MxM News

Quick Hit:

The U.S. Department of Labor has scrapped nearly $600 million in foreign aid grants, including $10 million aimed at promoting “gender equity in the Mexican workplace.”

Key Details:

• Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling were credited with delivering $237 million in savings through the latest round of canceled programs.

• Among the defunded initiatives: $12.2 million for “worker empowerment” efforts in South America, $6.25 million to improve labor rights in Central American agriculture, and $5 million to promote women’s workplace participation in West Africa.

• The Department of Government Efficiency described the cuts as necessary to realign U.S. labor policy with national interests and applauded the elimination of all 69 international grants managed by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs.

Diving Deeper:

The U.S. Department of Labor on Wednesday canceled $577 million in foreign aid grants, including a controversial $10 million program aimed at promoting “gender equity in the Mexican workplace,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The sweeping decision to terminate all 69 active international labor grants comes as part of a larger restructuring effort led by John Clark, a senior DOL official appointed during the Trump administration.

Clark directed the department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) to shut down its entire grant portfolio, citing a “lack of alignment with agency priorities and national interest.” The memo explaining the cancellations was first reported by The Washington Post and highlights a broader shift in federal labor policy toward domestic-focused initiatives.

Among the eliminated grants were high-dollar projects that had drawn criticism from watchdog groups for years. These included $12.2 million designated for “worker empowerment in South America,” $6.25 million targeting labor conditions in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and $5 million to elevate women’s workplace participation in West Africa. Other defunded programs involved $4.3 million to support foreign migrant workers in Malaysia, $3 million to improve social protections for internal migrants in Bangladesh, and $3 million to promote “safe and inclusive work environments” in Lesotho.

The Department of Government Efficiency, also involved in the review, labeled the grants as “America Last” initiatives, and pointed to the lack of measurable outcomes and limited benefits to American workers. The agency commended the leadership of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling for securing $237 million in savings during this round alone.

The cuts mark the second major cost-saving move under Chavez-DeRemer’s leadership in as many weeks. Just days earlier, she canceled an additional $33 million in funding, including a $1.5 million grant focused on increasing transparency in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector. Chavez-DeRemer, a former Republican congresswoman from Oregon, was confirmed as Labor Secretary on March 11th by a bipartisan Senate vote of 67-32.

Poor quality modeling is being used by WHO and a G20 panel to project our risk of infectious disease pandemics and the financial requirements to address them.

Previously considered a once in a century event, major pandemics are now predicted to occur every 20 to 40 years.

Global authorities view this as an existential threat, and have called for a coordinated international response led by the World Health Organization or the WHO…but not everyone agrees with this perspective.

Researchers from the University of Leeds, including policy experts, Professor Garrett Brown and Dr David Bell, are challenging the assumptions behind these dire warnings. They question whether the massive resources being allocated to pandemic preparedness are truly supported by the evidence.

One of their critiques centers on a chart frequently cited by the WHO, which appears to show a dramatic increase in the outbreaks over the past two decades. Brown and Bell say the chart omits crucial historical context and misrepresents today’s health threats.

Long-standing diseases like yellow fever, influenza, cholera, and the plague have been steadily brought under control, and outbreaks of diseases like monkey pox or natural coronaviruses have likely remained consistent over time, but what has changed, they say, is our improved diagnostic technology enabling us to distinguish diseases more readily than ever before.

Essentially, as surveillance increases, so does the likelihood of finding diseases that may have existed but previously went unnoticed.

In reality, mortality from infectious diseases has been declining for decades, thanks to advances in hygiene, nutrition, medical treatments and reduced poverty, even with COVID 2020, to 2021, mortality remained below 2010 levels.

The WHO has identified nine priority diseases for research and development, yet five of these diseases have never caused more than 1000 recorded deaths in history, aside from COVID 19, whose origins remain a topic of debate, the rest of the diseases are largely confined to specific regions, primarily in parts of Africa.

On the list the WHO also includes a hypothetical outbreak that they call disease X – it’s a placeholder for an unknown outbreak that could emerge in the future.

And while it’s intended to promote vigilance, its severity is entirely speculative and can encourage modelers to use catastrophic scenarios to estimate future risk, causing governments to make fear-based policy decisions based on little evidence.

Brown and Bell are concerned that so much focus on speculative pandemic preparedness is diverting critical resources away from urgent health issues such as tuberculosis and malaria.

Tuberculosis alone kills 1.3 million people annually, while malaria accounts for over 600,000 deaths, mostly among children.

Although testing and treatment for these diseases is relatively inexpensive, their funding could be at risk as more resources are directed towards hypothetical future threats in 2022 a high level, independent panel was convened by the G20 to review our risk of pandemics and the financial requirements to address it.

But again, the two main pieces of evidence the panel relied on to draw its conclusions grossly exaggerated the actual risk of a pandemic.

The first report provided by the G20 panel analysed the major outbreaks of the past two decades, and it was poorly referenced, excluding Covid-19 and the 2009 swine flu, which caused fewer deaths than seasonal flu, the total number of deaths from these events over the last 20 years was under 26,000 a relatively insignificant figure in the context of global disease burdens.

The second report was from Metabiota, a former private. US based corporation, the two graphs provided appear to show an exponential increase in recorded outbreaks. Yet the researchers point out that this trend aligns with the development of modern diagnostic technologies, which naturally increase the detection of previously unnoticed diseases, indeed, the absence of recorded disease outbreaks in the 60s coincides with a lack of technology and communication systems needed to document them.

Metabiota report also included data from an article published in the British Medical Journal in 2023 it shows the rise in mortality outbreaks over the last decade is almost entirely due to Ebola outbreaks – and when these Ebola deaths are excluded from Metabiota data – the mortality trend over the last two decades shows a clear decline – a finding that contradicts the narrative of increasing pandemic risk, the financial demands of the pandemic agenda are another concern.

The G20 panel relied on a report released by the World Bank and the WHO in 2022, which sought $31.1 billion in funding, and an additional World Bank report, using poorly supportive data, sought another 10 to 11 billion annually.

On top this report referenced a 2020 study by Maryanne, which also claimed to show an increase in the frequency of disease outbreaks, but closer inspection reveals the opposite, a sharp decline in disease outbreaks between 2010 and 2020 – and like the Metabiota report – this World Bank report overlooks the fact that the development of new diagnostic tests could account for any observed increase In disease outbreaks since 1960.

Finally, the WHO report exaggerates the economic impact of outbreaks by including extraordinary costs of actions, such as stimulus packages, while downplaying the costs of endemic diseases used for comparison.

This creates a false impression that these relatively low fatality outbreaks were costlier than other diseases, and that such costs could be fully avoided while preparing for pandemics is undoubtedly important.

Brown and Bell argue that the narrative of escalating pandemic threats is misleading. They suggest that the risk from naturally occurring disease outbreaks may actually be decreasing with the rise in detected outbreaks, primarily a result of better diagnostic tools.

Researchers warn that essential global priorities such as cancer, tuberculosis, malaria and nutrition support could be neglected. For example, funding for nutrition development dropped 10% in 2020 and has yet to return to pre pandemic levels.

If resources continue to be diverted towards speculative future scenarios, proven efforts to combat the world’s deadliest diseases may be overshadowed and ultimately cause more harm than good.