Elon Musk’s recent posts on X about the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have drawn attention to his role in dismantling the agency last year. Musk has claimed that his critics cannot cite a single name of someone who died as a result of the cuts, but when confronted with the names of children who died, he called a journalist ‘an utter piece of shit and a liar’ and ‘utterly evil.’ Musk has also claimed, without evidence, that US tax dollars went to arming militants and ‘corrupt politicians.’
The cuts, made through the short-lived US ‘department of government efficiency’ (Doge), have come under renewed scrutiny during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Last year, Musk admitted to ‘accidentally’ cutting Ebola detection and response programs. Experts say that if global health programs hadn’t been slashed, the Ebola outbreak would have been detected much earlier.
The cuts have affected global health, nutrition, and education around the world. A Lancet study estimated that there would be 14 million deaths, including 4.5 million child deaths, if USAID were abolished entirely. Musk threatened to sue a congressman who cited the study, and he doubled down on his claims that Doge did nothing wrong.
Experts say that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how many people will die as a result of these cuts, but the scale of the damage is likely to be in the millions. ‘People are absolutely dying. They’re dying in significant numbers in some places,’ said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former top USAID official. Musk’s demolition of USAID, and the resulting suffering and death, is likely to be a defining part of his legacy.
Musk took a model he used in his companies to ‘cut until people scream, and then when people scream, you’ve cut too far, and then you restore,’ but experts say that this approach doesn’t work for public funding, where the cost is literal human lives. If not for Musk, USAID would probably still exist, and Congress could have stopped the dismantling of the agency.
Experts say that there is still time to act and avert some of the worst effects of ending foreign aid. ‘We have a window here to try and bring some of this back before the worst of the harms set in,’ said Konyndyk. After the Covid pandemic caused about 20 million deaths around the globe, it was ‘absurd’ to cut programs that would prevent and prepare for the next pandemic.
