Jul 01, Kathmandu - More than 14 million of the world’s most vulnerable people could die by 2030 as the Donald Trump administration cuts US foreign aid, with a third of them likely to be young children, a study predicted on Tuesday.

The study, published in the prestigious Lancet journal, was published this week in Spain as world and business leaders gather for a United Nations summit in the hope of bolstering the struggling aid sector.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was providing more than 40 percent of global humanitarian funding until Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.

Two weeks later, Elon Musk, then a close adviser to Trump and the world’s richest man, described the agency as “putting it through a wood-cutting machine.”

Davide Rossella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and co-author of the study, warned that the funding cuts “risk abruptly halting and reversing two decades of progress in the health of populations at risk.”

“The resulting impact for many low- and middle-income countries is comparable to the scale of a global pandemic or major armed conflict,” he said in a statement.

Looking at data from 133 countries, an international team of researchers estimated that USAID funding prevented 91.8 million deaths in developing countries from 2001 to 2021.

This is more than the estimated number of deaths in World War II, the deadliest conflict in history.

The researchers also used modeling to predict how the US government's figures announced earlier this year would affect mortality rates by 83 percent.

The reduction is estimated to have prevented more than 14 million deaths by 2030. Of that number, more than 4.5 million were children under the age of five, or about seven child deaths a year.

For comparison, it is estimated that about 10 million soldiers were killed during World War I. Researchers have determined that programs supported by USAID are associated with a 15 percent reduction in deaths from all causes.

The decline in deaths for children under five was twice as rapid, at 32 percent. USAID funding was found to be particularly effective in reducing preventable deaths from disease.