Musk’s DOGE cuts and Ebola risk ignite anger

A Massachusetts-linked projection says hundreds of thousands of deaths—many among children and infants—could follow early-2025 USAID cuts tied to Elon Musk’s DOGE. Musk later discussed “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention in a 2025 televised cabinet meeti

In 2025, Elon Musk’s giggle about “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention landed like a joke someone couldn’t afford to tell. A year later. Africa is facing what could become the worst Ebola outbreak ever—and the dispute over whether global health systems were weakened on purpose is no longer an abstract political argument.

The chain of events begins with the Trump administration’s second term and a government restructuring under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency. led by Musk. In the first months. the Musk-led DOGE destroyed the US Agency for International Development. an agency whose mission is tied to public health around the globe. Musk referred to USAID as a “criminal organization” and celebrated spending a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”.

As the cuts went into effect, public health models began pointing to a human cost measured in children’s lives. A tracker co-created by Boston University professor Brooke Nichols projected over 780. 000 deaths—mostly of children. including many infants—linked to Trump administration early-2025 USAID cuts. Those deaths were attributed to malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and more. The precise number is uncertain. but multiple experts working to identify the scale of the tragedy have generally agreed it is in the hundreds of thousands.

Other research put even sharper numbers on the table. Global researchers publishing in Nature projected that the cuts to USAID could result in 163,500 child deaths yearly. Another publication in The Lancet said there could be millions more to come.

Nicholas Enrich, a USAID whistleblower, testified before Congress and said that a fix for canceled Ebola prevention never arrived. Enrich pointed to Musk’s own televised remarks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025. when Musk—wearing a “murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss”—said canceling Ebola prevention was a mistake that would be fixed. According to Enrich, the fix never came.

Enrich’s testimony extends beyond Ebola. He said the HIV rate among new babies being born was looking close to zero until Musk intervened.

What makes the anger hard to ignore is the sense that multiple threads were pulled at once. Musk’s embrace of global health reductions sits alongside claims and campaigns around birth rates that he has promoted. according to the author’s account. even as his actions—through the USAID dismantling—undermined programs meant to protect children from deadly disease.

Even people who don’t follow U.S. politics closely recognize how unusual Musk’s reach has become: wealth. media influence. and government power overlapping in a single person. The political reaction inside the administration has been mixed. Susie Wiles. listed as Trump’s chief of staff in the text. told Vanity Fair that Musk was a “complete solo actor.” Wiles said he “probably knew” that what he was doing “would be horrifying to others. ” but did it anyway. while also saying she was only “initially aghast.”.

The most immediate question for those reading the story now is what happens next to public health in a world watching Ebola return with mounting severity. When the same government actions that were predicted to raise death tolls are tied to the cancellation of prevention—and when a whistleblower says the promised fix never came—skepticism stops being partisan and starts being procedural: systems either protect lives or they don’t.

That’s why attention keeps turning back to the contradiction at the center of Musk’s public trajectory. On IPO day, as Musk addressed SpaceX employees, the text says he told them: “There are always problems on Earth. There are always things we wish to be better. that we want to solve here on Earth. and we should solve them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future.”.

For critics, the issue isn’t that leaders discuss the future. It’s that, in the author’s telling, one of the future-facing projects Musk got excited about was killing immunization efforts that save children’s lives from deadly diseases.

The story also argues that DOGE’s impact went beyond the headline numbers. It says the math on money saved is “fuzzy” and that DOGE barely saved the government any money. It cites a claim attributed to the Cato Institute that DOGE didn’t reduce spending. only federal employment. by 9 percent in around 10 months. Still, the text emphasizes that the operation looted a massive stockpile of expertise and capability from society.

And even after the DOGE period ended “in a fizzle. ” the text says Musk didn’t fully leave government influence behind. It argues that he still needs federal contracts for SpaceX “now more than ever. ” adding that X remains a “firehose of misery” with Musk at the reins and that Musk’s AI project is described as a “nightmare of misinformation and AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery.”.

Through all of it. the recurring detail is the same: prevention canceled. models projecting large-scale deaths. and a warning from a whistleblower that promised fixes never arrived. With Africa facing a potential worst-ever Ebola outbreak. the question is no longer only what was said in 2025—but what the consequences look like when the world finally has to live with the decisions.

Elon Musk SpaceX IPO DOGE USAID Ebola public health AI misinformation cybersecurity whistleblower Boston University Nature The Lancet