Ebola Is Only the Beginning

A health worker in Bunia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, June 2026 Gradel Muyisa Mumbere / Reuters STEPHANIE PSAKI is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and was U. Coordinator for Global Health Security at the National Security Council from 2023 to 2025. More & Download Print unlock this feature or Sign in. Save Sign in and save to read later Copy This is a subscriber-only feature. or Sign in. Chicago MLA APSA APA Chicago Cite not available at the moment MLA Cite not available at the moment APSA Cite not available at the moment APA Cite not available at the moment Request reprint permissions here. The United States’ withdrawal from the WHO and dissolution of the U. Agency for International Development almost certainly weakened the capacity of both the WHO and the Congolese government to respond to the Ebola outbreak. Nicholas Enrich, a career civil servant who briefly led USAID’s global health work in the early months of the Trump administration, has described in his book Into the Wood Chipper how he tried to convince politically appointed USAID leaders to restart contracts for Ebola response efforts that were canceled amid an outbreak of the disease in Uganda that began in January 2025. Although the Trump administration has said that those programs resumed, former USAID partners, including the International Rescue Committee and Oxfam, have confirmed publicly that Washington stopped funding their health programs in eastern Congo in 2025. The Trump administration also fired most of USAID’s health security staff, eliminated a National Security Council team formed after the 2014 Ebola outbreak to focus on health security and biodefense, and left the leadership position in the congressionally mandated White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy vacant for a year. It terminated thousands of staff positions at the U. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including entire branches of the CDC’s Global Health Center, and prohibited the agency from communicating with the WHO. After all these cuts and restrictions, Ebola was able to circulate for four months without U. S. experts or partner organizations sounding any alarm bells. The Trump administration has insisted its actions have not affected the detection or containment of Ebola: a White House spokesperson asserted instead, in May, that USAID cuts had made the “entire global health apparatus more efficient and responsive.” Yet it is hard to believe that closing offices, firing government staff, and terminating disease detection and response partnerships has nothing to do with the fact that this Ebola outbreak is one of the worst in history.