What Elon Has Done

This decade has seen the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in violent conflicts: in the Tigray War in Ethiopia, in civil war in Myanmar, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and most recently in the RSF massacres in the Sudanese city of Al-Fashir, to name just a few. Yet the largest act of mass murder of this decade, and of this century so far, was not perpetrated by militaries or militias, but by the world's richest man in Washington D.C.'s Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Elon Musk's rampage through America's foreign aid programs has largely been forgotten in recent months. Musk went back to his private endeavors, having comically fallen from Donald Trump's good graces into one of his most spectacular periods of X posting madness. The administration has chugged along, ramping up its abuse and serving up fresh scandals by the day. But the termination of American foreign aid has not been forgotten in the developing world, where the sudden absence of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has left death and destruction.

Every day, this administration does deplorable things, which rightly draw outrage; but the single most deplorable thing has settled into the background. In the hopes that tomorrow's histories remember the story of the crime and not just the statistics of the aftermath, I seek to document in this article what Elon Musk has done.

What has been done

The best account of the fourteen-day demolition of USAID comes from the New York Times. On inauguration day, President Trump signed EO 14169, ordering development spending be "paused" for a 90-day review. Confusion was replaced with shock as Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a directive by director of foreign assistance Pete Marocco, demanding that USAID halt all of its projects. A theoretical exemption for "life-saving" projects proved non-existent as USAID employees were banned from speaking with anyone outside the agency, even partners working on projects abroad.

Shortly after, members of Elon Musk's so-called "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE, showed up at USAID, among them young programmers Luke Farritor, age 23, and Edward "Big Balls" Coristine, age 19. They demanded fifty-seven employees who supposedly made payments in violation of the Marocco order be put on leave. Acting administrator Jason Gray complied.

This did nothing to relieve the pressure on USAID. As the Trump administration complained the organization spent millions on condoms for the Gaza Strip (it was actually for family planning in Gaza Province, Mozambique), Luke Farritor claimed he had found that some of the fifty-seven had indeed made payments, and demanded they be fired. Gray and USAID director of employee and labor relations Nick Gottlieb pushed back, and the latter sent the employees a message saying that there was no basis to keep them on leave. DOGE saw this as a direct rebellion against the authority of the White House, and the New York Times calls it "by many accounts, the moment that sealed USAID's fate."

Elon Musk phoned Gray and demanded every single USAID employee—including those in conflict zones—be cut off from the agency's systems immediately. His refusal led to him being fired. Marco Rubio took on yet another role as acting USAID administrator, with Marocco as acting deputy administrator. DOGE employees demanded control over the USAID computer system, getting Musk on the phone. Once they had it, USAID was gutted. They shut down the USAID website and locked thousands of employees out of their emails.

The world's richest man was live-tweeting the demolition. On February 2, the day of the lockout, Musk quote-tweeted right-wing technology and politics account "Autism Capital," who claimed USAID employees had tried to stop DOGE from accessing their computer systems, with "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die." In the early hours of February 3, on a live X Spaces discussion, Musk called USAID "not an apple with a worm in it, but just a ball of worms" and said that President Trump would allow him to shut it down. Shortly after, he tweeted "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead." That morning, employees packed up their things, and that afternoon the State Department reported to Congress that “U.S.A.I.D. may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State. The remainder of the agency may be abolished.”

And that was it. USAID was gone. It still legally exists, as it can only be closed by an act of Congress, but in every other sense it is gone..

Now directly under the control of the Department of State, Marco Rubio announced on March 10 that 83% of USAID's programs would be canceled. "Tough, but necessary. Good working with you" tweeted Musk in response. A 2.6 billion dollar contract to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance was announced to be terminated on March 24. PEPFAR, George W. Bush's HIV program that has saved an estimated 26 million lives since 2003, was supposed to be safe, but congressional aides reported that half of the money budgeted for it simply never appeared.

The administration, finding itself with the instruments of humanitarianism but no desire to use them, burned them instead. 500 metric tons of high-energy food, intended for child refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan under the age of five, were incinerated, as were ten million dollars of contraceptives at a cost of $167,000; 800,000 monkeypox vaccines intended for Africa were destroyed after sitting on the shelf too long to be safely used.

The effect

Like a child, Musk absolutely refused to believe that there might be negative consequences from his actions. "No one has died as result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one" he tweeted on March 3. He was wrong.

On February 11, the Telegraph reported that a 71-year-old Burmese refugee, Pe Kha Lau, died in a Thai refugee camp after being discharged from a hospital funded by USAID. On March 15, Nicholas Kristof reported on HIV-positive children in South Sudan who died of diseases most could shrug off as the USAID shutdown cut off their supply of antiretroviral drugs. A 10-year-old boy named Peter Donde; an 8-year-old girl named Achol Deng; a 35-year-old single mother named Jennifer Inyaa, and a week later, her 5-year-old son Evan Anzoo. All of those deaths were before Rubio's permanent shuttering of most USAID programs on March 24. That did not stop Rubio, testifying before the House, to repeat Musk's claim that "no one has died because of U.S.A.I.D." in May.

Across the world, wherever poverty, disease, and hunger exist, Musk has taken their side against humanity’s by withdrawing any defenses against their advance. ProPublica reported the World Food Program was forced to cut rations in refugee camps in Malawi by a third and in Kenyan refugee camps down to a mere 600 calories a day; a pregnant woman was trampled to death in a stampede at a food distribution center. In some refugee camps, the WFP has resorted to "triage" by reserving the diminished rations for those deemed the highest risk and cutting off any aid to those who might have other sources of food. The Bulwark reported that 17% of South Africa's HIV budget and a grant for water for a quarter of a million refugees in the DRC were slashed. Mother Jones reported that 125,000 people in Lesotho, one-sixteenth of the population of the tiny African nation, were at risk of illness and death due to cuts to HIV/AIDs programs. A three-part ProPublica series published at the end of the year described pregnant Congolese refugees in Kenya eating clay; refugee mothers contemplating suicide in the hopes that their children would be better off in orphanages; and a refugee camp in South Sudan stricken with cholera after a grant to maintain sewage systems was cut.

It is not just disease and death that face the victims of the cutoff. The Associated Press reported on the closure of schools and child protection centers in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, resulting in hundreds of underage girls being married off to abusive men, children being kidnapped by traffickers or getting dangerous jobs, and girls as young as 12 being forced into prostitution.

Let us attempt to get to the grisly bottom line. How many people have died and how many will die?

Dr. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor at Boston University specializing in infectious disease modeling, has developed a model on the website Impact Counter that has been widely cited. At the time of this writing, it estimates over 215,000 adults and 445,000 children are dead due to the funding cuts. A different estimate comes from a paper published in The Lancet, which begins by estimating that 91 million lives were saved by USAID from 2001-2021. It then projects 1.78 million deaths in 2025 (uncertainty interval 968,000–2.50 million) due to the cuts. The authors further estimate an eye-popping 14 million deaths between the beginning of the shutdown and 2030 (uncertainty interval 8.48–19.66 million).

The Lancet paper has been attacked by the right-libertarian publication Reason.com, in a piece called "Did USAID Really Save 90 Million Lives? Not Unless It Raised the Dead." The gist of the title is that the author calculated that if the 2001 death rate continued on to 2021, 79 million more deaths would have occurred, and uses that to conclude that it is mathematically impossible for USAID to have saved 90 million lives in that period. This assumes that USAID was not responsible for reducing the 2001 death rate to lower than it would have been otherwise, that the death rate would not have gone up without USAID, and that ending treatment for infectious disease would result in a constant death rate, rather than an exponentially increasing one, but such is the level of reasoning among right-libertarians.As 2025 has ended, we are able to make reasonable estimates of the damage that has been done thus far, rather than relying on projections. A report from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation for the Gates Foundation estimated that about 243,000 more children under the age of 5 have died or will die this year than in 2024, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa. 2025 will be the first year of this century where more young children died than the year before.

The consensus of all these disparate studies is that hundreds of thousands of people have or will die this year due to aid cuts. If this continues, the death toll will reach the millions within a few short years. The psychological toll on all the mothers who bury their babies, children who know only the pangs of hunger, or girls married to abusive older men for a bite to eat will be immeasurable. This is the crime of the twenty-first century. The world's richest man has pulled the plug on millions of hospital beds all at once.

Musk's victims will not be killed by bomb or bullet. His holocaust will be invisible, found in the increased death rate of this year's famine or disease outbreak in countries where last year's was already high. It hides not only in statistics, but in our apathy. Haitians and Mozambicans, Palestinians and Somalis, what do we care if more are dying now than died earlier? What are they to us other than famine and refugee camps, disease and death? What more do we in the developed world expect from them except to die?

Why it was done

To understand what could make a man do something as horrible as this, one must understand the right-wing media environment Musk swims in every single day. The false stories around condoms in Gaza is the kind of seemingly frivolous foreign aid that has been a bugbear of right-wing media for years. But though it riled up the base, it had limited reach in the highest echelons, and some members of the rapidly-vanishing old Christian right saw foreign aid (albeit not kinds of birth control they thought immoral) as a duty. Consider George W. Bush's PEPFAR program, or right-wing Opus Dei supporter Sam Brownback's championing of Darfur during his time in the U.S. Senate.

Musk's understanding of USAID is that it was not merely wasteful spending, but also a left-wing indoctrination machine. He said it had "been run by radical lunatics" and backed conspiratorial claims that a Chinese research lab which received a grant from USAID created COVID. He and President Trump trumpeted an $8 million dollar subscription to Politico for government employees as evidence of a collaboration with leftist media (especially ironic since Politico's owner told its executives to pray for Trump's reelection). "My guess is that ~20% of legacy media funding is from the government in one form or another" he posted on X. Musk represents the mainstream view of the American right on this; the Heritage Foundation posted an article titled "The Unmasking of USAID" on February 10 stating "The U.S. Agency for International Development’s efforts to remake the world in the image of a woke America are coming to a screeching halt. All these entities were either started by the Big Left or taken over by the Big Left during its March Through the Institutions."

On February 3, former President of Russia and professional X shitposter Dmitry Medvedev tweeted "Smart move by @elonmusk, trying to plug USAID's Deep Throat." This Freudian statement of support should not be surprising given repeated accusations that USAID was responsible for the color revolutions, the term given to a series of (mostly) peaceful revolutions in post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav states that sought more Western-style democracies. As with Musk's claim that America's left wing only exists because of USAID media control, imperialist American propaganda is taken as the only reason post-communist states might prefer to strengthen ties with the EU over staying under the thumb of Russia. 

Around the world, right-wing authoritarians espouse a conspiratorial, anti-globalist worldview. Far-right Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri accused Democrats of plotting a "color revolution," while right-wing darling President Nayyib Bukele of El Salvador posted on X that USAID was used to "undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda" and Hungarian Prime Minister thanked Donald Trump for revealing that USAID "financed... basically the entire left-wing media in Hungary."

The foundation of all this is the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theories, reheated versions of the Nazi fixation on "cultural Bolshevism" that have become popular on the global right from Poland to India. The essence of these theories is that academic and media institutions in the United States have come under the control of Marxist critical theorists of the Frankfurt School (the Heritage Foundation's previous reference to "Big Left['s]... March Through the Institutions), who have used them to promote political correctness, gay marriage, multiculturalism, or whatever right wing bugbear is making the rounds.

It is an easy sell to the small-minded reactionary who can blame college professors for his son dating another man or Hollywood for his daughter's acceptance of immigrants because at its root, it claims that all social changes that he finds uncomfortable are top-down decisions made by radicals who brainwashed the populace and not a meaningful change in people's attitudes. Every protest is funded by globalists, and not a sparrow falls to the ground without George Soros. As with most conspiracy theories of simultaneously billionaire and Bolshevik puppet masters, cultural Marxism is deeply intertwined with antisemitism, and it is no coincidence that the man they have chosen as their improbable ringleader is Jewish. Witness the bizarre scene of Musk, the world's richest man, suggesting that Soros—95 years old and "only" the world's 361st richest person—is scheming to destroy him.

USAID is dead. Yet, much to the consternation of the right, there are still people with left-wing and progressive views in the United States. “These random pallets keep showing up! I thought it would stop after we defunded USAID," tweeted Breanna Morello, a self-described "Independent Journalist" formerly with Fox. She was quote-tweeting another right-wing influencer, Anthony Cabassa, who reported that protesters opposing ICE at a Los Angeles Home Depot had been mysteriously supplied with cement bricks. Confusion over why rampaging through American foreign aid did not stop bricks from being on pallets outside a Home Depot. If thousands of people weren't dead, you'd have to laugh.

What the rest of the world has done

One might hope that other nations would step in to fill the void left from the end of USAID—if not out of enlightened humanitarianism, then out of a desire for soft power. But this has not been the case.

The world's second-largest economy, China, might be a logical candidate for a nation with both the wealth and the desire for a bigger global role. Yet this has not been the case. While aid data has not been published since 2018, the Brookings Institute estimates the budgets of both China's major foreign aid agencies amounted to about $2.85 billion USD in 2024, while the China Africa Research Institute suggested $3.46 billion. For comparison, USAID's budget that year was $32 billion, with its contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria alone being $2.3 billion. China has funded Cambodian programs left in the lurch and has proposed further aid to Nepal; however, these are smaller ventures limited to nearby nations, and there has been nothing to suggest a worldwide program on the scale of USAID is planned anytime soon.

If China has not risen to distinguish itself in the face of this crisis, the United Kingdom and France have chosen to join the United States in debasing themselves. The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, passed under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, required the Secretary of State to testify that 0.7% of GNI would be spent on official development assistance (ODA). The Tory government slashed that to 0.5% in 2021, citing challenges from COVID. Keir Starmer's Labour manifesto stated the party was committed to restoring it "as soon as fiscal circumstances allow". Instead, once in power it was cut even further, to 0.3%. One analysis suggested that this would result in 606,000 more deaths and 37.9 million fewer children immunized. France slashed 742 million Euros by decree from appropriations for ODA in 2024, long before Trump's victory and Musk's rampage, then cut the amount appropriated for 2025 by 37% in its Finance Act (increased to 39% by decree), and proposes cutting 800 million more in 2026.

What we can do

It is natural to feel demoralized at the scale of the carnage. You might even feel guilty for living your life amidst it. But these emotions ultimately serve to punish ourselves and help no one. The impact private citizens can make right now is small, but it isn’t irrelevant. Private charity is not a substitute for a well-run government program, but it is a stopgap measure that helps save lives. Well-respected international organizations like the International Rescue Committee, the Malaria Consortium, GiveDirectly, Helen Keller International, and the Against Malaria Foundation accept individual donations and use them to carry out life-saving work. One should give if one can.

The next Democratic administration—and there will be one—must commit itself to restoring every penny of foreign aid and them some. That it will doubtless be putting out fires domestically is no reason to ignore its duty to the less fortunate abroad. We must raise our voices and not quiet them until the job is done. But what is the job—to simply bring back what has been lost or bring about something new?

Both detractors and defenders of USAID have pointed out that the organization was intended to be as much a part of national security as a humanitarian instrument, boosting American soft power and creating a stable world where American interests could prosper. The former suggest that this makes it a tool of imperialism the developing world is better without. But the catastrophe caused by its absence makes it clear that despite its faults, USAID was the sole reason millions of human beings did not die, and the absence of any credible alternatives means that restoring American foreign aid must be a high priority for anyone concerned about the global poor.

As for the latter, it is part of a long tradition in American politics to justify unpopular spending by suggesting Americans will be unsafe without it. It is probably necessary politicking; but I am not a politician, so I can say that I find it repugnant, after reading stories of horrors from the real victims of this tragedy, to suggest that Americans like me are among them. I support foreign aid, not because I think its absence will lead to my death from terrorists, but because I know its absence leads to the deaths of my brothers and sisters abroad. USAID was destroyed because Musk and Trump believe Americans have no obligation whatsoever to the global poor, only to their own narrow self-interest. An opposition that concedes that principle but tries to draw the opposite conclusions from it is doomed to failure. I believe that the wealthiest country in the history of the world has the means to help those beyond its borders; what's more, it has the moral responsibility to. With a country as with a person, to those to whom much is given, much is expected.

If we have learned anything from the failures of the Biden administration, it is that restoring and strengthening the ideas that Trump repudiates requires more than simply returning to business as usual. The legislation authorizing USAID remains, but the ease with which the agency has been functionally erased from existence shows that structural change is needed. Those who call USAID imperialist may have the diagnosis wrong, but they are right that it put the lives of millions of people in the hands of a handful of powerful Americans, power which Trump and Musk used to disastrous effect. Four unchecked years of disease and famine will only increase the gap between the global rich and the global poor on a planet that grows hotter. We must push for drastic multilateral action under the aegis of the United Nations—a "Global Marshall Plan"—where our contributions will be front-loaded as much as possible. Whether or not millions of the world's poorest die should not be determined by several thousand uninformed voters in Wisconsin.

The next administration should also prosecute all those involved in the dismantling of USAID. On top of being a humanitarian catastrophe, it was illegal under American law as a unilateral shutdown of a Congressionally enshrined agency. DOGE's handling of employee records almost certainly violated the Privacy Act of 1974. Everyone—from Musk down to the teenaged DOGE boys—must be prosecuted. The successive refusal of Democratic administrations to hold powerful criminals of previous Republican administrations responsible, from Ford's pardon of Nixon to Iran–Contra to Bush's torture prisons to Trump's insurrection, cannot continue. In our current climate, the idea that the law will be enforced against Musk seems to be a fantasy, but it has to be done.

After everything he has wrought, Musk is an accepted part of our national stage. He has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the developed world; he turned Twitter into X, now an engine for delivering gutter racism, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia into the minds of everyone who uses it; he has pushed an update to X's AI assistant, Grok, that allows it to manipulate images of women and even children to remove clothing and sexualize them. None of this matters to millions of Americans, and certainly not to our political class. The one-man Holocaust will still be invited to parties and tech events; the platform with CSAM-on-demand will continue to be used by millions, including every journalist at every "respectable" media institution.

As Nathan Goldwag reminds us, that any number of people, including those in positions of power, have decided that this is acceptable does not compel us to accept it. People of conscience should do everything they can to avoid enriching and normalizing Elon Musk. This means not buying a Tesla car; not working for any company owned by him; and yes, getting off X. This will mean enduring scorn from people who view any attempt to live according to one's values as an attack on them. That does not matter. What matters is making it clear that the people Musk has killed—non-American, desperately poor, mostly non-English speaking and mostly dark-skinned—had lives that mattered as much as yours or mine, and that gleefully snuffing them out by the hundreds of thousands is not a mere peccadillo, but a crime on the scale of that committed by the defendants at Nuremberg. 

If American society will not remove Musk from itself, then we must orient our lives to exclude him, his cars, his companies, and his social media site.

It falls on us to respond to what Musk has done. We cannot undo it; the dead remain dead, and physical and psychological scars remain on the living. The stain Musk has placed on our national character is irremovable. What we can do is work to provide aid to the survivors; hold the guilty responsible; ensure that this can never happen again; and in doing so, fulfill our duty to our fellow human beings.

"It finally comes down to it that we could be born with all these advantages that we enjoy here in the United States and they—seventy, eighty percent of the rest of the world—suffer as much as they do. And when you finally decide that, then you must also decide what we can do to make up for it. For all of the advantages that we have, don't we have a major responsibility to those that do not have those advantages?"

—Senator Robert F. Kennedy Sr, 1968

"A society which says 'to hell with famine and disease in Bangladesh, it's all their own fault, isn't it?' is extremely unlikely to balance this with compassion and justice for its own pensioners and its own low-paid... We have to persuade men and women who are themselves reasonably well off that they have a duty to forgo some of the advantages they would otherwise enjoy for the sake of others who are much poorer... We have to persuade the British people as a whole that they have an obligation to Africans and Asians whom they have never seen."

—Roy Jenkins MP, 1972

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. There, it’s, they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response."

—Elon Musk, 2025

Featured image is A shuttered USAID, by Ted Eytan