8,000 pregnant women may die in just 90 days because of US aid cuts

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8,000 pregnant women may die in just 90 days because of US aid cuts

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time in delivering a slew of executive orders, memos, and work notices to federal employees. On February 18, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to make IVF more accessible to people in the US. In some ways, the move isn’t surprising—Trump has expressed his support for the technology in the past, and even called himself “the father of IVF” while on the campaign trail last year. Making IVF more affordable and accessible should give people more options when it comes to family planning and reproductive freedom more generally. But the move comes after a barrage of actions by the new administration that are hitting reproductive care hard for people around the world. On January 20, his first day in office, Trump ordered a “90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance” for such programs to be assessed. By January 24, a “stop work” memo issued by the State Department brought US-funded aid programs around the world to a halt. Recent estimates suggest that more than 8,000 women will die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth over the next 90 days if the funding is not reinstated. On January 24 Trump also reinstated the global gag rule—a policy that requires nongovernmental organizations receiving US health funding to agree that they will not offer abortion counseling and care. This move alone immediately stripped organizations of the funding they need to perform their work. MSI Reproductive Choices, which offers support for reproductive health care in 36 countries, lost $14 million as a result, says Anna Mackay, who manages donor-funded programs at the organization. “Over 2 million women and girls would have received contraceptive services with that money,” she says. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a 2025 budget of $42.8 billion to spend on foreign assistance, which covers everything from humanitarian aid and sanitation to programs promoting gender equality and economic growth in countries around the world. But the “stop work” memo froze that funding for 90 days. The impacts were felt immediately and are still rippling out. Clinical trials were halted. Jobs were lost. Health programs were shut down. “I think this is going to have a devastating impact on the global health architecture,” says Thoai Ngo at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “USAID is the major foreign funder for global health … I’m afraid that there isn’t [another government] that can fill the gap.” Reproductive health care is likely to lose out as affected governments and health organizations try to reorganize their resources, says Ngo: “In times of crisis … women and girls tend to be deprioritized in terms of access to health and social services.” Without information on and access to a range of contraceptive options, unintended pregnancies result. These have the potential to limit the freedoms of people who become pregnant. And they can have far-reaching economic impacts, since access to contraception can improve education rates and career outcomes. And the health consequences can be devastating. Unintended pregnancies are more likely to be ended with abortions—potentially unsafe ones. Maternal death rates are high in regions that lack adequate resources. A maternal death occurred every two minutes in 2020. “It’s difficult to overstate how catastrophic this freeze has been over the last several weeks,” says Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on global sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Every single day that the freeze is in place, there are 130,000 women who are being denied contraceptive care,” she says. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that should USAID funding be frozen for the full 90 days, around 11.7 million women and girls would lose access to contraceptive care, and 4.2 million of them would experience unintended pregnancies. Of those, “8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth,” says Friedrich-Karnik. “By denying people access to contraception, not only are you denying them tools for their bodily autonomy—you are really risking their lives,” she says. “Thousands more women will die down the road.” “USAID plays such a central role in supporting these life-saving programs,” says Ngo. “The picture is bleak.” Even online sources of information on contraceptives are being affected by the funding freeze. Ben Bellows is a chief business officer at Nivi, a digital health company that develops chatbots to deliver health information to people via WhatsApp. “Two million users have used the bot,” he says. He and his team have been working on a project to deliver information on contraceptive options and family planning to women in India, and they have been looking to incorporate AI into their bot. The project was funded by a company that, in turn, is funded by USAID. Like the funding, the work is “frozen,” says Bellows. “We’ve slowed [hiring] and we’ve slowed some of the tech development because of the freeze [on USAID],” he says. “It’s bad [for] the individuals, it’s bad [for] the companies that are trying to operate in these markets, and it’s bad [for] public health outcomes.” Reproductive health and freedoms are also likely to be affected by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been in the administration’s crosshairs, as has the Food and Drug Administration. After all, the FDA regulates drugs and medical devices in the US, including contraceptives. The CDC collects and shares important data on sexual and reproductive health. And the NIH supports vital research on reproductive health and contraception. The CDC also funds health programs in low-income countries like Ethiopia. Following Trump’s executive order, the country’s ministry of health terminated the contracts of more than 5,000 health workers whose salaries were supported by the CDC as well as USAID. “That’s midwives and nurses working in rural health posts,” says Mackay. “We’re turning up to support these staff and provide them with sexual reproductive health training and make sure they’ve got the contraceptives, and there’s just no one at the facility.” So, yes, it is great news if the Trump administration can find a way to make IVF more accessible. But, as Mackay points out, “it’s increasing reproductive choice in one direction.” Now read the rest of The Checkup Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive Last November, two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, 10 US states voted on abortion rights. Seven of them voted to extend and protect access. My colleague Rhiannon Williams reported on the immediate aftermath of the decision that reversed Roe v. Wade. Fertility rates are falling around the world, in almost every country. IVF is great, but it won’t save us from a looming fertility crisis. Gender equality and family-friendly policies are much more likely to be effective. Decades of increasingly successful IVF treatments have caused millions of embryos to be stored in cryopreservation tanks around the world. In some cases, they can’t be donated, used, or destroyed and appear to be stuck in limbo “forever.” Ever come across the term “women of childbearing age”? The insidious idea that women’s bodies are, above all else, vessels for growing children has plenty of negative consequences for us all. But it has also set back scientific research and health policy. There are other WhatsApp-based approaches to improving access to health information in India. Accredited social health activists in the country are using the platform to counter medical misinformation and superstitions around pregnancy. From around the web The US Food and Drug Administration assesses the efficacy and toxicity of experimental medicines before they are approved. It should also consider their “financial toxicity,” given that medical bills can fall on the shoulders of patients themselves, argue a group of US doctors. (The New England Journal of Medicine) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new US secretary of health and human services, has vowed to investigate the country’s childhood vaccination schedule. During his confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago, he promised not to change the schedule. (Associated Press) Some scientists have been altering their published work without telling anyone. Such “stealth corrections” threaten scientific integrity, say a group of researchers from Europe and the US. (Learned Publishing) The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired several people who were working on the federal response to the bird flu outbreak. Apparently the agency is now trying to hire them back. (NBC News) Could your next pet be a glowing rabbit? This startup is using CRISPR to “level up” pets. Their goal is to eventually create a real-life unicorn. (Wired)

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time in delivering a slew of executive orders, memos, and work notices to federal employees.

On February 18, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to make IVF more accessible to people in the US. In some ways, the move isn’t surprising—Trump has expressed his support for the technology in the past, and even called himself “the father of IVF” while on the campaign trail last year.

Making IVF more affordable and accessible should give people more options when it comes to family planning and reproductive freedom more generally. But the move comes after a barrage of actions by the new administration that are hitting reproductive care hard for people around the world. On January 20, his first day in office, Trump ordered a “90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance” for such programs to be assessed. By January 24, a “stop work” memo issued by the State Department brought US-funded aid programs around the world to a halt.

Recent estimates suggest that more than 8,000 women will die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth over the next 90 days if the funding is not reinstated.

On January 24 Trump also reinstated the global gag rule—a policy that requires nongovernmental organizations receiving US health funding to agree that they will not offer abortion counseling and care. This move alone immediately stripped organizations of the funding they need to perform their work. MSI Reproductive Choices, which offers support for reproductive health care in 36 countries, lost $14 million as a result, says Anna Mackay, who manages donor-funded programs at the organization. “Over 2 million women and girls would have received contraceptive services with that money,” she says.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a 2025 budget of $42.8 billion to spend on foreign assistance, which covers everything from humanitarian aid and sanitation to programs promoting gender equality and economic growth in countries around the world. But the “stop work” memo froze that funding for 90 days.

The impacts were felt immediately and are still rippling out. Clinical trials were halted. Jobs were lost. Health programs were shut down.

“I think this is going to have a devastating impact on the global health architecture,” says Thoai Ngo at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “USAID is the major foreign funder for global health … I’m afraid that there isn’t [another government] that can fill the gap.”

Reproductive health care is likely to lose out as affected governments and health organizations try to reorganize their resources, says Ngo: “In times of crisis … women and girls tend to be deprioritized in terms of access to health and social services.”

Without information on and access to a range of contraceptive options, unintended pregnancies result. These have the potential to limit the freedoms of people who become pregnant. And they can have far-reaching economic impacts, since access to contraception can improve education rates and career outcomes.

And the health consequences can be devastating. Unintended pregnancies are more likely to be ended with abortions—potentially unsafe ones. Maternal death rates are high in regions that lack adequate resources. A maternal death occurred every two minutes in 2020.

“It’s difficult to overstate how catastrophic this freeze has been over the last several weeks,” says Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on global sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Every single day that the freeze is in place, there are 130,000 women who are being denied contraceptive care,” she says.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that should USAID funding be frozen for the full 90 days, around 11.7 million women and girls would lose access to contraceptive care, and 4.2 million of them would experience unintended pregnancies. Of those, “8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth,” says Friedrich-Karnik.

“By denying people access to contraception, not only are you denying them tools for their bodily autonomy—you are really risking their lives,” she says. “Thousands more women will die down the road.”

“USAID plays such a central role in supporting these life-saving programs,” says Ngo. “The picture is bleak.”

Even online sources of information on contraceptives are being affected by the funding freeze. Ben Bellows is a chief business officer at Nivi, a digital health company that develops chatbots to deliver health information to people via WhatsApp. “Two million users have used the bot,” he says.

He and his team have been working on a project to deliver information on contraceptive options and family planning to women in India, and they have been looking to incorporate AI into their bot. The project was funded by a company that, in turn, is funded by USAID. Like the funding, the work is “frozen,” says Bellows.

“We’ve slowed [hiring] and we’ve slowed some of the tech development because of the freeze [on USAID],” he says. “It’s bad [for] the individuals, it’s bad [for] the companies that are trying to operate in these markets, and it’s bad [for] public health outcomes.”

Reproductive health and freedoms are also likely to be affected by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been in the administration’s crosshairs, as has the Food and Drug Administration.

After all, the FDA regulates drugs and medical devices in the US, including contraceptives. The CDC collects and shares important data on sexual and reproductive health. And the NIH supports vital research on reproductive health and contraception.

The CDC also funds health programs in low-income countries like Ethiopia. Following Trump’s executive order, the country’s ministry of health terminated the contracts of more than 5,000 health workers whose salaries were supported by the CDC as well as USAID.

“That’s midwives and nurses working in rural health posts,” says Mackay. “We’re turning up to support these staff and provide them with sexual reproductive health training and make sure they’ve got the contraceptives, and there’s just no one at the facility.”

So, yes, it is great news if the Trump administration can find a way to make IVF more accessible. But, as Mackay points out, “it’s increasing reproductive choice in one direction.”

Now read the rest of The Checkup

From around the web

The US Food and Drug Administration assesses the efficacy and toxicity of experimental medicines before they are approved. It should also consider their “financial toxicity,” given that medical bills can fall on the shoulders of patients themselves, argue a group of US doctors. (The New England Journal of Medicine)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new US secretary of health and human services, has vowed to investigate the country’s childhood vaccination schedule. During his confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago, he promised not to change the schedule. (Associated Press)

Some scientists have been altering their published work without telling anyone. Such “stealth corrections” threaten scientific integrity, say a group of researchers from Europe and the US. (Learned Publishing)

The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired several people who were working on the federal response to the bird flu outbreak. Apparently the agency is now trying to hire them back. (NBC News)

Could your next pet be a glowing rabbit? This startup is using CRISPR to “level up” pets. Their goal is to eventually create a real-life unicorn. (Wired)

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AI Infrastructure’s Next Phase: Capital, Power and the Right to Build

Capital Is Becoming Infrastructure Samsung’s $1 billion commitment to Helix Digital Infrastructure offered one of the clearest examples yet of how the capital structure surrounding AI data centers is changing. Helix was formed by KKR as an AI infrastructure platform with more than $10 billion already committed by founding investors including KKR, the Kuwait Investment Authority, NVIDIA and Vistra. Samsung’s new commitment pushes that capital base still higher. But the composition of the partnership may be more significant than another billion dollars being added to the AI infrastructure ledger. Helix is intended to invest across hyperscale data centers, power generation and transmission, fiber and other connectivity infrastructure. Samsung, meanwhile, brings capabilities extending across advanced technology, construction, energy storage and cooling. This is not simply capital chasing data center returns. It increasingly resembles an attempt to assemble the data center, energy and technology supply chain inside a single investment ecosystem. That distinction is important, because one of the defining problems of the current buildout is that capital by itself does not produce capacity. Billions of dollars can be committed long before transformers arrive, transmission is constructed, generation is secured or a campus is commissioned. The increasingly valuable infrastructure platform is therefore the one capable of controlling more of those dependencies. Lambda demonstrated another side of that evolution last week with the closing of a $1.008 billion delayed-draw term loan supporting three committed customer deployments across multiple data centers. The financing received investment-grade ratings from Morningstar DBRS and Moody’s and carries a 6.78% fixed interest rate. More importantly, it is secured by both the GPU infrastructure being financed and contracted cash flows from two investment-grade customers. Capital is drawn as infrastructure reaches commissioning milestones rather than simply being handed to Lambda upfront. That begins to make AI compute look less like speculative

Micro data center company rolls out stackable data center for edge and AI

Stack runs on Zella Sense, a monitoring, control, and automation layer built into every Zella DC cabinet. It tracks power, cooling, servers, and suspicious activity, while monitoring things like temperature, humidity, smoke, motion, water, and doors through sensors. The system runs over SNMP, Modbus, and a full API, with email alerting and local, LDAP, RADIUS, or TACACS+ authentication. That means an edge location can be remotely monitored without requiring local staff. It also comes with access control and fire protection. Zella Stack is an indoor-only offering. Zella DC sells Zella Outback as its standalone, ruggedized outdoor micro data center, and the company says an outdoor version of Stack is planned for the second half of 2027.

Data Center Jobs: Engineering, Construction, Commissioning, Sales, Field Service and Facility Tech Jobs Available in Major Data Center Hotspots

Each month Data Center Frontier, in partnership with Pkaza, posts some of the hottest data center career opportunities in the market. Here’s a look at some of the latest data center jobs posted on the Data Center Frontier jobs board, powered by Pkaza Critical Facilities Recruiting. Looking for Data Center Candidates? Check out Pkaza’s Active Candidate / Featured Candidate Hotlist Lead Mechanical Engineer – Data Center DesignNew York, NY/Remote This position is also available in: Denver, CO; Indianapolis, IN; Cedar Rapids, IA; Austin, TX; White Plains, NY; Dallas, TX; Richmond, VA; Ashburn, VA; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Phoenix, AZ; Salt Lake City, UT; Kansas City, MO; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA or San Jose, CA. Our client is a leading engineering design and commissioning company that is a subject matter expert in the data center space. They will provide design coordination and construction administration, consulting and management support for the data center / mission critical facilities space with the mindset to provide reliability, energy efficiency, and sustainable design expertise when providing these consulting services for enterprise, colocation and hyperscale companies. This career-growth minded opportunity offers exciting projects with leading-edge technology and innovation as well as competitive salaries and benefits. Electrical Commissioning Agent – Data Centers Austin, TX (limited travel) Non-Traveling CxA positions available in: Indianapolis, IN; Cedar Rapids, IA; Phoenix, AZ and Columbus, OH. Traveling CxA based near any major airport, otherwise traveling to: New York, NY; White Plains, NY; Dallas, TX; Richmond, VA; Montvale, NJ; Charlotte, NC; Salt Lake City, UT; Kansas City, MO; Chesterton, IN or Chicago, IL. ***Also looking for a Lead EE and ME CxA Agents and CxA PMs. *** This opportunity is with a leading EPC company of data center design / build / commissioning solutions. This company provides a complete life cycle of solutions that are custom-fit

Startup doxx.net hands the network controls to AI

“The whole thing is run completely by AI, so behind the scenes, I mean, it’s a network with 31 locations around the world, and internally there’s a mesh network, and I can’t, as a human being, manage all of this by myself,” Lyon said. Lyon said the team modeled every site, down to the wire and the optic, in a virtual model before building. An infrastructure management system running the company’s own AI on its own hardware then ordered the installation. It orchestrated shipping and delivery through data center APIs. Human technicians performed the remote smart hands installations. The company also built tools for agents to work with users and with the network. An agent gateway gives an AI agent an identity in the doxx.net chat app. The user pastes a credential into the agent. The agent obtains its certificate and appears in the user’s chat. Users can create group chats with several agents. In one example, Lyon said one agent runs BGP while others handle other tasks.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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