The team also directly shared the links to contacts within the State Department, the governmental organ behind the end of USAID, and quickly heard back from their contacts that it was being shared broadly. 

In late June, days before USAID closed down, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee, denounced Nichols’ tracker in a letter to the president of Boston University. He says the tracker is at “the heart of this dangerous hysteria” surrounding DOGE cuts, and that the estimates are “a masterclass in lazy, politically-charged disinformation that lacks any sort of analytical rigor.” 

The letter includes citations linking to Nichols’ methodology, but none linking to data proving that no deaths have occurred. 

“I am deeply concerned that Boston University is serving as a platform for the weaponization of academia,” the congressman wrote, calling the work “disinformation.”

Nichols is careful to spell out her methodology for the calculations. In an effort for transparency, that work is also on the website.

In some ways, the figures may be an overestimate. For other reasons, it may be an underestimate.

Nichols acknowledges that the numbers on the tracker might be an overestimate since there is no existing database of medicine at each clinic in every country, there is no way of knowing the availability of drugs in various countries. There is also no database recording the extent that other outside funding sources might be filling in the gap USAID left behind.

In other ways, Nichols believes that her estimates might be a vast underestimate. On Monday, June 30, the day before USAID was officially shut down and absorbed into the State Department, a study published by The Lancet estimated that the continued disruption of aid would push the total death count to 14 million people by 2030. The same study also calculated that USAID had saved the lives of more than 90 million people in the past twenty-one years.

“My estimates are a drop in the bucket,” says Nichols. “Congress should be happy with my estimates, instead of trying to say they weren’t real.” 

Her tracker focuses more on the direct effects resulting from the cuts, while the article in The Lancet reports the repercussions being felt in other indirect health fields, such as investment in the healthcare workforce or electronic medical records. 

Nichols has recently expanded the website to include a Medicaid Impact Counter, following the House of Representatives narrowly passing the Big Beautiful Bill, a domestic spending bill that aims to cut Medicaid for more than 10 million Americans. She says the goal for this tracker is to quantify the direct and indirect effects of these domestic cuts on American health. As of the writing of this article, the counter estimates an additional 27,721 deaths, with one additional death every 18 minutes. The counter also includes the amount of Americans facing catastrophic healthcare costs. That number is at 750,857 and adds an additional number every 0.7 minutes.