We human beings are silly things. We invest in war. We must have the latest weapons. Our defense budget (that’s the budget for the Department of War) is a trillion dollars. Private investment in AI has reached the lofty level also of a trillion dollars. Yet how much have we invested in world peace? How about minus $40 billion? That’s the amount the US used to spend on USAID. Thanks to the Trump administration, USAID was dismantled by DOGE. The US now spends $6 billion just as a continuing cost in the dismantling operation! Hundreds of millions of dollars are needed for dismissing thousands of employees. Hundreds of millions are also allocated to fight legal challenges over the shutdown.
Is this the best thing we can do to advance the cause of humanity? Human beings as a species are doing more to destroy the world and our future through competition and greed than they are to make sure that every human being wherever they are in the world has the basics for a decent life. And then there is climate change. Thanks to the fact that renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels there is some hope in that regard. It is only because of the financial advantages of solar and wind that we will probably not make the planet earth completely uninhabitable. Only partially uninhabitable with the poorest people taking the brunt of it.
As of November 2025, estimates from public health experts indicate that the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has already resulted in the deaths of approximately 600,000 people, two-thirds of whom are children. Instead of investing in the human race in order to make the lives of the least well off better, we are treating people with, as the late great Richard Nixon coined, benign neglect. Benign neglect or as the popular historical phrase, “Let the devil take the hindermost” suggests, let everyone put their selfish interests first. And if some end up having miserable lives, so what?
We have to decide as individuals and as a species is it more important to cherish and preserve the lives of as many people as possible or is it more important to facilitate the latest technological developments? Do we care about advancing the latest technology based on an ethic of greed or do we care more about saving the lives of the most disadvantaged based on the technology that is currently available? Are those on the lowest rung of the totem pole expendable or is every human being worth saving if at all possible? Those are the ethical choices we must make as individuals and as a nation.
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