“We are no longer able to get some supplies,” Amadou Bokoum, country director of anti-poverty nonprofit CARE in the Democratic Republic of Congo, tells WIRED. “For this reason, we cannot respond immediately.”
Baucom says essential medical equipment like masks and hand sanitizer, as well as components needed for testing, are in short supply due to funding cuts.
WIRED spoke with more than a half-dozen global health experts who described how the Trump administration’s move to close the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), amid other funding cuts, created an increasingly strained and fragmented disease prevention and response system in the run-up to the Ebola outbreak, a system in which a severely reduced workforce was already stretched thin.
“We are very far behind in this outbreak,” says a current staffer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who has experience with outbreaks. “This is a perfect storm.”
The World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak an emergency of “international concern” on May 16. There is no vaccine or treatment for this strain of Ebola virus, known as Bundibugyo. There have been more than 530 confirmed cases and 134 deaths as of May 19, and both numbers are rising rapidly. According to the CDC, 25 to 50 percent of people who become infected with the strain will die from it.
“People really need to understand that if this isn’t handled carefully, it will get unruly very easily,” Baucom says. “It’s really important that we need to respond quickly to contain it.”
The outbreak was first identified in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an area bordering South Sudan and Uganda and known as a refugee route. There have already been confirmed cases in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, in people who traveled there from Congo. Travelers frequently cross the region’s borders, especially at this time of year, when thousands of pilgrims are expected to travel from Congo to Uganda for an annual event. While Uganda postponed the celebration over Ebola fears, it is not clear how quickly information about the cancellation will spread, especially in rural communities.
In February 2025, when Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency dismantled USAID, the billionaire told Trump administration officials that the department had “accidentally” cut off funding for Ebola prevention and then restored it. However, as WIRED reported at the time, the life-saving work fighting Ebola and other infectious diseases has not been restored. DOGE also downgraded the CDC, causing another major player in global health to atrophy. In April 2025, the Trump administration instructed a US National Institute of Health facility studying Ebola to halt its research.
Before the DOGE cuts, USAID was an important part of infectious disease prevention, treatment, and containment policies in the DRC. The U.S. Embassy in Kensha, the country’s capital, noted in 2024 that the agency provided treatment for 11 million people for deadly diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV that year alone, and that it also played a key role in containing six previous Ebola outbreaks.
“We’re missing a big player in the response right now,” a current CDC staffer with outbreak experience told WIRED. “We used to coordinate really closely during outbreaks with USAID because we might be able to get public health responders and public health response out right away – that’s one of our jobs and goals in these outbreaks at CDC – but USAID can get materials and funding quickly, and that’s been one of their specialties.”
