Lives Affected By Funding Cuts

To the Editor:

For years, children across our nation in many churches, especially Sunday Schools, have learned to sing, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.” Even though some of us only had tales associated with World War II, or different events later, to inform our sense of the world, with no TV in those days, we believed, really wanted to believe, these lyrics were true. We heard tales and saw newsreel accounts of American soldiers caring for children and sharing food with them, especially chocolate bars. We liked the idea of caring for children, even very distant, foreign ones.

Many years later after lots of conflict and suffering, the world experienced an HIV/ AIDS pandemic. President George H. W. Bush was inspired, perhaps by that little song which can be heard online, to create PEPFAR in 2003: The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Under Our Mission, its home page reports: “Through PEPFAR, the U.S. government has invested over $110 billion in the global HIV/ AIDS response, the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history – saving 26 million lives, preventing millions of HIV infections, and accelerating progress toward controlling the global HIV/AIDS pandemic in more than 50 countries.”

Among the lives saved are those of children, some of whom became infected at birth. Entire families, towns and villages suffered death and even extinction from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. It seems to only take dollars to provide medication to save lives; what is a life worth?

Recently, a guy wearing a black hat showed up to frustrate this humanitarian effort. After slashing or pausing funding, Musk claimed in March 2025 “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding.” “No one.” Every story has the potential of a sad ending. That was the case for Peter Donde a 10-year-old boy infected at birth, a poster child for what happens when medication is withheld. After PEPFAR funding was shut down by Musk and President Trump, Peter could no longer get the needed medicine in February. He and others died, because some government officials believed the funding was government corruption, waste, and fraud. Without funding, thousands of people will die. If only paused, people will die because it takes time for the medication to build up resistance to the virus.

Has PEPFAR’s funding been restored, or has its defunding only been paused, for a while?As the Federal budget for 2026 is being marked up, what is PEPFAR’s fate? What is the fate of the children Jesus asked us to love? Or will they starve for lack of food bought from American farmers and provided by USAID? Is that old song still sung in Sunday Schools? We hope so. Many of us still love the little children.

Bob Heath Carmine