Donald Trump’s top campaign donor, Elon Musk, said the DOGE initiative accidentally cut off Ebola prevention funds but quickly reversed course. The evidence suggests otherwise.

By any fair measure, Musk and the DOGE initiative have struggled mightily through a series of avoidable mistakes, controversies and legally dubious moves. He isn’t denying the existence of the screw-ups, so much as he’s saying that the screw-ups are easily forgivable and inconsequential.

For example, the president gave the billionaire a starring role at the first White House Cabinet meeting of Trump’s second term, and Musk used the spotlight to concede, “We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly.”

He even offered an example of what he was referring to.

“So, for example, with [the U.S. Agency for International Development], one of the things we accidentally canceled, very briefly, was [funding for] Ebola prevention,” Musk said. “I think we all wanted Ebola prevention. So, we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.”

The GOP megadonor pointed to this example while chuckling a bit, as if this were an amusing example of his quasi-governmental “department” slipping on a banana peel. But the public need not worry, Musk suggested, because nothing bad actually happened when his team accidentally — but briefly — cut off Ebola prevention funds. All’s well that ends well, right?

Wrong. The Washington Post reported:

[C]urrent and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.

The Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, quoted Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks, saying, “There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases.

In case that weren’t quite enough, Bouri also told the Post that her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response “had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week.”

She wasn’t the only one making this assessment. Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and the many responsible for leading USAID’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa 10 years ago, described Musk’s comments as “bunk” as part of a larger social media thread.

In other words, Musk adopted a rather blithe attitude, voluntarily informing the White House Cabinet, assembled journalists, and the public that DOGE briefly cut off federal investments in Ebola prevention, but the misguided mistake was quickly noticed and corrected.

But if the latest reporting is correct, that’s not at all what actually happened. The president’s top campaign donor got part of the story right — funding really was halted — but the reversal part of the story, which actually matters, was wrong.

All of which suggests this guy can’t even address one of his screw-ups without also screwing up.

The result leaves us with a familiar question for which there is no clear answer: Are Musk’s many missteps the result of rampant incompetence, or is Musk engaged in mis- and disinformation campaigns intended to deceive the public?