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The first meeting of President Donald Trump‘s second-term Cabinet on Wednesday offered ill omens for the health of Americans as well as populations abroad.
Although neither appointed to a Cabinet position nor confirmed by the Senate, omnipotent adviser Elon Musk turned up for the occasion in his now-familiar “Tech Support” uniform on behalf of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which the White House on Tuesday unconvincingly claimed is led by someone other than the Silicon Valley oligarch. Echoing previous remarks to the effect that DOGE would make “mistakes,” Musk told cabinet members: “We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake we’ll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled, very briefly, was Ebola prevention,” he said, laughing slightly. “I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was among the first federal agencies that DOGE attempted to rip up by the roots as Musk, Trump, and allies have spread misinformation about its spending on humanitarian work abroad. Thousands of employees have been placed on leave. Withdrawn support from the U.S. has disrupted critical health programs and clinics around that provide access to life-saving medical care and work to prevent the spread of infectious diseases including tuberculosis and malaria. While Musk claimed that no harm was done by the pause of Ebola containment measures, his blitzkrieg against the departments of the administrative state on behalf of the Trump administration has effectively kneecapped multiple HIV and AIDS relief agencies, because some of their funding goes towards the distribution of condoms and contraceptives.
Musk’s claim that the mistake has been corrected has been questioned. The Washington Post reported later in the day that current and former USAID officials have said the group’s ebola prevention efforts remain largely halted.
Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia wasted no time taking aim at Musk for his chuckling comment about an often fatal virus that has devastating effects on the communities that experience an outbreak. “An average person who did something as incompetent as ‘accidentally cancelling Ebola prevention’ wouldn’t be applauded, they’d be fired,” he posted on X, Musk’s social media platform. “Musk is failing up in this administration because he didn’t earn his job, he bought it. It’s corrupt, and risks Americans’ health and safety.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician with decades of experience in global public health who has worked as an epidemiologist in Africa and survived Ebola himself, outlined the harm that the mistake had actually caused. “On January 29, Uganda reported an Ebola outbreak,” he wrote on X. “Normally the U.S. would’ve very quickly sent one of our Ebola experts to help the response. But this time, we didn’t. Because we couldn’t. Because this administration wouldn’t let them go right when this outbreak was declared.” He further noted that officials in Uganda had tried to call the White House for days but received no response, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which handles Ebola prevention in the U.S., is losing hundreds of “frontline experts” thanks to DOGE.
Elsewhere, humanitarian aid worker Jeremy Konyndyk, who led Covid-19 and disaster response at USAID under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, respectively, accused Musk of demolishing the nation’s ability to confront catastrophic epidemics. “I’ve actually led Ebola outbreak response at USAID,” he wrote in a thread on the social platform Bluesky, calling Musk’s claim to have immediately restored Ebola protections as “bunk.”
“They have laid off most of the experts, they’re bankrupting most of the partner orgs, have withdrawn from [the World Health Organization], and muzzled CDC,” Konyndyk wrote. “What’s left is a fig-leaf effort to cover their asses politically.” Widespread cuts at the CDC and USAID had “wrecked” any response capability, he said. “Elon’s vendetta against USAID and the federal workforce is shredding all of the systems that the [U.S. government] has built up to protect the U.S. homeland against global outbreak risks,” Konyndyk concluded. “Scrambling to recall a few staff and issue some belated funding is just window dressing.”
Musk wasn’t the only unqualified MAGA loyalist at Wednesday’s meeting to downplay a potential health crisis. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s conspiracist anti-vax head of Health and Human Services, fielded a reporter’s question about a measles outbreak in Texas that has killed at least one person, an unvaccinated child, according to health officials in the state. Kennedy said of the outbreak itself: “It’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.” But the child who died marked the first recorded death from measles in the U.S. in a decade. (The respiratory disease was declared “eliminated” in the country in 2000.)
Kennedy wrote in a 2021 book that people “have been misled by the pharmaceutical industry and their captured government agency allies into believing that measles is a deadly disease,” and that “outbreaks have been manufactured to create fear.” On Wednesday, he suggested that 18 other children are currently hospitalized with the measles in Texas as a simple quarantine measure. A doctor at the hospital told NBC that, in fact, they had all been admitted because they were having trouble breathing — and that none were vaccinated.
All told, Musk and RFK Jr. painted a grim picture of the U.S. response to epidemiological threats in the months ahead: not only fewer resources and gutted health institutions, but utter dishonesty about everything going wrong.
