The ongoing Ebola outbreak in central and East Africa has been exacerbated by the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid and global health organizations, according to public health workers and experts. This 'perfect storm' of funding shortages and reduced workforce capacity has created a strained and fragmented disease prevention and response system, making it harder to contain the outbreak and protect global health.
One of the key issues is the lack of basic medical supplies and equipment, such as masks and hand sanitizers, which are essential for preventing the spread of the disease. Amadou Bocoum, Democratic Republic of Congo country director for the anti-poverty nonprofit CARE, highlights the impact of funding cuts on the availability of these critical supplies.
The Trump administration's decision to shutter the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and cut funding to other global health organizations has had a significant impact on the response to the Ebola outbreak. WIRED spoke to several global health experts who described how these cuts have created a strained and fragmented disease prevention and response system, with a severely reduced workforce already struggling with burnout.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak an emergency of international concern on May 16. As of May 19, there were over 530 confirmed cases and 134 deaths, with both numbers rising quickly. According to the CDC, 25 to 50 percent of people who contract the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola will die from it.
Bocoum emphasizes the importance of a rapid response to contain the outbreak. "People really need to understand that if this is not handled carefully, it will get wild very easily," he says. "It’s really key that we need to react fast to contain it."
The outbreak was first identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri region, which borders South Sudan and Uganda and is known as a thoroughfare for refugees. Confirmed cases have already been reported in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, from people who had traveled there from Congo. Travelers frequently cross the region’s border, especially at this time of year, with thousands of pilgrims expected to travel from Congo to Uganda for an annual event.
In February 2025, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dismantled USAID, the billionaire told Trump administration officials that DOGE had "accidentally" cut funding to Ebola prevention and then restored it. However, as WIRED reported, lifesaving work on Ebola and other infectious disease prevention was not restored. DOGE also slashed the CDC, causing another key global health player to atrophy.
Prior to the DOGE cuts, USAID was a critical part of the DRC’s infectious disease prevention, treatment, and containment policies. The US embassy in Kinshasa, the country’s capital city, noted in 2024 that the agency had provided treatment to 11 million people for deadly diseases like tuberculosis and HIV that year alone, and that it had also played a key role in containing six prior Ebola outbreaks.
A current CDC employee with outbreak experience tells WIRED, "We're missing a huge player in the response right now. We used to coordinate really, really closely during these outbreaks with USAID because we may be able to get public health responders out and public health response out immediately... but USAID could get materials and funding out rapidly, and that was one of their specialties."
The CDC did not respond to questions about how funding cuts had impacted its response. However, a CDC spokesperson referred WIRED to a statement the agency posted about its international response.
The CDC has teams on the ground working with the WHO to coordinate a global response. However, the employee says, the team’s capacity has been diminished by cuts and the loss of leadership. "They will get burnt out. They will not be able to work 16-hour days for two months in a row, and they will need backfill," the employee says. "They will need people to come in and roll on and off the response to assist them, and that pool that they have to pull from is much, much smaller than it was just a year ago."
Infectious disease physician Joia Mukherjee, a Harvard Medical School professor and clinical advisor to the medical nonprofit Partners In Health, believes that the outbreak "unequivocally" could have been caught sooner, had US aid not been slashed. Other experts concur. "When funding disruptions affect surveillance systems, workforce capacity, laboratory operations, vaccination efforts, infection prevention, and community-based response activities, it becomes harder to identify cases early and mount rapid containment measures," says Anna Tate, a former biosecurity strategy lead at US Health and Human Services who now leads domestic programs for the global health nonprofit Project HOPE.
Tate says there’s a "broader lesson" to be learned from the debacle. "Outbreak response capacity cannot be built overnight during a crisis," she says. While the CDC does have intensive monitoring systems, and travel bans have already been put in place, experts are concerned that the outbreak could spread—including to the US. "If this is not under control immediately, we will have cases here in no time," says one former deputy assistant administrator for global health at USAID.
This 'perfect storm' of funding shortages and reduced workforce capacity has created a strained and fragmented disease prevention and response system, making it harder to contain the outbreak and protect global health. The impact of these cuts on the availability of critical medical supplies and equipment, as well as the reduced capacity of global health organizations and the CDC, has created a situation where the outbreak is more difficult to control and manage.
