A packet of peanut paste costs a dollar. We bought the missile instead.
By Joe Broadmeadow
For twenty years I answered calls from people on the worst day of their lives. That is the job. Someone cannot help themselves, so someone else shows up. A cop, a medic, a nurse, an aid worker walking a dirt road to a village.
The uniform changes, the agency may be different, but the work gets done. You show up for the ones who cannot fend for themselves, or you do not, and not showing up has a cost measured in bodies.
Last week the Associated Press put a name to that cost. Kabita Mukhiya was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, living in a mud home in Gaur, one of the poorest districts in Nepal. She had been in pain for weeks and did not know it was an emergency. The aid workers who once walked to her village to check on expectant mothers, explain the warning signs of complications, and escort them to a clinic had stopped coming. The program that sent them was gutted when the United States dismantled its foreign aid agency.
In December, she died. So had her unborn child.
We did not walk away from those programs because we could not afford them. We walked away because we chose not to value them. The money was always there. What was missing was the will to spend it on people who could give us nothing back.
Joe Broadmeadow
Kabita left behind a three-year-old. She died because a country that claims to hold the protection of unborn children to be their highest moral goal chose weapons and war over medicine and food.
Kabita is not an outlier. The country director for CARE Nepal, which lost more than half its American funding, told the AP that a year’s worth of maternal deaths is now arriving in four to six months.
The tools that would have saved Kabita Mukhiya were almost insultingly cheap. A packet of fortified peanut paste, the kind that pulls a starving child back from the edge in a matter of weeks, costs less than a dollar. A clean birth kit that keeps a mother and newborn from dying of infection costs a few dollars. These are the least expensive lives to save anywhere on earth, and they were the first ones we walked away from.
The scale of what we abandoned is hard to hold in your head. The United States was the world’s largest humanitarian donor. Last year the administration cancelled roughly eighty-three percent of the agency’s programs and shut it down, cutting the workforce from thirteen thousand people to fewer than nine hundred. Researchers writing in The Lancet projected that the cuts could cause more than fourteen million additional deaths by 2030, over four million of them children under the age of five.
The official line is that no one died. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress the cuts cost no lives. The people who buried Kabita Mukhiya would disagree. So would the health workers watching prenatal visits collapse across rural Nepal. So would the researchers counting the graves.
Now set that against what we did have money for.
The same year we dismantled the aid agency, the president signed a bill adding one hundred fifty billion dollars to defense. Roughly twenty-five billion of it goes to munitions. Fifteen billion goes to nuclear weapons. The administration is steering toward a defense budget of a trillion dollars. Understand: this one hundred fifty billion is not the ordinary Pentagon budget. It is the plus-up, the extra, the money we found lying around when we went looking.
I am not a pacifist. Twenty years carrying a badge cured me of any illusion that the world is gentle or that force is never necessary. A nation needs a military. That is not the argument. The argument is about what a budget says when you read it out loud, because a budget is a moral document. It is a list of who we decided to protect and who we decided we could live without.
We decided we could live without Kabita Mukhiya. We decided the dollar that buys the peanut paste was better spent on the missile.
Look at the two numbers side by side. The entire foreign aid we cut was a rounding error next to the defense increase or, even more striking, the overall US defense budget. For 2024, the last year USAID had full funding ($35 billion), it amounted to 0.04% of the defense budget.
Barely enough to pay Hesgeth’s and Patel’s bar bill.
We did not walk away from those programs because we could not afford them. We walked away because we chose not to value them. The money was always there. What was missing was the will to spend it on people who could give us nothing back.
There is a word for pouring your resources into hurting the weak while abandoning the ones you could have saved for pennies. It is not strength. Strength does not need to prove itself against a pregnant woman in a mud house in Nepal. The powerful have always been able to kill. That has never been the hard part. The test of a country, the only test that has ever meant anything, is what it does for the people who cannot fight back, cannot pay, and cannot return the favor.
For twenty years, the answer to a call for help was that someone came. We have just told the most vulnerable people on earth that no one is coming, and we used the savings to buy bombs.
In a country where some like to wrap themselves in the flag, wave a bible in the air, and proclaim a shallow, amoral fraud of a president the second coming, I’d love to see them explain their actions and choices to the actual Jesus. Now that would be something to witness.
History keeps a ledger. It will remember the packet of peanut paste we could not spare, and it will remember exactly what we bought and who we choose to use them against.
History will not be kind to our choices.
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