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After DOGE cut off USAID’s money last year, the New York Times flew columnist Nicholas Kristof to South Sudan to locate dying children and give the fallout names and faces. He located them. He named them. And he challenged Elon Musk to come look those children in the eyes.
What Kristof failed to note — in that column, and evidently every other — is that some four hundred thousand people had died in South Sudan back when the aid was still flowing. He also said nothing about the twenty-five billion dollars in oil revenue the United Nations recorded as diverted from basic services. He said nothing about the president’s twelve-year-old son sitting on a twenty-five percent stake in a holding company. And he said nothing about the country itself being, in the New York Times’ own 2014 phrasing, “an American creation.”
That is the story worth telling.
South Sudan’s independence was a twenty-year American political campaign that brought all types of unlikely political and cultural allies behind one objective: breaking the south from Khartoum. When the country was born in 2011, then-President Obama called it a moment of promise. It was more like a cash cow of profit. USAID subsequently hired a contractor for nearly ninety-three million dollars to build a functioning government from scratch. The consultants didn’t merely advise — they governed. They built the central bank. They oversaw the oil revenues.
An inspector general’s audit concluded the flagship governance program had no real way to measure whether it was working — it was gaming its own metrics and lacked any fuel-tracking controls. Five months later, South Sudan descended into civil war. Four hundred thousand people died. In 2017, during peak USAID spending, famine was declared — the first anywhere since Somalia in 2011.
Today the oil is pumped by state-owned Chinese and Malaysian companies; no Western firm remains. The divestment drives that once helped birth South Sudan pushed those firms out; BRICS nations filled the vacuum, facing no comparable human rights pressure. Every barrel travels north through Sudan — the country South Sudan voted to escape — which pockets transit fees on every shipment.
This isn’t a story about what happened when the money dried up. It’s a story about what happened while the money still flowed — and about who chose not to report it.
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