Like Ebola the epidemic is raging in central and eastern Africa, public health workers say response was blocked by the Trump administration cuts to foreign aid and global health organizations.
“We are no longer able to get supplies,” Amadou Bocoum, Democratic Republic of Congo country director for anti-poverty nonprofit CARE, told WIRED. “For this reason, we are not able to react immediately. »
Bocoum says basic medical equipment like masks and hand sanitizers, as well as components needed for testing, are in short supply due to budget cuts.
WIRED spoke with more than a half-dozen global health experts who described how the Trump administration’s decision to close the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), amid other funding cuts, has created a strained and increasingly fragmented disease prevention and response system in the lead-up to this Ebola outbreak, in which a dramatically reduced workforce is already battling burnout.
“We are way behind in this outbreak,” says a current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employee with outbreak experience. “It’s a perfect storm.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak an emergency “of international concern” on May 16. There is no vaccine or treatment for this strain of Ebola, known as Bundibugyo. There were more than 530 confirmed cases and 134 deaths as of May 19, and both figures are rising rapidly. According to the CDC, 25 to 50 percent people who contract this strain will die from it.
“People really need to understand that if this isn’t handled carefully, it has the potential to spiral out of control very easily,” Bocoum says. “It’s really critical that we respond quickly to contain it.”
The outbreak was first identified in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a region bordering South Sudan and Uganda and known as a gateway for refugees. Cases have already been confirmed in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, in people traveling from Congo. Travelers frequently cross the region’s border, especially at this time of year, when thousands of pilgrims are expected from Congo to Uganda for an annual event. While Uganda postponed the celebration Due to Ebola fears, it is unclear how quickly news of the cancellation will spread, particularly in rural communities.
In February 2025, as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) was dismantling USAID, the billionaire said Trump administration officials said DOGE “accidentally” cut funding for Ebola prevention and then restored it. However, like WIRED reported at the time, prevention work against Ebola and other infectious diseases had not been restored. DOGE too cut the CDC, causing another key player in global health to atrophy. In April 2025, the Trump administration tasked a U.S. National Institutes of Health facility to study Ebola with stop searching.
Prior to the DOGE cuts, USAID played a critical role in the DRC’s infectious disease prevention, treatment, and containment policies. The American embassy in Kinasha, the country’s capital, note by 2024, 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 previous Ebola outbreaks.
“We’re currently missing a major player in the response,” the current CDC employee with outbreak experience told WIRED. “We used to coordinate very, very closely during these outbreaks with USAID, because we might be able to get the public health responders out and have a public health response immediately – that’s one of our tasks and goals in these outbreaks at CDC – but USAID could get equipment and funding quickly, and that was one of their specialties.
“In a perfect world,” they added, “WHO could resume [slack]. But they are not funded by the United States either. So we’ve removed two of the main ways people could get support during this outbreak. » The United States withdrew of the WHO in January 2026, completing a process begun when Trump issued a decree on the first day of his second term, contributing to significant funding shortfalls and staff reductions.
The CDC did not respond to questions about how funding reductions would impact its response.
CDC spokesperson Melissa Dibble referred to WIRED a declaration the agency published an article on its international response.
The CDC has teams on the ground working with WHO to coordinate a global response. However, the employee said, the team’s capacity has been diminished by cutbacks and loss of leadership. “They will burn out. They will not be able to work 16 hours a day for two months straight and they will need backfill,” explains the employee. “They’re going to need people to come in and join the response to help them, and the pool they have to draw from is much, much smaller than it was just a year ago.” Other teams that would traditionally be part of the response, they add, are not currently joining, “because they are already so understaffed in their own work that they cannot do it safely.”
Joia Mukherjee, an infectious disease specialist, professor at Harvard Medical School and clinical advisor to the nonprofit medical organization Partners In Health, believes the outbreak “unequivocally” could have been detected earlier if U.S. aid had not been cut.
Other experts agree. “When funding disruptions impact surveillance systems, workforce capacity, laboratory operations, vaccination efforts, infection prevention, and community response activities, it becomes more difficult to identify cases early and implement rapid containment measures,” says Anna Tate, former manager of biosecurity strategy at US Health and Human Services, who now leads national programs for the global health nonprofit Project HOPE.
Tate says there is a “broader lesson” to be learned from the debacle. “Outbreak response capacity cannot be strengthened overnight during a crisis,” she says.
Even though the CDC has intensive surveillance systems and travel bans have already been put in place, experts fear the outbreak will spread, including within the United States. “If the situation is not brought under control immediately, we will have cases here in no time,” says a former deputy assistant administrator for global health at USAID.