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You’ve heard of President Trump’s “board of peace” to compete with the United Nations. Now his administration is considering a global board of health to replace the World Health Organization.
And it could need $2 billion to stand it up, I reported with my colleague Lena Sun in The Washington Post.
That’d be exponentially more than what the country spends on its contributions to the WHO, and the U.S. would get less bang for its buck.
It would be nearly impossible, experts told Lena, for this new group to replicate the global disease surveillance and outbreak monitoring that protect billions of people worldwide.
It also comes after the Trump administration slashed billions of dollars in public health funding in 2025 and eliminated much of the U.S.’s global health assistance programs — namely the U.S. Agency for International Development.
As Atul Gawande, the Harvard Medical School professor and former top-ranking global health administrator, told Lena:
“It’s after the decimation of foreign aid for health, including the dismantling of USAID, and has already cost upward of three-quarters of a million lives,” Gawande said, citing data from a 2025 Lancet study and modeling from Boston University estimating the toll of dismantling USAID. “This is not reversing the damage. It is spending more than we spent on WHO to create an institution that’s unlikely to survive and will certainly accomplish only a fraction of what we did by working together with the entire world.”
So why the zombies? Well, I no longer work at The Washington Post.
My last day was Wednesday. But I’m not quite done with the place. This story with Lena came out after I left the paper. I have one more piece rattling around the editing process that another colleague is shepherding across the finish line.
“Zombie bylines,” as they’re called, are fun. Weird, but fun. Because it means that for a little while longer, I get to be part of The Post’s journalism.
As I’ve shared, I’m headed to Reuters to cover economic policy at the White House. But I hope you’ll keep The Post in your life, too. Reporters like Lena have earned your support.
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Tell me what I ought to dig into. Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. And follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social.
