“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Elon Musk boasted in February, shortly after President Donald Trump gave him permission to hack his way through the federal government. As a “special government employee” with no oversight running the “temporary organization,” the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk destroyed the 64-year-old humanitarian agency in a matter of days, abruptly halting deliveries of lifesaving medicine, emergency food aid and many other forms of support to the poorest people on the planet. This was done in the name of DOGE’s mission to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
Musk claimed that DOGE would slash government spending by “at least $2 trillion,” but it ended up saving a microscopic fraction of that figure. Now that DOGE has been disbanded, Musk claims “We were a little bit successful” — but admits that he wouldn’t do it again.
It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate human toll of shuttering USAID.
Musk tried his hand at government, shrugged and moved on. The same can’t be said for the people who are dead and dying thanks to the DOGE-led onslaught on the U.S. Agency for International Development. “No one has died as [a] result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Musk declared in March. According to models created by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, hundreds of thousands of people have in fact died as a result of eliminated and disrupted aid.
It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate human toll of shuttering USAID. The U.S. was responsible for 40% of the total foreign aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024, and much of the infrastructure that delivered this aid has now been destroyed. Beyond the frozen payments for active aid projects, partner organizations have closed, supply chains for medicine and food deliveries have been severed and staff who administered and monitored programs have been fired. Early warning systems for starvation and infectious diseases have shut down.
The individual stories are harrowing. A South Sudanese child with HIV died from pneumonia because he didn’t receive the medication necessary to sustain his immune system. People participating in studies were abandoned with experimental drugs in their systems and medical devices in their bodies. Cases of acute malnutrition at refugee camps have surged.
In the MAGAverse, none of this is true because USAID was never an aid organization to begin with. Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who has accused the agency of being a terror organization and subverting governments around the world, was a big influence on Musk’s assault on USAID, which Benz called the “Terror Titanic.” Like Musk before him, Benz has now been appointed as a special government employee to investigate his allegations that USAID was a massive covert influence operation and front for the CIA.
Benz’s campaign is just the latest example of MAGA propaganda using USAID as a convenient political scapegoat. DOGE viewed the takeover of USAID as an opportunity to find instances of “viral waste,” which could be broadcast to the American people as a justification for its other cost-cutting efforts. One example cited by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the “50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later declared that the money had been “sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
There was just one problem: The money was actually for family planning in a province of Mozambique called Gaza.
The destruction of USAID was undertaken with breathtaking carelessness and incompetence. Musk demanded an immediate cutoff of communications with USAID personnel around the world, including those in conflict zones. When Acting USAID Director Jason Gray said this could put lives at risk and refused, he was fired. DOGE will forever be a cautionary tale: this is what happened when messianic tech oligarchs and political neophytes were temporarily handed the reins of government. Members of DOGE with no government or foreign aid experience — such as 23-year-old computer programmer Luke Farritor or 19-year-old Edward Coristine, who went by “Big Balls” — were responsible for investigating USAID staff for evidence of “insubordination.” This allegation was then weaponized to destroy the entire agency. Musk declared: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” The following day, Musk said Trump had given him the authority to feed the agency into the woodchipper. What a difference a few months can make. Musk has gone from swinging his chainsaw around at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), siccing his DOGE goons on career civil servants and bragging about his power to crush entire agencies to meekly arguing that he was a “little bit successful.” But DOGE hasn’t just been exposed as a fiasco — it somehow accomplished the twin feats of utterly failing to reduce government spending in any meaningful sense and causing a global calamity at the same time. DOGE will forever be a cautionary tale: This is what happened when messianic tech oligarchs and political neophytes were temporarily handed the reins of government. They didn’t just fail — they destroyed one of the U.S.’ most important organs of soft power. They made the world sicker, poorer and more miserable. And it was all for nothing.
Matt Johnson
Matt Johnson writes for Haaretz, The Bulwark, The Daily Beast and many other outlets. He's the author of "How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment." 
