War, disease, famine — in various ways, the Trump administration is in favor of all the big killers. And while “more people who aren’t us should die” is a through-line of the whole executive branch, the Cabinet secretaries appear to be attacking that goal with varying degrees of vigor. There are a few obvious candidates for who will eventually be responsible for the most unnecessary death in the world:
Who needs a National Weather Service, anyway? Lutnick’s big contribution here will be due to Commerce being home to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the NWS, the National Hurricane Center, and other disaster response and science areas, even aside from the longer term research on climate change and so on. Lutnick has made it his mission to slow NOAA’s activities to a crawl, holding up contract approvals and grant decisions while overseeing huge cuts to staffing across the board. The result could be pulses of hundreds or thousands of deaths as weather and climate disasters arrive, with a bit less warning and prep time than a functional NOAA provides.
Every word out of RFK Jr’s mouth seems carefully picked to increase the chances that people die. If he succeeds in hindering vaccine development, rollout, and uptake, on everything from measles to the flu, many thousands of people will suffer the consequences. A study published late in April found that just a 10 percent decline in childhood vaccination rates would yield more than 11 million cases of measles in the US over the next quarter-century.
And that’s before you get to his assault on the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, the death toll from which is going to take years to become at all clear. A 2021 study found that cancer patients had gained more than 14 million life-years since 1980 as a direct result of NCI-funded trials. NIH-funded research has saved many millions of lives over the years, and the proposed $18 billion cut to its budget would slow or stop a simply unconscionable number of research avenues and trials.
Any number of other RFK-directed moves would likely carry death tolls as well, from reduced food inspections to killed pandemic preparedness research. His final tally will likely be difficult to count precisely, but if things continue as they are it is likely in the millions.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Our special 99-0 boy, the supposed voice of reason inside the cult, is the partial or sole author of what are probably the most heinous moves of the entire administration so far. Even aside from his gleeful participation in the disappearances of legal residents and others (which, taken to their extreme, will surely carry their own death toll), he was appointed acting director of USAID in early February and then oversaw its almost complete dismantling.
Even internally, the results of that move and the cuts to other foreign aid are considered appalling. Memos uncovered by ProPublica included warnings to Rubio and others of what it would mean:
One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.
Boston University researchers have set up a tracker to try and keep a real-time record of the toll; as of this writing, it estimates that more than 80,000 adults and 167,000 children have already died as a result of funding cuts from a variety of maladies including malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and both adult and infant HIV-related causes. A modeling study suggested that tens of millions might die from HIV/AIDS, TB, and other causes between 2025 and 2040 if all foreign aid were to stop. And of course, as the US’s top diplomat he is also a full-throated defender of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (though yes, so is the entire administration), where for more than two months no aid including food has been allowed through to a starving and dying population. Taking stock of it all is worth noting again — 99-0.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
It is maybe easy to forget, but the most glaringly public scandal of the administration so far involved the likely deaths of dozens of Yemeni civilians. Hegseth’s boneheaded Signal chats included descriptions of fairly obvious war crimes, and it is unclear exactly how many innocent people have died so far on his watch. That said, his real potential here is simply that he is an incompetent know-nothing, in far over his head at the world’s largest military, and has control (minus the actual launch of nukes, yes) over the most destructive forces known to the world; mixed with Trump’s bluster about invading Panama or Greenland or Canada, would a “Hegseth Inadvertently Starts Hot War” sort of headline at some point in the next couple of years really blow your mind? RFK and Rubio have the likelier path to mass death, perhaps, but Hegseth’s ceiling is in the clouds.
There are other candidates that deserve mention, of course — the nationwide immigration crackdowns, the deregulatory actions at EPA and the deadly pollution they’ll unleash, the kneecapping of the Forest Service as wildfire season ramps up, and so on. There is barely a Cabinet secretary around that hasn’t shown some potential for unleashing death on the rest of us; but when the dust settles, the biggest toll will probably come from that list.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
