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On the edge of a lush jungle here in West Africa, the heavy metal doors of a warehouse creak open. Inside are boxes piled high with millions of doses of medicines donated by Merck and other pharmaceutical companies for a United States aid program. Yet the medications are gathering dust, and some are approaching their expiration dates and may have to be destroyed, at immense expense.

It’s an excellent example of the waste that President Trump claims was rife in the United States Agency for International Development. (“Absolutely obscene,” as he put it in February.) But this waste of drugs exists only because his administration shut down U.S.A.I.D. and canceled plans to distribute these medicines, even though the pills cost America nothing and are ready to use.

Each tax dollar invested in mass administration of drugs like these leverages $26 in donated medicines, making the effort astoundingly cost-effective. One of the medications languishing in this warehouse is sufficient to protect 7.6 million children and adults from a parasitic disease called river blindness. Other donated medicines in the warehouse would rid more than two million children of worms, plus protect 1.4 million kids from a debilitating parasitic ailment called schistosomiasis that causes pain, weakness and bloody urine.

These medicines also have the side benefit of protecting against worms that cause elephantiasis, a disfiguring and humiliating ailment.

I’ve been traveling through Sierra Leone and Liberia to gauge the impact of Trump’s closing of U.S.A.I.D., to see how bad things have gotten since an earlier trip through South Sudan and Kenya. Here’s what I see: Children are dying because medicines have been abruptly cut off, and risks of Ebola, tuberculosis and other diseases reaching America are increasing — while medicines sit uselessly in warehouses.

After Elon Musk boasted about feeding U.S.A.I.D. “into the wood chipper” over a weekend, he claimed that no one had died as a result. Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeated that claim just last month.

So I challenge them both: Come with me on a trip to the villages where your aid cuts are killing children. Open your eyes. And if you dare to confront actual waste and abuse — the kind that squanders lives as well as money — join me in the village of Kayata, Liberia, where in April a pregnant mother of two, Yamah Freeman, 21, went into labor.

Freeman, a lively woman known for her friendliness to all, soon hemorrhaged and began bleeding heavily, so villagers frantically called the county hospital to summon an ambulance. U.S.A.I.D. previously supplied ambulances to reduce maternal mortality, but this year the U.S. stopped providing fuel, leaving the ambulances idle. Ambulance crew members said they’d be happy to rescue Freeman, if someone would only come and buy them gas.

It’s more than 10 miles through the jungle on a red mud path from Kayata to the hospital, but villagers were determined to try to save Freeman’s life. The strongest young men in the village bundled her in a hammock and then raced down the path, shouting encouragement to her as she lay unconscious and bleeding. They didn’t make it: She died on the way, along with an unborn son.

So when I hear glib talk about waste and abuse in U.S.A.I.D., I think of how we American taxpayers purchased ambulances for Liberia at a cost of more than $50,000 each and then abruptly cut off gasoline funds, leaving a young mom to bleed to death.

Freeman is buried in an unmarked grave on the edge of the forest. Her two daughters, ages 3 and 6, weep for their mother. “The three of us sit together and cry,” said Freeman’s younger sister, Annie.

How often does this happen? The Trump administration is also dismantling data collection, making it difficult to count the deaths it is causing. By one American economist’s online dashboard, about 350,000 people worldwide have died so far because of cuts in American aid. My guess is that the figure isn’t so high, partly because it takes time for children to weaken and die, but that the rate of deaths will accelerate.

We can’t save every child in the world, I realize, and it’s fair to note that not every U.S.A.I.D. program was brilliant and lifesaving. The agency could have used reforms. Yet it’s also true that at a cost of only 0.24 percent of gross national income, we provided humanitarian aid that saved about six lives every minute around the clock, based on rough estimates from the Center for Global Development. That is what we have undone.

One of America’s most heroic achievements in the past half-century was turning the tide of AIDS and saving, so far, some 26 million lives through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, started by President George W. Bush in 2003. In particular, PEPFAR made much less common the horror of H.I.V.-positive women inadvertently infecting their babies during childbirth.

And now mother-to-child transmission may be rising again.

At clinic after clinic that I visited in Sierra Leone, staff members reported that they were out of H.I.V. test kits and could no longer test pregnant women for the virus. And if doctors and nurses don’t know which women are H.I.V.-positive, they can’t block transmission during childbirth.

Some readers may think: Of course it’s sad that children are dying, but why is it our job to save their lives?

To those unmoved by moral arguments, I’d note that President John F. Kennedy created U.S.A.I.D. in 1961 to advance our interests as well as our values. We confront China not only with warships but also with aid programs in Africa that build soft power and international support. The collapse of American aid programs is a gift to Beijing, which has been reaching out to some African countries now in desperate need.

“We are in touch with China,” said Dabah Varpilah, the chair of the health committee in the Liberian Senate. “China is making a lot of inroads into our country, with infrastructure and so on, but until now we have depended mostly on the U.S. for health.”

Aid programs also protect Americans from a threat that aircraft carriers are helpless to combat: disease. U.S.A.I.D. and the World Health Organization (which the United States is now withdrawing from) track outbreaks of diseases like Ebola to extinguish them before they can spread.

So aid cuts are at a level where they undermine our national interest as well as corrode our souls. They are a braid of recklessness, incompetence and indifference — and “indifference” is generous, for the disregard is so deliberate that it bleeds into cruelty.