Making sure all sob stories are fed to the masses, the liberal media are pulling out all the stops to defend and justify the need to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in place (and offer no suggestions for reform). Friday’s NBC Nightly News sent its China-based correspondent Janis Mackey Frayer to Cambodia to declare innocent Cambodians will die without USAID funding for nonprofits to remove landmines from the Vietnam War.
Anchor Lester Holt had the foreboding tease: “We’re back in a moment with the human cost of cutting foreign aid. We take you to Cambodia with life and death consequences.”
Ah, so we’ve moved from kids in Sudan are going to die en masse if they don’t get their only meal (and with the U.N. seemingly nowhere to be found or mentioned) to....people will die in Cambodia due to 50-year-old landmines?
Holt cued to Frayer with the declaration that there’s “chaos...around the world” because of the Trump administration’s desire to shrink the size of government.
This is from Friday’s ‘NBC Nightly News’ – USAID is apparently funding demining for unexploded U.S. landmines in Cambodia from the Vietnam War, so the argument here is that the Trump administration is going to be killing people.... pic.twitter.com/hGZvfr6djv
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 17, 2025
“The delicate and dangerous task of clearing unexploded bombs in Cambodia. Deminers using simple tools and every day finding something,” Frayer began ahead of an interaction with Bill Morse, the head of a mysterious, unnamed nonprofit (Cambodian Self-Help Demining) that receives USAID money to defuse the mines.
After showing a mine being blown up, she explained that “[m]any of the munitions here are American dropped in rampant U.S. bombing during the Vietnam War” and thus the U.S. has “for decades...helped to clean up the mess until President Trump froze all foreign aid for 90 days.”
Of course, Morse was ready to drop the money quote for NBC about what will happen without USAID keeping CSHD funded: “They die. They don’t have a job. It’s going to affect everybody. Nobody knows quite what to do right now.”
Frayer would later say 65,000 Cambodians are “maimed or worse” by such mines.
Frayer added America “spends about $72 billion a year on foreign aid, much of it delivered through USAID, which was abruptly dismantled, upending every kind of program on the planet, from HIV/AIDS treatment to fighting hunger though a U.S. judge ruled the White House can’t cancel funding already in place.”
Adding there’s a “realtime impact of the stop work order” with “charities facing collapse” (and thus raising questions about whom do they answer to for accountability if they’re all-but government agencies), Frayer fretted “teams are having to scale back, so fewer bombs are getting cleared” with it taking “over two months to clear” just half of a nine-and-a-half-acre field.
She closed on an ominous note: “Already, China is filling funding gaps, pledging $4.4 million to keep demining going here and decades of work still ahead.”
To see the relevant NBC transcript from February 14, click here.
