,” Kerr said. “If there’s no investment then it’s just not going to work.”

The emotional weight of that loss is hard to miss—especially in a moment when U.S. actions are being tied directly to outcomes thousands of miles away. Kerr pointed to the way USAID has historically underwritten the systems that keep epidemics from detonating across borders.

For decades, U.S. funding was what propped up these systems and gave people in the most vulnerable parts of the world even half a fighting chance at life. Kerr said. Elon Musk. then head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. tweeted in February last year that “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper.”.

Kerr said that her organization and dozens of other international and local groups lost staff and money. “We all lost so many staff and so much money,” she said, describing how the groups working on the ground became part of a budget fight that she says was decided in Washington.

Now, with over 600 reported cases and at least 139 deaths, the question for the U.S. is no longer whether an Ebola outbreak could happen. It’s whether the country’s choices about aid readiness helped determine how far this one would go.

Ebola USAID United States foreign aid Democratic Republic of Congo Ituri province Bundibugyo Heather Reoch Kerr International Rescue Committee Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Remdesivir M-23 Kamapala Kinshasa